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Ah, the 2018 Memorial Cup in Regina!

What casual hockey fan in the area doesn’t have their favourite memories of the tournament, being ‘Why is this on instead of the Houston Rockets playoff game?’, or ‘Is this a replay or tape delay? 10:45 p.m. seems awfully late to be starting the third period.’

Three Western Hockey League teams in Saskatchewan took most to all of their chips and pushed them into the middle for the mad dash of the last few months of the season and two of them were among the top four teams in Canada by the time the Cup started a couple of weeks ago.

One of them, the host Regina Pats, were always going to be there but they may have paid the biggest price of them all.

Swift Current traded their top couple of players under the age of 18 in Riley Stotts and Logan Barlage in order to get stars Matteo Genaro, Stuart Skinner and Giorgio Estephan. They had also surrendered most of their bantam draft picks from the next few drafts to help bolster their roster. Including 2018, they will only have only one first round pick in the next three years to help them, unless they make deals between now and those drafts.

Think about junior hockey for a moment and take away everyone on your favourite team who was drafted in the top 60 picks for a three-year period, save one. It’s a staggering price to pay.

Also leaving the Broncos were Aleksi Haponiemi, star Finnish forward who could have come back next season, and head coach and general manager Manny Viveiros, who took two years (and a win-now attitude) to turn the Broncos from also rans to league champions.

But that price tag, though. If they finish anything but a distant 12th in the WHL’s Eastern Conference it’ll be something of a minor miracle. 

The Moose Jaw Warriors lost some prospects and picks but aren’t in nearly the same position the Broncos are in. They still have star defenceman Jett Woo, and top D prospect Daemon Hunt, and top picks in the 2018 and 2020 drafts. It’ll be an uphill climb for the team for sure after losing so many good players and going out in the second round but it’s not the high mountain the Broncos will need to scale to get back into the upper echelon.

The Pats meanwhile paid a super high price with the team and their assets. They didn’t have a top three pick in the 2018 draft and won’t have one in the 2019 or 2020 drafts. Prior to this season, the Pats also coughed up their top two picks in the 2017 draft and their top pick in the 2016 draft, Cole Muir, was sent to Kootenay in a trade to get local minor hockey product Cale Fleury, who we can assume will soon either get signed by the Montreal Canadiens or drafted again.

The team also revealed that the cost of hosting the Memorial Cup will mean the team will lose upwards of $2 million. It wasn’t because organizers undercharged for tickets, or a lack of moxie in trying to lure people to the area – they brought in The Eagles, for crying out loud. But it turns out paying $3.65 million for the right to host is just a price tag that not many places in Canada will have the stomach or the owners’ pockets to pay for.

To their credit, the team seems to have understood these costs going in. Still, though, a $2 million loss isn’t something to sneeze at. 

It’s something to think about for future hosts, if there will be any in the coming years, from Saskatchewan. Already in the last 18 years we’ve had this event hosted three times in the province, once in Saskatoon and twice in Regina. We may have come to the point where the price tag just isn’t worth it for the teams anymore.