Blazers have ideas to make Memorial Cup better after visit to Saint John’s tournament

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The group, which also included Sean Smith from the City of Kamloops and Blazers assistant GM Tim O’Donovan, realized what a massive undertaking it will be.

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The one takeaway was they felt Saint John had a few too many events during Memorial Cup week.

“I think they had a lot of different sub-events going on besides the Memorial Cup, which is a great thing, but at times it might have been too much,” said O’Donovan. “I think just figuring out the balance there of the sub-events besides the games.”

Blazers’ majority owner Tom Gaglardi added, “My experience with the Memorial Cup is there’s a lot of events… to me it’s making sure you have the right number of events and they’re all successful because I’ve been to Memorial Cups where the host tries to do too many events, and some are really successful, and some aren’t. I think a great Memorial Cup will be one that gets the number of events right and all the events are super successful and well-attended.”

Then there’s the on-ice preparation for a Memorial Cup, building a team that can compete to win it all. The Blazers feel they have their core, which went to Game Seven of the Western Conference Final.

The team, including Gaglardi, knows they need to make other moves to improve the team, but they’re not in a rush as the offseason begins.

“While we’d like to make a splash and do something now, we really haven’t seen the opportunity to do that,” said Gaglardi. “We’ve got a good team. I expect this year’s team to be more competitive than last year’s team and we’re going to make it better over the season.”

There have been talks of attracting the likes of phenom Connor Bedard in such a big season, but Gaglardi says it hasn’t gone anywhere beyond rumours.

“It’s an interesting name for sure and it’s something I suppose we’ll talk about if there’s an opportunity to land a player like that,” he said. “But there’s nothing to it at this stage.”