“I really feel for (Ty Halaburda), because I know how devastating that can be,” said Zack Ostapchuk, who had his 16-year-old rookie season shut down early due to an operation.
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Ty Halaburda hasn’t had to look far for advice on how to handle a season-ending surgery in his Vancouver Giants’ rookie campaign.
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Halaburda, who turns 17 later this month, hurt his shoulder in Vancouver’s March 4 game against the Kamloops Blazers and has since had it operated on. Vancouver wraps up league play Saturday with a visit to the Blazers, and Halaburda will wind up missing the final 19 games of the regular season.
Fellow Giants forward Zack Ostapchuk saw his 16-year-old rookie campaign in 2019-20 come to a close with 18 regular-season games left due to knee surgery.
Two seasons later, Ostapchuk is Vancouver’s captain, one of the team’s best players and a signed prospect with the Ottawa Senators, the club that used a second-round pick on him in last summer’s NHL Draft. That’s something Halaburda can take solace from.
“I really feel for him, because I know how devastating that can be,” Ostapchuk, 18, said after practice earlier this week. “I told him to stick with the process. It’s especially hard the first couple of months. You really feel alone. You’re not around your teammates very much.”
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Halaburda, a Victoria product who was Vancouver’s second-round pick in the 2020 WHL Draft, had been one of the bright spots for the club in what’s been a largely underwhelming season to date.
Coach Michael Dyck had talked up Halaburda’s ability to take care of his own zone, and he was already giving Halaburda top-six ice time some nights. Both Dyck and general manager Barclay Parneta have said they expect Halaburda to be in the leadership mix with the Giants going forward.
Halaburda, who’s a right-hand shot and measures in at 5-foot-11 and 164 pounds, has five goals and 16 points in 45 games. To give that perspective, Ostapchuk had five goals and eight points in 44 games at age 16. The St. Albert, Alta., native was Vancouver’s first-round pick in the 2018 WHL Draft.
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Ostapchuk is bigger and stronger. Like Halaburda, though, he plays in all situations and you ca n’t judge him immediately off of his offensive numbers from him. Ostapchuk was at 24 goals and 41 points in 57 games going in to the Giants’ game with the Seattle Thunderbirds on Wednesday.
“He’s going to be huge for this organization,” Ostapchuk said of Halaburda. “You can see it now that he’s a good player. I can’t even imagine when the kid is 18, 19, how good he’ll be.
“He embodies what it means to be Giant right now at a young age. And all the guys love him. He’s going to be massive for leadership for this organization.”
Parneta feels that Halaburda is a “core player moving forward that the team will be built around.”
“He’s an exceptional human being,” Parneta added.
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Ostapchuk says Halaburda searched him out to talk about recovering from surgery when he first heard an operation was necessary on his shoulder.
“I told him it would be tough, but talk to people and work your way through it,” Ostapchuk said.
Goalie Jesper Vikman (lower-body injury), who was hurt in that same March 4 game as Halaburda, and winger Cole Shepard (lower-body injury), who hasn’t played since March 16 versus the Tri-City Americans, skated on their own earlier this week. It’s likely that the Giants would want to put them into multiple practices before letting them return to game action, so they’re both questionable for Vancouver’s Friday game at home against the Kelowna Rockets and Saturday’s finale in Kamloops.
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Shepard, who turned 20 in February, has seven goals and 20 points in 28 games this season. Vikman, who turned 20 in March, has a 17-15-2-0 record, to go along with a 3.05 goals against average and a .903 save percentage. He was a fifth-round pick of the Vegas Golden Knights in the 2020 NHL Draft. Parneta had earlier tagged him as the team’s most valuable player this season.
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