2024 wasn’t a very good year for WHL’s Regina Pats

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The Regina Pats lost their first and last hockey games of 2024.

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And there was lots of losing in the 12 months between because, truth be told, the legendary WHL franchise is still digging out from holes first dug six years ago. So it wasn’t exactly a great year as the Pats continued living the mantra of “Pain before gain,” complete with extended losing streaks while general manager Alan Millar stockpiled draft picks that eventually could return the franchise to respectability.

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Tanner Howe, the Pats’ best player, local product Sam Oremba and the disgruntled Vaughan twins, Corbin and Jaxsin, have been dealt away this season, joining a parade that started before last season’s trade deadline.

The current roster lists 27 players, with only nine holdovers from last December, including goalies Kelton Pyne and Ewan Huet, defender Kolten Bridgeman and forward Braxton Whitehead.

“Continuity is a big thing that we haven’t had a lot of this year,” said head coach Brad Herauf, who spent eight seasons as an assistant before Millar promoted him to head coach prior to last season. “We had to make moves and get our organization back to where we need to start going forward.

“Al’s done a heck of a job restocking the cupboards and also getting some good older guys in here with serious character. We’ve also got some younger guys with high-end talent. And right now it’s our job as a coaching staff to get these guys organized.”

In his 1 1/2 seasons in charge, Millar has made 20 trades and now has multiple picks in the first and second rounds of the next two WHL prospects drafts. It bodes well for the future, but from September through December the Pats had an eight-game losing streak, lost badly in four of five starts during a difficult road trip through the B.C. Division and were 9-19-6 overall.

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“We want to continue to be as competitive as we can,” said Millar. “We want to make sure we’re doing the right things in terms of giving our young players opportunities to get better.”

Last season, from January through March, the Pats were 7-24-1.

They endured an eight-game losing streak and were 0-6 on their late-season trip through the U.S. Division. The Pats lost their regular-season finale 11-1 to the Moose Jaw Warriors, their geographical rivals and last season’s WHL champions.

Emotions blew up during that contest, with Herauf and Millar afterwards vowing to remember the Warriors running up the score. Nothing crazy has happened since, with Moose Jaw winning four of their first five meetings this season.

Moose Jaw completed a home-and-home sweep with a 4-3 road victory Wednesday, moving the Warriors into 10th place in the Eastern Conference (10-21-3-1). Their 24 points are good for a tie with the cellar-dwelling Pats (9-20-4-2), who have one fewer victory. Wednesday’s contest was the first game of 2025 and, in a season where attendance has occasionally barely exceeded 2,000 at the Brandt Centre, it drew this campaign’s largest announced crowd of 4,061.

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Moose Jaw also beat the visiting Pats 4-2 on New Year’s Eve. Tallied up, the Pats were 16-43-6 in 2024.

“It’s kind of a new, put-together team here,” said Whitehead. “We took that B.C. trip seriously and made sure we got to know each other really well.

“We’re all super close and, you know, I’m 20 years old and I find myself hanging with the 16-year-olds a lot. I don’t think that happens much on the street, but it’s pretty special that it does on our team.”

Like all WHL teams when they’re playing host to a Memorial Cup, the Pats dealt away numerous draft choices to be competitive for the 2018 Canadian junior hockey championship. Myriad, subsequent trades somehow landed the Pats a generational superstar in Connor Bedard, who spent 2020-23 with the squad but didn’t have enough supporting talent for his team to be a contender.

Trading away Bedard during his final season could have given the Pats a boatload of prospects, but former general manager John Paddock said his superstar didn’t want to be traded. So that was that.

When Paddock resigned/retired after the 2022-23 season, Pats owner Shaun Semple and CEO Gord Pritchard hired Millar as his replacement. Millar used to be Moose Jaw’s general manager before joining Hockey Canada’s Program of Excellence as its player personnel director.

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Millar’s forte is acquiring players. Along with obtaining veteran defender John Babcock, Millar has added promising blueliners Reese Hamilton, Matt Paranych and Ephram McNutt, so the Pats got something worthwhile out of 2024.

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