The (hopefully) last in our series of Prospect Watches. The season is nearly upon us. It’s crunch time.

This article is not going to have a strong central theme. I thought I should just clarify that straight off the bat.

The Blue Jackets had quite a few CHL prospects last year (e.g. Blake Siebenaler), but this year (as far as I can tell) most of them will be graduating to the AHL. They signed three free agent players from the CHL as well, who will also all most likely be graduating to the AHL.

This makes writing an article about any one league a little, as the kids say, problematic.

Thus, this is going to be something of a round-up of all the leagues that I haven’t yet covered – the OHL and WHL (see our QMJHL round-up here), the NCAA, and that one goalie lingering in the USHL. This may make it overly long compared to the other articles but it will save me from attempting to wring an entire article’s worth of material out of Peter Thome’s goaltending stats (although I would probably manage to get some blood from that stone, it wouldn’t be great journalism.).

OHL & WHL

I don’t understand the CHL. At all. Just going to put that out there. So if I get anything glaringly wrong please be kind while ruthlessly commenting on Reddit about it, alright?

The Blue Jackets, as far as I can figure out, have four prospects who will be playing in either the OHL or WHL this season: Keegan Kolesar, Sam Ruopp, Calvin Thurkauf and Kole Sherwood, local boy.

Watching these games is a lot more straight forward technically speaking, as the CHL as a whole is a money making machine profiting from the labour of minors (just to soapbox for a second) and has three dedicated streaming services; it is expensive, though, and you may be better off just buying the occasional game for something special (like a hat trick or a shutout) and consuming game highlights the rest of the time.

Much like the AHL, camera quality seems to vary wildly between rinks, so as I said you may have to weigh the value of live prospect hockey against the likelihood of eye strain trying to make out which player just scored.

Some highlights!

I will say that in trying to find some Kolesar highlights I mostly found hockeyfights.com videos. A promising start.

Keegan Kolesar 2014-15 Season Highlights

Here’s a fight just because. I think he won this one? It’s hard to tell.

Sam Ruopp is captain of his WHL team the Prince George Cougars. He was a 5th round pick in 2015 and will hopefully continue to develop his game as a two-way defenseman. In some prospect drama he was invalided out of his playoff series against the Thunderbirds due to an illegal hit by our very own Keegan Kolesar. For shame, Keegan.

He has a similar highlight drought problem to Kolesar in that nearly the entire first page of YouTube search results are fights.

Calvin Thurkauf! While I was lamenting this article on twitter Lou suggested that if I became a big fan of Thurkauf I would have basically collected the whole 2016 CBJ draft class, like Pokemon. The worst part is that I am already feeling myself become a fan.

Just look at that face.

Kole Sherwood is weirdly difficult to find highlights for. A cursory YouTube search reveals mostly videos of either his brother Kiefer or Jack Roslovic, who is from Columbus but is in fact signed with Winnipeg.

In lieu of a highlight reel, he scores a pretty sweet goal from a difficult angle in the above video. Below, a feature on his face. And Columbus based hockey, I guess.

NCAA

Three Blue Jackets prospects will be attending further education this season! I’m very proud of all of them and their dedication to learning (assuming they don’t get poached by the Monsters at some point.).

My favourite thing about this is that Andrew Peeke missed part of the prospect camp because he was busy taking summer classes in Theology and Calculus – he’s more than just an incredibly sweet face.

Streaming NCAA games is a bit piecemeal from what I can tell. Some schools have individual subscription streaming services, others stream for free, and some schools don’t stream at all. The Frozen Four is televised when it comes around, so let’s all cross our fingers for Notre Dame, Minnesota Men’s Hockey and Brown to all make it. Assuming that’s even possible, I’m not sure how divisions work in the NCAA (not for lack of research, I promise.).

Wow, this article is not being very informative on the Watch half of Prospect Watch. Sorry guys, I wasn’t expecting it to be this complicated.

Anyway, highlights!

Tyler Bird, a 2014 5th round pick, is currently playing for Brown University. In two seasons as a right wing he’s accumulated 12 points and 0 highlights on YouTube. Hopefully he’ll continue on a gentle upward swing this season (he did double his points last season from 4 in 14-15 to 8) but until then we’ll just have to wait and see.

Here’s a cool goal, anyway.

Coming in all the way from the University of Minnesota is Ryan Collins. Unfortunately these Gophers are not the women’s team, who are really good, but the men’s team, who are… I don’t want to say bad because they do win games. Mediocre maybe? The Ottawa Senators of this article. Collins was a 2014 2nd round pick for the Jackets, in their current trend of taking a defenseman in the 2nd round.

Here is a picture of him dressed as a minion.

Here he is assisting on an Auston Matthews goal!

And our final NCAA prospect (my very favourite): Andrew Peeke!

I really couldn’t tell you why I’m so fond of this guy but he’s just very easy to like. It helps that he was 2nd in scoring among rookie USHL defensemen. This may not sound terrible impressive but remember that Ryan Collins scored 6 points in the USHL and Peeke got 30.

He’ll be playing for Notre Dame this coming season, which has apparently just had a number of their defensive core graduate, so hopefully there’ll be a real chance for Peeke to play his way into a key role on the team.

And last but not least…

Peter Thome (USHL)

I think at this point I definitely qualify as soon-to-be-USHL-star Peter Thome’s biggest fan. I exaggerate only slightly.

The NAHL is a difficult league to research, given that it’s second tier junior hockey and its website doesn’t seem to have been formatted quite right. No streaming service, no visible shop and no advanced stats. A nightmare.

(What I did discover while researching this article is that I’m just going to have to take over coaching duties of the Kenai River Brown Bears. And by coaching duties I mean I’m going to adopt the entire team.

They won four games all season, they have a super hardcore logo of a bear gutting a fish, and their power play was 11.34%. Someone get me a jersey because they’re my new faves.)

Anyway: Peter Thome.

A sixth round draft pick this year, Thome led the NAHL in SV% with a .929 in 47 games played. This was 8 and 24 more games played than the two goalies he tied with for that lead, respectively.

It’s obviously difficult to evaluate his potential skill as of Right Now at this moment, but I do think that an achievement like that is pretty impressive if nothing else. This could be because the best thing I’ve ever achieved in sports is coming 64th in a county-level cross country competition.

What is also impressive is that Thome managed to get a .929 while winning only 17 of those 47 games. The Aberdeen Wings, along with their sadly lacklustre logo, were a sadly lacklustre team last season, coming last in their division with 58 points (still over 4x more points than Kenai River though! Silver linings.).

Unfortunately, the NAHL films all its games on a potato, so I’ll leave you with this video of what is probably a really cool desperation save behind the five players blocking the camera (he’s at #6 of the top 10).

In this coming season Thome will be playing with the Omaha Lancers of the USHL. I was about to say that I hope this will be a breath of fresh air for him, but it turns out the Lancers were actually worse off points wise than the Wings last season. Poor kid.

The season after this, Thome is committed to the University of North Dakota, which is likely to be where we’ll get to see more of what kind of goalie he could turn out to be but until then – at least we’ll always have that potato crowd camera.

He recently won the CBJ Prospects 4-on-4 tournament as a rotating goalie (which was really confusing to watch but probably a good idea for the teams) and was clearly very happy about it, bless him.

In order to watch USHL hockey you can either pay £23 a month for a subscription streaming service or you could decide to love yourself and just watch the youtube highlights (link is to the Omaha Lancers channel.). If you go back through the Green Bay Gamblers channel you should be able to find some Andrew Peeke highlights, so in a way it’s a two for one deal (and all of it is free!).

And so our prospect round-ups come to an end… it’s been fun finding out more about where to watch these kids, when it wasn’t deeply demoralising and/or potentially financially ruinous.

I hope someone out there found these useful and informative (and hopefully a little amusing) in the run up to all the season starts. If there’s one thing writing these taught me it’s that there are about 1000 times more leagues active than I originally thought.