frontenacs gm cooper picks up blueline prospect, draft capital ahead of ohl priority selection
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kingston frontenacs goaltender gavin betts (no. 43) gets his pad down and skate to the post against peterborough petes forward aiden young in the frontenacs 4-2 loss to the petes on march 19, 2026 at slush puppie place in kingston. betts was named to the ohl's second rookie all-star team for the 2025-26 season.
gare joyce/the kingston whig-sta
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jpg, ki, apsmc
with the ontario hockey league’s priority selection looming, kingston frontenacs general manager kory cooper struck a couple of deals this week, acquiring a young prospect at a position of conspicuous need from the brantford bulldogs and a package of picks in trades from the flint firebirds.
in the one deal involving a live body, cooper landed defenceman gavin christie from the bulldogs, who had selected the beamsville native in the third round, 58th overall, in the 2025 priority selection.
a 2009 birthday, the six-foot-one, 175-pound christie made into the lineup of a veteran-laden brantford team that posted the league’s best regular-season record. christie spent the balance of the season with the brantford titans in jr. a, posting seven goals and 20 assists in 38 games. the price tag for christie was not small but neither will it be particularly impactful in the near future: a fifth-rounder in the 2026 entry draft and a second-rounder three years down the line.
combined with 2025 first-rounder matthew henderson (17th overall) and fourth-rounder dante d’andre (71st overall) the frontenacs’ deal for christie leaves them with three of the first 23 blueliners selected in last year’s draft class. the frontenacs still have an experience deficit in the defence corps with the graduation of last year’s overagers will bishop and maleek mcgowan and captain van williamson’s decision to forego a promised overage season to play at clarkson in postdam, n.y., but christie figures to be a building block for seasons ahead.
at a glance, the trade with flint looks like a shuffling of deck chairs on a crowded cruise liner: most of the picks in play are import drafts. yet one line in the transaction might produce an immediate payoff.
kingston is sending its first two picks in this year’s import draft and a third-rounder in next year’s import draft to the firebirds.
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in return the frontenacs land flint’s second-and third-round picks in this year’s import draft and flint’s first-round import pick next year.
the frontenacs seem to be locked in for european content for next season — slovak left-winger alex misiak was one of the most consistent forwards after coming over in trade from erie in mid-season and his countryman tomas pobezal found his game when used at centre rather than playing on the wing. pobezal would be the rare overage import, but there seems good reason to think he’d be a fit and a significant asset on that count.
misiac and pobezal will be joined by adam goljer, who was captain of the silver-medal-winning slovak team at the world under-18s and was named the top defenceman in the tournament. in a recent mock draft on the athletic, goljer was projected to be a first-round pick in this year nhl entry draft — a significant spiking in his stock after being slotted previously as a third- or fourth-rounder.
in a position to play a long game, cooper was able to leverage the frontenacs’ positioning in the coming import draft for an upgrade in next week’s priority selection: the third-round pick sent to flint was originally slotted for windsor and is 56th overall; the second-round pick coming back to kingston was originally brampton’s and will be 23rd overall. effectively, it’s a move up to the fringe of the first-round.
the one other bit of frontenacs news out of the ohl office was gavin betts being named as goalie on the ohl second rookie all-star team. in his first full season in the league, betts built on his gold-medal performance with a canadian team at hockey canada’s under-17 challenge in 2024 and a bronze-medal performance at the under-18 hlinka/gretzky tournament last summer. after the frontenacs’ lost in the first round to ottawa in this year’s ohl playoffs, betts played at the world under-18s, where canada lost to eventual champion sweden in the quarterfinals.
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