Silvertips process ‘bittersweet’ end to season

Published 10:00 am Wednesday, June 3, 2026

EVERETT — Carter Bear led the line as the Everett Silvertips slowly left their bench at Prospera Place after the clock hit 0:00 in their 6-2 loss to the Kitchener Rangers in the Memorial Cup Championship on Sunday. He went straight towards goalie Anders Miller, who had not yet left the crease.

The Silvertips alternate captain wrapped his netminder up in a big hug. The words they shared had nothing to do with the loss, or even the triumph they experienced two weeks prior when they won Everett’s first Western Hockey League Championship.

“He was just telling me how much he’s going to miss me,” Miller told The Herald at Angel of the Winds Arena on Tuesday. “He’s telling me I’m a stud. I’m telling him back he’s a stud, and like how we’re going to miss each other and stuff like that. I just feel like it got really emotional, and like, you can’t hold back tears. You love every single guy on this team and I feel like, knowing you’re not going to be playing with everyone, it’s an emotional feeling.

“It kind of sucks at the same time, but it’s also like, you got to be grateful it happened.”

As the rest of the team embraced Miller one by one after Bear, as they gathered with friends and family at their hotel in downtown Kelowna on Sunday night, as they completed their bus ride back to Everett on Monday, each player slowly started to feel what Miller described.

It’s a unique sensation that only the losing Memorial Cup qualifiers experience. After all, how many other league championship seasons end with an immediate wave of devastation?

“That night after the game was a bittersweet feeling with ending on a loss and that being the end of our season,” forward Jesse Heslop said. “But I think after we grouped as a team, we were able to look back and realize what we did as a team is super special.”

If there was any silver lining, the Silvertips received extra time to try and process those mixed feelings. In many cases, a team’s season will end and players part ways following locker clean-out the next morning. Instead, Everett spent one last night and bus ride together as a team before Tuesday’s exit meetings marked the official end to the greatest team in the franchise’s history.

Everett won 57 games in the regular season, a franchise record, to capture its second straight Scotty Munro Trophy as regular-season champions before going 16-1-1 in the WHL Playoffs en route to the Ed Chynoweth Cup. In 91 total games between the regular season, playoffs and Memorial Cup, the Silvertips never lost back-to-back games.

Defenseman Luke Vlooswyk was one of the last people to join the roster, as Everett acquired him from Red Deer in early January right before the trade deadline, but his perspective as an outsider helped him see what set the group apart pretty early on.

“I think the thing with this team that I’ve never seen on another team was just our killer instinct,” Vlooswyk said. “I mean, we were never out of a game. Ever. Doesn’t matter if we were down two goals, three goals, or if we’re up, we wanted to put our foot on other teams’ necks. And we wanted to keep it there. We were always applying pressure. We were kind of like striking first. This team, man, it was crazy. There won’t be a team like this in the Western Hockey League for a long time.”

However, just as important as their ruthlessness was their cohesiveness. Practically every Silvertips player expressed that this year’s team was the most tight-knit group each had ever been a part of. There were no separated friend groups or infighting. Everyone got along as one team.

Captain Tarin Smith even said this was the first time he never felt the need to bring headphones on long bus rides because everyone was always talking, joking around or playing cards as opposed to just listening to music alone. Recognizing the finality of the situation, the team channeled that energy one last time instead of dwelling on the loss.

“I think, for the most part, (the bus ride) was pretty upbeat,” said Nolan Chastko, who spent time at both forward and defense this season. “I think it was obviously the loss was still fresh and everything, but I mean, we had such a special year, and we didn’t want that last bus trip to really go to waste, so to (speak). We just wanted to just have a good bus trip again and talk lots, hang out lots and just one last time in that setting.”

Chastko is out of WHL eligibility, and he’ll be one of a handful of players not returning to Everett next season, but the ones who are coming back feel confident that the united culture will continue next year. That’s not to say it will be easy to recapture what the Silvertips accomplished this season. A lot of key players’ futures are still up in the air, and contention cycles open and close quickly in the WHL.

There’s no guarantee Everett will return to the Memorial Cup, or even the WHL Championship, but the roster construction recipe is a proven success for a simple reason.

“Everett just finds a way to get good people,” said forward Lukas Kaplan, who will be among the returners. “That’s the difference between here and most places, is we search for good people. There’s not a guy in that room that I can’t sit down and talk to, or go out and have fun with. … It’s just easy to have a good hockey team when every single guy in that room has each other’s back.”

This time last year, those same guys who fell in seven games to the Portland Winterhawks in the second round of the WHL Playoffs nearly all agreed to come back with the sole focus on capturing the Ed Chynoweth Cup, then the Memorial Cup. They did not want to feel that pain again.

Flash forward to Sunday, long after fans cleared out of Prospera Place, and after the Kitchener Rangers hauled the Memorial Cup off the ice and onto their plane home, Bear sat in a seat atop Section 113, the hood of his grey Silvertips sweatshirt pulled over his head. He stared silently towards the ice, then bowed his head into his arms, which rested on his knees.

He felt everything. The pain of falling short. The disappointment of never playing with this specific group again. But he also felt pride. Even appreciation. It was not the same as last year.

“You got to take a moment and appreciate the little things, how you got here — how we got here — as a team,” Bear said on Tuesday. “How far this group has come, how much I’m proud of the group, of the guys, staff, everyone in the organization. I think we just got to appreciate the little things that we did, and the big things we did.

“It’s not a disappointing season, obviously for sure. It definitely sucks to (lose) the Memorial Cup, for sure, but other than that, I think we had an unbelievable season, and I’m just so proud of the group.”