The Calgary Roughnecks added nine players to their roster on Monday night at the NLL Draft, including six in the first three rounds. As a result, the Roughnecks now have a ton of talented youth to work with.
Prior to the 2015 season, rightie forward Scott Ranger retired, taking 50-60 points per season with him. Although it looked like the Roughnecks had enough firepower to make up for that loss, they went from leading the NLL in goals for for two straight years to a tie for fourth-best. Over this past summer, they lost another 50-60 points when Daryl Veltman took his talents to Buffalo via free agency.
While Calgary still has some big guns in two-time MVP Shawn Evans, former MVP Jeff Shattler, Curtis Dickson, and Dane Dobbie, they no longer have the depth up front that they used to.
Well, that may have changed since the draft. With their two first-round picks, the Roughnecks took righty forward Wesley Berg and lefty forward Reilly O’Connor.
Berg was a standout for the University of Denver, helping the Pioneers to an NCAA championship and finishing his career as their all-time leading scorer (255 points, 188 goals). This past summer, he picked up 12 points in seven regular season games for the Oakville Rock of Major Series Lacrosse before exploding for 15 points in five games in the playoffs. Berg has huge upside and could fill the hole left by Ranger on the right side.
O’Connor is a pass-first forward who played for the Brooklin Redmen this summer, scoring five times and adding 15 assists in 12 games. With O’Connor setting the table on the left side and Evans doing the same on the right, snipers Dickson and Dobbie could find themselves with more free space in which to operate.
In the second and third rounds, the Roughnecks loaded up on talent for the back end. Penalties, defensive lapses and, early in the season, shaky goaltending turned Calgary from a top-three defense to a middle-of-the-pack defense and nearly cost them a playoff spot for the first time since their debut season in 2002.
With their first pick in the second round, Calgary took transition/defenseman Mitch DeSnoo, a teammate of Berg on the Oakville Rock. DeSnoo had five points in 13 games over the summer with the Rock and isn’t afraid to mix it up, as evidenced by his 23 penalty minutes in the MSL playoffs this year in five games.
Calgary also added 18-year-old goalie Christian Del Bianco in the second round, the highest-picked goalie in this year’s draft. Del Bianco adds depth to a goaltending unit that already includes veterans Frankie Scigliano and Mike Poulin, as well as second-year reserve Peter Dubenski.
In the third round it was all defense as Calgary took Tyson Bell and Kellen LeClair. While Bell is considered more of a stay-at-home defender, he also racked up 18 points with Onondaga Community College last season. At 6’4″ LeClair is an imposing figure on the floor and helped the Six Nations Arrows win the 2015 Minto Cup.
Calgary’s fourth round pick was forward Jacob Ruest, another pass-first righty who scored eight goals and added 24 assists for the Langley Thunder this summer. In the fifth they took home-grown goalie Jordan Kancsal who spent the summer with the Jr A Calgary Mountaineers.
With their final pick, the Roughnecks chose Carson Barton, who had a 29-point season with the Coquitlam Adanacs in 2015.
With the depth of talent in this year’s draft, all nine of these athletes have a shot at earning a roster spot for the 2016 season. When pre-season workouts begin in the coming weeks, they’ll all be pushing the veterans hard for those spots and you can count on seeing at least a handful of them in roughnecks jerseys when they take the floor for the season opener on Jan 2, 2016, when they host the Saskatchewan Rush.
