AdamMcg83
Registered User
1. I am also biased here, but it's not even close. Ryerson has far and away the best team in the OUA West, and should win the division. Nothing spectacular about a team fulfilling expectations for once. Ottawa is a team of 21 year-olds largely recruited from JrA and looks on track to make the playoffs. Grandmaitre over Duco for COY here. Although Hodgins at UOIT and, if their form holds, Gibson at Queen's will also be in the conversation.
Re: Grandmaitre: Ottawa is a nice story, but let's be careful not to look harder at ranking than record. "Make the playoffs" sounds like a great accomplishment for a first-year program, but that bar looks like it will be set pretty low by RMC and Nipissing this season. I'd also suggest a "team of rookies" means much less in men's hockey than in any other sport, because the age difference is no longer physically substantial - this isn't the 2013 Ravens football team of 18-year-olds playing 22-23 year-olds. The difference in talent between a 21-year-old top-6 fwd from Jr. A and a bottom-6 F with 4 years of major junior is *very* slim.
Success in year one isn't even that unprecedented in OUA hockey: Carleton went 12-13-3 in their first year (07-08), and Lakehead went 13-8-3 in their first season of 2001-02.
Clearly they are overachieving, and clearly they're a well-coached team. But If Ottawa makes the playoffs with 10 wins in a 28-game sched, CIS COY is a hard sell for me.