Sudbury Wolves reflect on highs and lows of 2023-24, playoff heartbreak and look to uncertain future
‘It was just such a fun team’
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While David Goyette can count himself lucky as one of the few Sudbury Wolves whose hockey season will continue, forgive him if he has mixed feelings.
Don’t get him wrong — the 20-year-old forward Hawkesbury, Ont., and Seattle Kraken prospect was grateful for the opportunity to join that team’s top affiliate, the Coachella Valley Firebirds, as they get set to open the American Hockey League playoffs on Friday. But Goyette had another kind of post-season run in mind when the 2023-24 campaign got underway — a push for OHL gold with the Sudbury Wolves.
That dream was dashed on April 18, when the North Bay Battalion completed a second-round sweep of their Highway 17 rivals to qualify for a third straight Eastern Conference final.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Goyette said. “You work so hard throughout the year and you look at the team we had and the opportunity we had — it was really something special. I don’t know if any of us will come close to having a team like we had this year, so it was obviously tough to end it the way we did, especially getting swept like that by our rival, which had the better end on us for pretty much my whole career there.
“It was such a good group of guys and we battled all year to get there. It was a tough ending, for sure.”
There was no shortage of highlights over the course of the season, both for the team and for Goyette as an individual. Captain for the OHL’s highest-scoring club during the regular season, he won the Eddie Powers Memorial Trophy as the league’s most prolific point-getter with 117 points and played a key role in some of the most entertaining contests ever seen at Sudbury Community Arena, including a couple of thrilling comeback victories.
Goyette and his teammates found themselves on the opposite end of such an outcome, however, during what proved to be the pivotal third game of their Eastern Conference semifinal against the Battalion back on April 16. Trailing by two games in the series and in an early hole on home ice, the Pack seemed to have turned the tables by dominating the second period and taking a 5-2 lead into the third. But things unravelled quickly when North Bay scored short-handed, then added two goals on the power play before wrapping up the result in overtime on a goal by Dalyn Wakely.
Backed by a standout netminder in Mike McIvor, the Battalion completed the sweep with a shutout in the Nickel City two nights later.
“I don’t know — a few bounces didn’t go our way, but they’re obviously a really good team, a well-structured team,” said Goyette, reached in southern California this past week. “I thought Game 1 could have gone either way in North Bay and I thought we had a really good game. Their crowd was unreal and in Game 2, they just came out flying.
“In Game 3, we just took the energy from our crowd and I thought we were probably having the best game we played all year. Then you’re up 5-2 with seven minutes left and a couple of penalties — it’s tough to give up a three-goal lead like that. It just can’t happen, especially in playoffs. Then they got that one goal they needed in OT and when you’re down 3-0 in a series, it’s hard to bounce back from that.”
Wolves forward Evan Konyen, a member of the same 2020 OHL draft class that included Goyette, Kocha Delic and Nolan Collins and formed the core of this year’s squad, was also one of its top scorers in the post-season with eight points in nine games and scored four times in Sudbury’s first-round victory over the Mississauga Steelheads.
Though Sudbury had a team laden with OHL veterans, Konyen suggested North Bay’s wealth of playoff experience was a factor in swinging the series, though certainly not the only one.
“They got some timely saves when they needed them and I kind of felt like they had luck on their side,” suggested the 20-year-old Mars, Pa. resident, one of 13 potential overagers for 2024-25 who were listed on the Wolves’ year-end roster.
“They’re obviously a really good team, well-coached, with good players, great goaltending and great defencemen,” Konyen said of the Battalion. “But I just felt like the stars aligned for them in some of the games and they got every bounce and we got none of them. It was unfortunate the way it ended up, but that’s hockey sometimes.
“There’s nothing you can do about it now.”
Collins gave full marks to McIvor, the rookie puck-stopper who had what seemed at first to be an unenviable task of filling in for injured starter Dom DiVincentiis, the Sudbury defenceman having watched his teammates outshoot the Battalion in all four games of the best-of-seven series.
“We just couldn’t find the back of the net,” said Collins, a hard-nosed defenceman from Whitby, Ont. who celebrated his 20th birthday on Sunday. “Then there were some slow starts for us and letting them get the first goal quickly in a lot of the games. We were playing down the whole series, for the most part, and it was tough to come back.”
Silver linings
While the loss to North Bay will sting for some time, Goyette will still look back fondly on what will likely be his final OHL season as he looks to turn professional on a full-time basis come fall.
Along with his own impressive stats, the likes of Quentin Musty and Dalibor Dvorsky also posted head-turning totals in terms of goals and assists. Nick DeAngelis had points in 18 straight games while earning OHL Defenceman of the Month honours for December. Fellow rearguard Andre Anania was voted as one of the league’s top defensive defencemen in the annual OHL Coaches Poll en route to setting a team record with a plus-49 rating.
But while he noted those numbers, it’s the close friendships with his teammates that Goyette said will leave a lasting impression.
“It was just such a fun team,” Goyette said. “We just got to do a lot of stuff together and it was a pretty tight group. For me, the highlight was spending every day with those guys. They’re brothers to me now. Spending three years with those guys was unreal.”
While a series win over a youthful, but talented Mississauga outfit was far from the end goal, it will stand out for Konyen as a highlight for a team that had enjoyed little post-season success in the post-COVID era. A five-game defeat of the Steelheads was the Pack’s first since 2019, when graduating overagers Anania, Landon McCallum and Zacharie Giroux had yet to take their first strides at the OHL level.
“It was still fun to win that,” Konyen said. “It was definitely a disappointing year with all things included, but there’s still some positives to take away from the year.”
A dramatic rally against the Kitchener Rangers in early January, which saw the Wolves erase a three-goal deficit to beat the league leaders 7-5, will also stand out for the hard-working winger. So will an impressive 6-3 defeat of the Saginaw Spirit in mid-February and a 9-2 thrashing of the London Knights on Shoresy Night back in November.
“Those were games that meant a lot to us, were fun to play in and fun to be a part of,” Konyen said. “I’ll definitely remember those games.”
Despite some stumbles down the stretch with key players out of their lineup, Collins noted the Wolves battled for first in the conference for much of the season.
“That was an exciting thing to be a part of, competing for first and beating good teams through the year,” said Collins, the right-shooting rearguard who played important roles this season in shutting down top lines and killing penalties, often with Anania skating to his left.
“We kind of struggled a bit near the end and we went all the way down to fifth, just because it was so close in the East, but night in and night out, winning games with this group and beating Mississauga in the first round was awesome. It’s just tough we couldn’t win another round or two or three.”
Season of change
Sudbury’s OHL franchise will enter the off-season with plenty of unanswered questions, starting with who will guide the team behind the bench in 2024-25.
Ken MacKenzie resigned as head coach last week, after guiding the locals to a 38-23-4-3 record during the regular season, and general manager Rob Papineau immediately began the search for a replacement.
With so many overage candidates, but only three eligible to dress at any time, Papineau and his staff will also begin the work of deciding which 2004-born players will be the best fit for their roster, which may find a better opportunity in the league via trade, and which will continue their careers at another level.
Potential returnees in the age group include forwards Goyette, Konyen, Delic, Lucas Signoretti, Devin Mauro and Nick Yearwood, defencemen Collins, Ryan Pryce, Noah Van Vliet, Nick DeAngelis and Donovan McCoy and goaltenders Jakub Vondras and Marcus Vandenberg. Of those, Goyette is signed to a professional contract and is among the least likely to see OHL ice again. Collins and Vondras were NHL draft selections by the Pittsburgh Penguins and Carolina Hurricanes, respectively, but have yet to sign with those clubs.
“They’re in great hands, but there will obviously be some tough decisions moving forward,” Goyette said. “It’s going to be a different look for next year and for the next few years, for sure. We were a special team this year, so there are a lot of guys who can bring a lot back to the team next year, for sure, and a lot of guys who will be going to different teams and bringing a lot of maturity and experience.”
Konyen believes with more ice time available for 2005s such as defenceman Matthew Mania and forward Alex Pharand, both NHL draft picks themselves, the Wolves could have the makings of a competitive playoff team once again, but stopped short of making any predictions due to the current uncertainty.
Asked if he hoped to return to Sudbury as an OA, Konyen was certainly open to the idea, knowing he would likely be a key contributor after scoring a career-high 23 goals in only 55 games and emerging as one of the Wolves’ more reliable two-way forwards this season.
“It’s tough to find places to play in this league as an overager,” he said. “Wherever you’re wanted, you want to play. I’m sure management has their hands full, trying to figure stuff out and wherever I lie in all that, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, but wherever there is space, I’d love to play.”
Collins, whose physicality, strong skating and defensive acumen will surely make him an attractive OA option if he does not ink a pro deal of his own, said it “would be awesome” to close out his junior career with the Wolves.
“The thing for me with my career is I want to be guaranteed a spot on a roster,” he explained. “I don’t want to go into camp and have four or five of us and have to sit out games and stuff. We talked to Rob about that type of thing and we have to wait a bit, time will tell, but we’ll communicate with each other over the summer and we’ll see if it works out. I would definitely not be opposed to coming back.”
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