Monthly Archives: November 2025

Comox – Nanaimo Preview

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Today couldn’t come fast enough for the Comox Valley Glacier Kings. After an 11-1 drubbing last Saturday night, they have been anxious to redeem themselves as quickly as possible. It will be a tough test however as they will be playing the best team in the VIJHL’s North Division. The Nanaimo Buccaneers come into the game with a solid 10-5-1-0 record which is one point ahead of the second place Oceanside Generals. Comox is 7-8-2-1 and 4th in the division. These two squad have played twice so far this season with both sides winning one game apiece. Nanaimo won on opening night (September 6th) 4-2 while the Yeti took the second match on September 27th by a score of 5-3. The Bucs are the highest scoring team in the North so it will be a tough task for a team that gave up so many goals in their last contest.

For the most part, the GKings penalty kill has been pretty good this season up until their last game when they gave up 4 goals on 5 Peninsula power plays. That dropped them from 1st to 8th place in the league. The power play has been streaky this year but has been non-existent the last couple games because they haven’t been getting any opportunities. In their past 2 games they have a total of 1 power play opportunity. I talked to head coach/GM Curtis Toneff about that. He says his club only have themselves to blame, “That should tell you a lot about our legs and our effort and our moving our feet. Any team in this league should have at least 4 power plays over the course of a game. I don’t think it was a ref thing either. It was our guys not working hard enough to draw any penalties. There was no second and third efforts. Sometimes those draw penalties. So in my opinion, that’s on our performance. I didn’t even love our performance on Friday night (in Lake Cowichan), I loved our finish but I didn’t love our performance on Friday overall.” The Buccaneers have the advantage in the special teams situations. Here is a look at the stats for each side:

Power Play
Nanaimo: 22.7% (3rd)
Comox Valley: 16.5% (8th)

Penalty Kill
Nanaimo: 84.3% (2nd)
Comox Valley: 81.7 (6th)

The Glacier Kings are desperate to get some scoring from anyone right now. One player that has shown he has an upside is Westin Churchill. Some games he looks like the best player on the ice than we don’t hear from him for a bit. Toneff says he likes what he can do offensively but knows he has more to do than what we’ve seen so far, “He’s a streaky scorer. Westin has shown a lot of flashes of someone that can do some damage in this league and be a difference maker. With Westin, he’s a busy kid, he goes to school, he works. For him it’s about managing his energy to be able to perform like that. He’s a guy who you can tell after 3 or 4 shifts if he’s going or not. And quite frankly he’s got to be going more than he has been this year. Points are great and all that but he’s got to be more consistent to be relied upon down the stretch night in and night out.” The consistency should come with maturity. Westin just turned 17 a month ago. He is 5th in team scoring with 4 goals and 5 assists.

The Bucs are led by Madden Cruickshank who has already amassed 9G, 15A in just 16 games so far. That ties him for 8th place among VIJHL scorers. Intersting, it’s a rookie 17 year old defenceman that is second on the team in scoring. Nate Barclay has been really good and very consistent. In fact he has at least 1 point in each of his last 8 games. That includes scoring 4G, 3A in his last 3 games… what!? In net, it’s former Glacier King Aaron Pichette getting the lionshare of the work. He sports a 6-3 record with a 2.41 GAA and .927 save percentage. That’s 4th and 3rd respectively in the entire league.

So Nanaimo has a better record, scores more goals, allows fewer goals and has better special teams than Comox Valley. They will definitely have their work cut out for them tonight. Curtis talked about what will be key for this evening, “It’s important to just not let anything slide any further. You have a terrible night last Saturday. It’s a chance for a bounce back, have a great first period as well as attitude and detail. I don’t know if there is any better place to do it than on the road against a divisional rival opponent. They’ll probably be looking to jump on us, jump on a team that is coming off a weak performance. We have to be ready to compete and get back to our game that helped us dig out of an 0-3 start. We have an even record with 90 percent of the league. It’s a good opportunity for us to get an upperhand on a season series against a good hockey club that’s done a great job this past year turning their trip around.” These two clubs will still have head to head match up once more in December, January and February.

A regulation win would move Comox within 2 points of the first place Bucs as well as propel them over Campbell River into sole possession of third place. As hard as I’ve been on the Glacier Kings lately, they are still well-positioned in the North Division. That’s due to winning 4 of their last 6 contests. A good start is paramount. Remember they gave up 6 goals in the first 11 minutes last Saturday. When the Yeti score first, they are 4-2-1 this season. Anthony Ganoung will get the start in net. Puck drop is at 7:15 PM at the NIC. Comox Valley’s line up for tonight is up on the Gameday Lineups page of this blog. Have a good one everybody!

Darryl Skender

Yeti Making Progress But Still Need To Be Better

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When you look at the opening day line up and compare it to the current roster, it is very different. Is the team better now than on September 6th? The answer is pretty obvious, of course it is. Every team will be better as the season goes on by just getting more shifts, getting in better shape, playing in more situations, facing different diversity and improving on personal skill sets. But the Glacier Kings have brought in quite a few players which has really bolstered their line up. One case and point is Ethan Gobel who joined the team after the season started. He is second on the team in points and first in assists and point per game. Also Cameron Collins who has points in 3 of his last 4 games and sits 4th in team scoring despite also missed the first 3 games. In fact he has already equaled his point total of last year with the Pacific Coast Academy U18 Prep team in under half the games played. The list can go on but the moves head coach/GM Curtis Toneff has made definitely upgraded his squad. The problem is, so have the other teams.

Since most of the teams in this league have improved, who has made the best progress? Comox Valley has to be up there as they are vastly better than they were in Game 1. But is it just skill that can make a team better or are there other factors? Toneff says he’s happy with the how his team has been coming along and a big part of that is because of the players thought process, “Progress has been pretty good as a whole. I think we brought in players that we hope have one or two mindsets. Those return goal guys, veterans that are 18, 19 or 20 and simply want to win. Or the 16, 17, maybe a couple 18 year old’s that really want to get to the next level and get better everyday. Maybe that’s why they came to this league. I think if you combine those two, it’s a recipe for success. We just have to show and manage our effort and energy levels better. We’ve had weeks where we looked like we had good legs and then weeks where we don’t look like we have good legs. We talked about what they were doing the other 21 hours of the day. That becomes important this time of year. What does that other 21 hours of the day look like? Is it guys getting better or guys getting worse? It’s kind of up to them as athletes to do the right thing. It’s not always being in the gym more, it’s maybe just eating right or hydrating right or sleeping right.” It’s obvious that Curtis wants a full commitment from this team and not just during the 3 hour game.

It’s been a few weeks since the coaching staff made their decision on who the leadership group was going to be as well as who would don a letter. With that honor comes a lot of responsibility. For young kids that can be a lot of pressure. It’s still pretty new to most of them and Toneff says the lettered guys as well as the rest of the team need to take another step, “Pretty average to be honest. They have some learning to do and some growing to do like we all do. Our players have to get better and our leaders have to get better, I know I have to be better. If we want to take that next step and put some separation being average and .500, we all got to be 5 to 10 percent better here. It’s that time of the year where it’s not all sunshine and rainbows outside. There are some long days where the sun is down pretty early and you find out where your character lies. We’ll start to find out in the next month or so who has that character.” The leadership core does need to get better and it seems they are. The real evaluation should come around mid-season when everyone is more comfortable in their roles.

For now, the biggest task will be putting the Peninsula game behind them, regain their confidence and be ready for Nanaimo on Thursday. The club had started getting a little bit of swagger before Saturday’s loss. One good solid effort against the Bucs can certainly make a huge difference in a lot of different ways. We will see which way it will go tomorrow evening.

Darryl Skender

Team Focused On Moving Ahead

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It obviously wasn’t a great performance on Saturday night for the Comox Valley Glacier Kings to say the least. The 11 goals were the most they’ve given up in a game and the 6 goals in the first period was the most they’ve given up in a single period all season. In fact, the 4 goals they allowed in the second period was more than they allowed in any period previous to Saturday’s game. The 4 shots in the first period was the fewest all season, the 18 shots were their lowest game total this year. The good thing is that it was just one game and they can move on from it. The club has progressed too much since the start of the season to let this setback hurt them in the long run. It does still sting however. The thing that was disappointing was that the game was basically over by the midway point of the first period. Even offensively talented teams can only dig themselves a hole so big. A defensively-minded team is hard pressed to comeback, especially when playing the top club in the league.

Just as a refresher, the score was 6-1 just 11:48 into the contest. The Glacier Kings did play better in the third period but it was way too late to mount any kind of a comeback, especially to a squad that has only lost one game all season. Head coach/GM Curtis Toneff said it wasn’t a good night, “It was a game where after the first 5 minutes, it was over. That hadn’t happened to us this year. We ended up on the penalty kill and I tried to make some adjustments to suit our night better and I failed at that as a coach. They scored two and it’s tough as a team to get behind a team like that but we did score a goal to make it 2-1 but after that the wheels fell off. Our effort and our attitude wasn’t close to where it needed to be against a team like that. It showed by the end of the period and at the end of the game with the score. These things happen over the course of a season.” Hopefully those things don’t happen too much more. Remember Comox was playing well until Saturday’s game (4-1 in their last 5 games).

As the season has gone along, it seems that two teams have risen to the top. Peninsula (15-1-1-0) and Westshore (15-2-1-0) while everyone else is in the rearview mirror in the standings. Curtis had told me in the past that any team can beat any team this year but with the Panthers and Wolves way ahead of everyone, you can’t help but wonder about the parity. I asked him if he thought that they were in a league of their own and then the other 9 teams were in a different grouping. Toneff disagreed, “No I don’t think so. We’ve proved that we can compete with both of those teams that you eluded to, we showed that we can compete with them for two periods. If we can compete with them for two periods, then we can compete with them for three periods. For us to be successful, we have to be at full tilt. The difference between those teams is that they can be average some nights, we cannot.” Looking at past games, the Glacier Kings handed the Panthers their only regulation loss of the season back on September 28th and the Yeti were up by 2 goals on the Wolves on October 22nd before having a collapse. So yes, they have proved that they can play with the higher calibre teams but it’s like the coach says, you need to play 60 minutes against these guys.

So it was back to practice this week. I had asked the coach how he has been and he said that it he feels better now after a couple of days of frustration. It’s easy to fall into a trap after one disappointing game. Just look at my post after the 11-1 loss, I felt like it was doomsday for the club but honestly, it was just one game. With that being said, changes need to be made. You can move past the game but you also have to learn from it and not hide from it. The bench boss seemed to be in pretty good spirits. He talked about practice and maybe switching things up, “Just back to basics, systems refresh. Our rush coverage was rotten the other night. It was an effort based thing and with regards to ‘X’s’ and ‘O’s’, it’s November and maybe time for a systems refresh. I thought after the game that I’m not going to overanalyze it. You’re never as good as you think you are and you’re never as bad as you think you are.” I’m guessing it would be a minor tweaking of the systems and personnel assignments. I really couldn’t see a major overhaul based on one game. But maybe having a new face here and there and different responsibilities, it might be good. A couple of months of the same thing could get stale and easy to be scouted by other opponents.

Speaking of opponents, Nanaimo should be a good test for the Glacier Kings to see how they bounce back after an embarrassing loss. The Bucs are currently in first place in the North Division and even better at home. The reason it should be a good test is because Comox Valley knows they can play with these guys despite their good record. How do they know? Well, because they beat the Buccaneers back on September 27th at the Sports Centre. A win at the NIC on Thursday and that last game can be tossed out. That’s the great thing about sports, you can be so down one day but a couple days later things are good again.

Darryl Skender