With a new WHL season approaching for the Regina Pats, fans are wondering if Maddox Schultz and Liam Pue will play in the team's home opener on Friday, September 26.
"It's the plan right now that they would be," general manager Dale Derkatch said on the SportsCage. "Moving from there, if you take their schedule when they're going to be missing, they're going to be in the rest of those games and there aren't many. There were only 36 games, so they're pretty well going to play in the ones that are in front of them. We look forward to having them with our team."
Both Maddox and Pue were selected in this year's WHL Prospects Draft by the Regina Pats. Both are 15 year olds which means under the Western Development Model they will be allowed to play a maximum of 34 games this season. According to Derkatch, planning out the games for Schultz and Pue to play took a lot of work.
"We were doing it with Maddox in mind and waiting to see what would happen with Liam, but now the schedule goes for both of them. We took the Pats schedule and the Pat Canadians schedule and melded them together. From there, we blocked out things that the players were going to be away from. We have heard Maddox and Liam could potentially both be away at the under 17 [tournament], so we blocked those dates out because they won't be around for those. We blocked out Circle K being good to the Pat Canadians if they happen to go to that and we left the games in March. We didn't add any games in March to the plan from a Pats perspective as that's when the Pat Canadians would start playoffs," Derkatch said.
"There's a 10-game buffer there with those games. From September 19 until February 28, there were only 36 games that they could potentially play in. Having said that, we have the buffer of the 10 games in March, where there could be some other things that come up through September to February. The end of February in terms of illness, fatigue, injury, that we have those games there to play with at the end."
The Pats training camp for the coming season starts Thursday, Derkatch wants to improve on their efforts from last season when they finished second to last in the Eastern Conference with 16 wins and 44 losses.
"I know you guys have heard it from Al [Millar], the next step here would be that we want to make the playoffs this year, that's a goal that I have to help the team to make as well as the players. I'm going to be talking to them about that goal and they want to be part of that goal moving forward again. Team goals will help individual goals," Derkatch explained.
"Yes, every individual is going to have their own goals for what they want to do this year. Coming at it from a scouting perspective when I scouted for NHL teams, the teams that go the farthest in the playoffs usually have guys getting drafted, guys getting invited to camps because scouts watch that time of the year and see who can play at the hardest time of the year -- that's what we want to see. Training camp should be pretty good, we have a lot of vets back and they have to earn their spots."
