A banner day at PWHL entry draft resets Toronto Sceptres roster

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There is a pillow calling Gina Kingsbury’s name following today’s PWHL Awards ceremony and she can’t wait to accept the invitation.

Like all the various decision-makers in the PWHL, the Sceptres GM has been burning the midnight oil for weeks now as the league went through the business of adding two expansion teams into the league on equal footing while still doing the work necessary to prepare for a six-round entry draft.

Kingsbury and her staff arrived in Ottawa needing to fill some big holes in their lineup, solve an overcrowded goaltending situation and basically get the organization back on solid footing after enduring the roller-coaster ride that was the expansion process.

Kingsbury should sleep well in the coming days because it appears she has addressed all of those needs.

It began with a move that will likely not get the attention it deserves given how divided the attention of the league’s followers was on draft night with all the new faces coming into the league.

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While teams were stockpiling potential in the young college stars or in some cases veteran international talents, Kingsbury and the Sceptres dealt away their first pick, third overall, to acquire 27-year-old defender Ella Shelton from New York.

Shelton has long been a favourite of both Kingsbury and Sceptres coach Troy Ryan, who have seen her talent up close for years as a member of the Canadian national team.

But the Ingersoll native, who always has seemed like a natural fit in Toronto, wound up in New York in the inaugural draft and thrived in the Big Apple even as the Sirens themselves struggled to find consistency.

Shelton easily is among the top five defenders in the league and joins another in that group in Toronto with Renata Fast, giving Ryan and his coaching staff a pair of defenders capable of doing whatever the team needs most at any given moment in a game.

In a league that is morphing more and more to a win-now mode given the roster upheaval expansion brings — and don’t kid yourself, more is coming, next year if not the one after that —  getting a league-proven star at the very top of her game is good business.

“Bringing Ella to Toronto is something we are really excited about,” Kingsbury began in her post-draft interview. “We have always wanted Ella Shelton in Toronto. I think anyone would want Ella Shelton in their lineup.

“Once we saw (Sirens GM Pascal Daoust) was having more and more signings on the defensive side, we thought he would be more willing to let go one of his (more accomplished) defenders,” Kingsbury said. “So, we started to have conversations about what that would look like and eventually came to an agreement.”

Kingsbury said that move was very much connected to the next big shoe to drop on draft night, which came in Round 2 when the Sceptres again stole the spotlight by sending their starting goaltender of the past two years, Kristen (Soupy) Campbell, to Vancouver in exchange for Vancouver’s second- and third-round picks.

Toronto also sent its third-rounder to Vancouver in the deal.

“They kind of had to happen simultaneously,” Kingsbury said of the two deals. “Obviously we were in discussions about moving Soupy somewhere and Vancouver was always of interest and interest from her as well.

“So, moving her and having the opportunity to pick again in the second round gave us more courage to give up our first-round pick if that makes sense. It allowed us to go after a defender when possibly you would be thinking forward if you looked at our lineup, but having those two picks in the second round gave us the courage to say ‘yeah, this is the right choice for us.’”

With those two picks in the second round, Toronto would address some holes up front created by the loss of players like Sarah Nurse and Hannah Miller, as well as Izzy Daniel and later in free agency losing Hayley Scammura.

With those picks, Toronto appeared to focus on size, but not solely size.

In selecting Emma Gentry, a five-foot-10 forward out of St. Cloud State, Kiara Zanon, a high-scoring Ohio State forward, and Clara Van Wieren, a 5-foot-10 co-captain at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, the Sceptres got a little bit of everything.

Gentry brings size and physicality, not to mention an underrated ability to put the puck in the net.

Zanon is a self-described rink rat who breathes, eats and drinks hockey 24 hours a day. It doesn’t hurt that she’s an offensive machine as well.

Van Wieren brings another leader into Toronto’s locker room who seems to share a lot of the same attributes that have made Sceptres’ team captain Blayre Turnbull such a fixture in Toronto.

Both are responsible centres who can be counted on to do the little things and the hard things properly and consistently.

In total, draft day should allow Kingsbury her first restless sleep in the past month and the Toronto fan base some confidence in knowing that a Walter Cup remains well within reach despite all the recent roster upheaval.

mganter@postmedia.com