It will be a long season for Windsor Spitfires – And that’s a good thing!

Fret not, Windsor Spitfire fans, if your team doesn’t get out of the starting gate of the 2016-2017 Ontario Hockey League season and doesn’t run roughshod over the competition from the opening face-off this Thursday night.

The only time you should really want/need for the Spitfires to be on a roll is when the games actually mean something – and that won’t be until the 2017 Mastercard Memorial Cup. Sure, it would be great for the team to double-down as the OHL champions or at least be on an extended winning streak heading into the Memorial Cup tournament, but it’s not absolutely necessary.
More than ever, this season will be a marathon for the Spitfires, and not a sprint. This will be a team in transition virtually all season long. And while the club will likely be without a few players to start the regular season as not all ten of their players who are away at National Hockey League training camps, that’s not a crutch the Spitfires can lean on. Every single OHL club has players – their best players obviously – at NHL camps at this time of the year. It’s the same situation year after year too.

The Spitfires will be without key personnel for much of the regular season and actually that’s not such a bad thing as younger and depth players will receive more ice time and have the opportunity to prove that they are more than just young or depth players. The Spitfires could lose Logan Brown, Christian Fischer and Mikhail Sergachev to the 2017 World Junior Hockey Championships and first-year players Connor Corcoran and Christopher Playfair are strong candidates to play for Ontario at the World Under 16 Hockey Challenge in the Soo that starts at the end of October.. And who knows when the injury bug will hit the club? In all my decades of following the Spitfires, I have never seen the club go injury-free over the course of the regular season.

And, by the way, the regular season is almost trivial when it comes to the Windsor Spitfires this season. The club has already punched their ticket to the 2017 Mastercard Memorial Cup as the host team. And the stigma of going through the back door as the host club of the Memorial Cup is laughable.

Once a team is in the tournament they have a chance, albeit not perhaps the best chance, to win the event. When the Knights last hosted the Memorial Cup in 2014 they went in through the back door and made history as becoming the first host team ever to lose all three round robin games and were outscored 13-4 in the process. But two seasons earlier, the Knights lost the championship game of the Memorial Cup to the Shawinigan Cataractes, who were the host team of the tourney.

The Spitfires won’t be icing their strongest and most cohesive team until just after the start of 2017 anyway as general manager Warren Rychel will be dealing right up until the January 10 trade deadline to ice his best team. And wouldn’t Clayton Keller be a nice addition to the club if he signs a contract with the Arizona Coyotes and lands in Windsor after the World Junior Hockey Championships?

So, Spits fans, don’t panic if your club doesn’t start playing its best hockey until sometime next spring. Taking into consideration exhibition, regular season and play-offs, the team is expected to play close to 100 games during the 2016-2017 OHL campaign. In the big picture, it’s not how the Windsor Spitfires start – or even continue on through – the 2016-2017 season. What really matters is how they finish it.