It seems that usually a 20-year-old serves as a WHL team’s captain. In that sense the 2015-16 Everett Silvertips were unique in that their captain was 19-year-old Dawson Leedahl.
However the three overagers – Remi Laurencelle, Carson Stadnyk and Cole MacDonald – all wore the “A” on their jerseys. With Leedahl missing a third of the teams’ regular-season games due to injury all three overagers got their chances to lead.
Laurencelle is arguably the best story, which we’ve covered in some detail. Picked up off the Lethbridge scrapheap in 2014, he went on to lead the Tips in scoring as a 20-year-old and recorded the team’s only hat trick of the season in a four-goal performance at Spokane.
He missed only three contests during the season and those were due to the three-game suspension he drew for a hit on Seattle’s Jerret Smith in January.
One of the Silvertips’ mantras this season was “Warriors playing a team game” and much of head coach Kevin Constantine’s verbal imagery hearkens back to the idea of being a warrior on the ice. No player exemplified that better than Laurencelle and that’s what the Tips will miss most with the graduation of their first-line center.
Stadnyk was Everett’s top returning scorer from the 2014-15 season when he played on the Saskatoon platoon line alongside hometown teammates Leedahl and Kohl Bauml, and Stadnyk finished as Everett’s second-leading scorer as a 20-year-old.
Drafted, signed and developed by the Tips, Stadnyk participated in the resurgence of the organization under Constantine and general manager Garry Davidson. He went from playing on a team that barely squeaked into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed as a rookie to being a key member of the Tips’ division-champion 2014-15 team as well as this year’s squad that reached the Western Conference semifinals for the second consecutive year.
MacDonald may have scored the quietest nine goals and 36 points of any player on Everett’s roster. Also a four-year Silvertip who went undrafted before making the roster as a listed player, MacDonald experienced the same lows and highs as Stadnyk during his time with the organization.
Though no overly physical, MacDonald had decent size at 6-1, 200 pounds and missed only one game during the regular season. Constantine mentioned how crucial it was that MacDonald was able to play so many games particularly given the rate at which Tips blueliners were dropping due to injury in the latter months of the season.
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