Central Division
Just give it to Barrie. Unless North Bay can turn around their horrendous season last year (15-45-6), then nothing's stopping the Colts. Let's make the Mississauga Ice Dogs exhibit A. Six games into the season, they've gone 0-6, they've only scored 4 goals, never scoring more than 1 in a night, and they've let up 54 goals. That's a 9.00 GAA kiddies. That stinks. Don Cherry has refused to allow Europeans on his team, and even skipped the import draft. The result? If you can't get on the scoreboard, you get on the penalty board. In 6 games, they've accumulated 245 penalty minutes. That beats London by 22 minutes, but London's played 2 more games. Their 40.8 penalties per game average beats Kingston by more than 4 minutes per game. Compare that to Brampton who are tops in the league with a 17.7. If they have one bright spot, it's 16-year-old rookie Lou Dickerson. Other than that, their one proven player is Adam Nittel. To give you a sign of this season, Nittel was second in the league last year in penalty minutes with Erie with 309. To make that worse, it took him 48 games to do that, whereas the leader, Mike Cirillo of North Bay had 310 in all 66 games. Makes Nittel wish he could've played just one more game, huh?
St. Mike's is the other bottom basement team. Three teams in the OHL have yet to win a game this season, and Central Divison teams make up two-thirds of that. The only thing going for the Majors is their new arena is Maple Leaf Gardens, so they can look at more empty seats. I can't find anything good for this team either.
The Wolves are the only team that remain with Barrie in the central division from when Barrie joined the league in 1995-96. Barrie has clobbered them in the all-time series. So what's the scary part? If Sunday night's game is a prelude to Sudbury's season, then what's the point of Barrie playing this year, if they've already clinched the division?
