Game On Magazine - April 2017 GameOn-Apr2017-P001-144-ONLINE | Page 16

MANITOBA JUNIOR HOCKEY LEAGUE
were good, but nobody thought they were
49-wins good.
“I didn’t think we’d do as well as we have,”
said Taraschuk. “It’s
just that at the start
of the season, we got
on an early roll and
we just kept rolling. It
seemed as if we start-
ed winning and all the
guys just bought in
and kept believing.
“Even when we
made changes at the trade deadline, we
didn’t miss a beat. It hurt to lose the guys
we did, but the entire team just accepted the
new guys as if nothing had changed. This
has just been a great group of players to be
around.”
Taraschuk
started
playing
organized
hockey at Southdale
Community Centre at
age five. He fell deeply
in love with the game
early in his life and
hasn’t stopped loving
it, despite some disap-
pointing times during
his Western Hockey
League stint.
“I often remember
playing in the Dyna-
mite Cup when I was
eight and nine,” Tara-
schuk said. “I still have
great memories of that
tournament today. It
was a pre-season event
and it was the only
time I remember play-
ing minor hockey and
having music in the rink, just like the NHL
guys. It’s a really big minor hockey tourna-
ment when you have music.”
Taraschuk played with the Railcats, then
the Warriors as a Bantam and City Midget
player and finally, he played two seasons of
Triple A Provincial Midget with the Winni-
peg Wild. He was selected in the sixth round
(112th overall) by the Brandon Wheat in the
2012 WHL Bantam draft and played the 2014-
15 season in Brandon. He started the 2015-16
season with the Wheat Kings, but was dealt
to Swift Current and while bouncing in and
out of the Broncos lineup, he decided he just
wasn’t having fun anymore.
That’s when he contacted Coach Dyck and
made arrangements to join the Pistons this
season.
“We’ve had a lot of players contribute to
our success this season and Mark is one of
them,” said Dyck. “It started in goal with the
great play of All-Star and the league’s top
Darby Gula, Ryan Carlson and Mark (Tara-
schuk) gave us a real good back end. Mark
brought that WHL experience he has and
was a real leader for us.”
As well as things have gone all season,
however, Dyck and Taraschuk both know
that the game has to be won in the greasy
parts of the rink at this time of the year. And,
of course, despite Steinbach’s 49-10-1 regu-
lar season, that means nothing come playoff
time, especially in a league that was a lot
closer than Steinbach’s record might have
indicated.
In fact, seeds two-through-five – Winkler,
OCN, Selkirk and Portage – were extremely
close to one another in the standings and
not that far back of the Pistons.
“Every game is tough, it seems, this year,”
said Dyck. “There are a lot of games, where
if you look at the standings, they seem like
they would be an easy team but that isn’t
the case. A lot of teams feel like they’ve
been in contention,
so the playoffs have
already been very
interesting.
“But we have a
pretty good group
of guys. The experi-
ence we can draw
on from last year
being in the finals
and what it takes to be a champion, will be
something