Deere, Northmen off to Minto Cup
Courtesy Orangeville Junior A Northmen
Trey Deere and the Orangeville Junior A Northmen of the Ontario Junior Lacrosse League (OJLL) have won the Iroquois Trophy, the league’s championship trophy, for the second straight year, doing so in six games against the Whitby Warriors.
The series clinching game on August 11 was won in overtime by the Northmen, with Dylan Sanderson scoring his 13th of the playoffs at 9:32, with assists from Owen Rahn and Liam Matthews.
Deere had three points in game six, scoring his 22nd of the playoffs early in the third period and adding two assists, his 24th and 25th.
He had 17 points in the series against Whitby, seven goals and 10 assists.
This is Deere’s last year of Junior lacrosse eligibility, having turned 21 in February of this year.
While he did not reach the offensive heights of his 2023 and 2024 seasons, where he reached 107 and 159 points respectively, he still came close, netting 96 points in 28 games, including playoffs.
That made him the fourth-highest point generator on a very offensively gifted Orangeville team. Deere and the three players ahead of him on the stat sheet - Matthews (158), Max Kruger (138), and Sanderson (119) - are all in the top 10 in points this season, regular season and playoffs combined.
Deere’s 42 goals are also the eighth most in the league, and his 54 assists are good for 10th most.
Four of the series’ six games went to overtime, with Orangeville winning three of them - game one by a score of 7-6, game three by a score of 9-8, and the aforementioned game six.
The Northmen will be competing against three other teams for the Minto Cup: the 2025 host St. Catharines Athletics, the Calgary Raiders, and the Coquitlam Adanacs, who defeated Orangeville in last year’s Minto Cup finals.
The round-robin portion of the tournament will begin on August 16 for Orangeville at 4 p.m. against Coquitlam. The next day at 7 p.m. the team will play against the Raiders, before finally taking on the host Athletics on August 18 at 7:30 p.m.
The Athletics also play in the OJLL, where they swept the season series against the Northmen, beating Orangeville 9-5 on May 21 and 7-5 on June 22.
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All Minto Cup games will be played at the Meridian Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario.
