Giants: Flames draft pick Jaden Lipinski heats up as season winds down

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Vancouver Giants centre Jaden Lipinski is showing he has a strong finishing kick once again.

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Lipinski ended last season on a dead sprint, playing some of the best hockey of his Giants career down the stretch. That included the Calgary Flames draft pick amassing nine goals and 20 points in his final 14 games.

He has hit the repeat button, it seems. The Giants have seven games left in this regular season. Coach Manny Viveiros has Lipinski (6-foot-4, 210 pounds) together with wingers Maxim Muranov (6-foot-2, 185 pounds) and Tyler Thorpe (6-foot-4, 215 pounds) for what might be the largest forward line in the WHL, and it feels like the trio is driving play almost every shift.

There are numbers to help back that up, including that Lipinski has four goals and nine points in his past seven games.

Vancouver (29-24-8-0) resumes action Saturday with a visit to the Kamloops Blazers. The Giants woke up Wednesday in seventh place in the Western Conference. They were tied in the points with the Portland Winterhawks (31-24-3-1), but Portland had the tiebreaker with more wins and also had two games in hand. The Tri-City Americans (31-23-5-1) were two points up on both Portland and Vancouver, with a game in hand on the Giants.

Lipinski started the season with the Flames’ AHL Calgary Wranglers farm team and admits he may have been overanalyzing things earlier on this year season. He’s trying to stay out of his own head now.

“It’s just going out and playing,” Lipinski, 20, explained. “I’m playing like it is my last year in the league.”

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He is, in fact, in his final season with Vancouver. He is one of Vancouver’s three 20 year olds.

Lipinski has notched 11 goals and 34 points in Vancouver’s 30 games since the Christmas break. That’s got him at 14 goals and 51 points in 52 games on the season.

An assist in Sunday’s 3-1 win over the Wenatchee Wild marked his 185th point in his four-year Giants career, which ties him with Gilbert Brule (2002-06) for the ninth-best all-time point total in team history.

Lipinski was a list player — the WHL vernacular for free-agent addition — from Scottsdale, Ariz., signing on with Vancouver after team brass saw him while they were checking in on his Phoenix Jr. Coyotes teammate Colton Langkow, who was a Giants’ selection in the 2019 WHL Draft.

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Lipinski worked his way into being an NHL Draft choice, going in the fourth round to the Flames in 2023. Lipinski was age-eligible to play minor pro this season, and he started the year with the Wranglers before being reassigned to the Giants.

He has yet to sign a contract with the Flames. They have until June 1 to ink him to a deal or he becomes a free agent.

With the NCAA route opening up next year for WHL players, that could also be in play. The Arizona State Sun Devils would seem like a logical fit. They are in their 10th season, and have one Arizona native on their roster currently.

Lipinski is focussed on this season, but admits he is thinking about next year, too.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Lipinski said. “There’s a lot of options. I’m just taking it a game at a time, and whatever happens with the Flames happens. My job right now is to show up in every game.”

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The top eight teams in the 11-team WHL Western Conference make the postseason. The Giants were on the verge of clinching a spot Wednesday morning. A loss Wednesday night by ninth-place Wenatchee to the fourth-place Prince George Cougars would cinch it for Vancouver.

The standings are congested enough — two points between fifth and seventh, five points between the Cougars and Victoria Royals for the B.C. Division lead and the No. 2 overall seed that goes with it to start Wednesday — that there are a multitude of match-ups still possible.
Vancouver’s been wildly inconsistent this season. They’ve been up and down and all around. When they’ve played connected, they’ve shown they can compete with the top teams and general manager Barclay Parneta says that how his team is trending, rather than who it’s playing in the first round, is what he’s thinking about most.

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The trio of Lipinski, Muranov and Thorpe do look like a line Viveiros could match up with other team’s top units in the playoffs. They can be physically imposing. They’ll make the opposition work in the defensive zone as well.

Thorpe, 19, was a fifth-round pick of the Montreal Canadiens last summer. Muranov, 20, had a free-agent invite to Toronto Maple Leafs training camp in the fall. The Giants landed him this season via trade with Wenatchee.

“We all think the game pretty well on both sides,” Lipinski said of the three. “As long as we buy in and work, we’re going to get the puck back and good things are going to happen.”

Giants defenceman Mazden Leslie, 19, had two goals against Wenatchee on Sunday, pushing him to 184 points for his Vancouver career, or one behind both Brule and Lipinski.

Leslie is at 19 goals and 66 points on the season. The Giants’ record for points in a season by a defenceman is 72, set by Kevin Connauton in 2009-10. Rearguard Bowen Byram had 71 points for Vancouver in 2018-19.

Leslie is at 55 career goals. Jon Blum (2005-09) had the former Giants standard with 49.

sewen@postmedia.com

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