Year-End Grades: MacKenzie and Sohor

Matt MacKenzie: A+

If you recall from my year-end awards, I gave Big Mac "Best Defenseman". Tough call between him and Schmidt, but I did it. Matt's awesome. He skates very well, he's consistently in correct position. He knows how to finish his checks and blocks shots like a boss. He's very experienced, coming from the Calgary Hitmen who have been quite successful over the last several previous seasons. For the Hitmen he had been a co-captain which tells me he has leadership skillz too.

In my opinion the MacKenzie/Sutherland pairing was the best aspect of the playoffs, especially that 2nd round. Matt's talent, skills, and ability wore off on Sutherland and made him a better player too. Making those around you better--that's a great quality to have. I'm not going to get into whether or not he'll be back as a 20 next season, need more summer content so have to spread this stuff out LOL.

Best story about Mac is when he heard he was getting traded to Tri, he was actually a little mad. There was leftover animosity from the championship series last year, especially between him and Kruise Reddick. But leave it to Captain Kruise to make everything ok, the guys made Matt feel very welcome and animosity disappeared--thank god. It's interesting because really, the hockey community is pretty small, most of these guys on all the teams know each other. Most times they'll tell you they leave it all on the ice so to hear that it didn't get left on the ice for Matt, to me, showed how passionate he is about the game and about winning.

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Paul Sohor: D

I wish I could grade on looks. So on the opposite end of the defense spectrum from MacKenzie is Paul Sohor. If he was a 16-year-old rookie I'd give him a lot more leeway. But he's 19. If we were to assign blame, you could look to Everett where he spent 3 seasons. He wanted a trade because he wasn't getting ice time. The lack of ice time could have hindered his development. Or the ice time was limited because he wasn't developing--which came first, chicken or egg?

Statistically he had the best season of his WHL career in Tri-Cities with 3 goals, his first ever WHL goals. He's played with the Winnipeg boys for years so I think it helped him to come here and be able to fit in right away. But if I were to give him a nickname it'd be "Turnover City". He skates good, blocks shots like a mo-fo, but there were often mistakes that I'd expect to see from a rookie, not a veteran. He was paired up with Sam Grist which always made me nervous, they're both decent, but neither good enough to compensate for the shortcomings of the other. But again, Sam's a rookie, Paul's not. I just expected more.