The Maineiacs make nearly a dozen cuts as they move toward the regular season.
LEWISTON – The engine sputtered at first, but it didn’t take long for it to kick into gear and start purring like a kitten.
After dropping their first exhibition game, a 7-4 loss on Friday in Salem, N.H, the Lewiston Maineiacs weren’t discouraged.
“This weekend is still a part of our evaluation process,” said team general manager Normand Gosselin. “Winning is always good, but we wanted to be able to evaluate the talent we have this weekend.”
A small round of cuts after Friday’s game and a few more since have trimmed the Maineiacs’ roster to 25 players, the league maximum during the regular season.
“After each game we cut a few more,” said Gosselin. “It was easy top see after the cuts that we started to play a bit better as a team.”
The team won its final two games of the weekend, winning Saturday 6-1 and Sunday 5-4.
So long…again
A total of 10 players were shown the door over the weekend, the final two being announced Monday morning. Among the last to be cut was Bruno D’Amico, who for the last two seasons had played with the team in Sherbrooke.
“When you evaluate the talent, you always have to look to the future of the team,” said Gosselin. “A lot of times it is hard because you have to keep younger players that have the same skill as the older players because they will have a longer time to develop.”
Among the cuts also were three goaltenders, leaving just two – Matt Davis and Brandon Verge – on the team.
According to Gosselin, the team is targeting 23 or 24 as the number of players with which the team will start the season. That means one or two more names from the list of 25 are likely to go. With four scheduled exhibition games left in the next three weeks, the remaining players will be fighting to stay on the team.
The other option…
Maybe the Maineiacs didn’t have a place for him, but the team near his home town did. The Lewiston Maineiacs made a trade with the Acadie-Bathurst Titan on Monday, sending forward Corey Toole to the Titan in exchange for an eighth-round draft pick in the 2004 QMJHL Entry Draft.
Toole, who hails from Fredericton, New Brunswick, was an invite player to the 2003 training camp in Lewiston and had already been told he would not be in the Maineiacs’ opening day roster.
“The idea is to give the kids an opportunity to play,” said Gosselin. “He wasn’t going to have a place with us, but, where he is from New Brunswick and they had an opening for someone like him, we felt it was right to send him there.”
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