***

There's been some good Canadian Junior Hockey playoff content lately, and there will be much more to come as playoffs in all three leagues are underway, with the first rounds nearly wrapped up. Here's a quick debrief of the OHL bracket for those of us lacking the free time to catch all the action:

OHL

Hamilton 4, Ottawa 1

MVPs: Hamilton obviously dominated this one, thanks to huge outputs from Matt Strome (PHI) (10 points), Brandon Saigeon (2018) (9 points including 7 goals), and Robert Thomas (STL) (9 points).

Barrie 3, Mississauga 2

MVPs so far: Mississauga veteran Michael McLeod (NJD) leads his squad with 8 points and Barrie's Dmitry Sokolov (MIN) and Lucas Chiodo (undrafted) have the same total, but MVP so far is Barrie goaltender Leo Lazarev (undrafted). He has faced the most shots of all goalies in the playoffs and has managed a .919 SV%.

Kingston 4, North Bay 1

MVPs: Gabe Vilardi (LAK) was a big ticket deadline pickup and is paying off with a league-leading 12 points in the 5 game series. He remins at over a point-per-game even if you dont count powerplay contributions. Same goes for teammate Cliff Pu (BUF) and dman Sean Day (NYR)

Niagra 4, Oshawa 1

MVPs: Niagra's GM. They had 13 different players score goals in this series, 17 with a point, and 7 players at over a point-per-game. That is some scary depth. Akil Thomas (2018) and Sam Miletic (undrafted) lead the way with 7 apiece. Netminder Stephen Dhillon (2018) hasn't been too shabby either with a 0.932 SV%.

SSM 4, Saginaw 0

MVPs: Sault. Ste. Marie's powerplay scorers led by Boris Katchouk (TBL), Taylor Raddysh (TBL) and Conor Timmins (COL) with 2 goals each. Quite a few stat lines inflated thanks to a dominant man-advantage.

Kitchener 3, Guelph 2 

MVPs so far: Adam Mascherin (FLA, for now) and Logan Brown (OTT) are among top plyoff scorers with 10 points each (all assists for Brown). Ryan Merkley's (2018) fantasy line is dreamy – 5A, 10PIM, 20 SOG (most of all dmen). Coaches wont like his minus-5 rating though. 

Sarnia 3, Windsor 2

MVPs so far: Michael DiPietro (VAN) and his sparkling 0.943 SV% despite 3 losses and a huge shot count against. Also, the rest of Windsor's penalty kill that hasn't let in a single goal-against this series. In 5 games! That's just unbelievable. DiPietro suffered a knee injury last game which might hurt the streak.

Owen Sound 4, London 0

MVPs: A bit of a steamrolling here but Brett McKenzie (VAN) and Alan Lyszczrczyk (undrafted because no NHL GM wanted to try and pronouce that) managed over a point-per-game even-strength production which is nice. No dmen had big numbers but only 4 players on all of London managed double-digits SOG over the entire series kudos to the coaches and dmen for that.

***

Thanks for reading, and be sure to check back for more playoff updates over the next few months!

Hayden Soboleski

@soboleskih

***