Competing philosophies emphasizing the importance of offense versus toughness led to the Toronto Sceptres and Ottawa Charge completing the PWHL’s most significant trade a month into the league’s second season.
The trade completed Monday night involved three players with a combined five Winter Games appearances and featured a swap of 2023 first-round draft picks.
Physical defenseman Jocelyn Larocque was dealt to Ottawa for play-making blue-liner Savannah Harmon. The teams also traded forwards, with Ottawa landing Victoria Bach, and Toronto acquiring the versatility and grit of Hayley Scamurra.
Harmon, 29, and Scamurra, 30, are current U.S. national team members, who won silver medals at the 2022 Beijing Games. The 36-year-old Larocque is a three-time Olympian and a blueline fixture for Canada for 14 years. The 28-year-old Bach, meantime, was a member of the Canada's world championship gold medal-winning teams in 2021 and '22, before taking the following year off to pursue a teaching degree.
“Mixed emotions, I guess this morning,” Sceptres general manager Gina Kingsbury said during a Zoom call Tuesday of having to part ways with two players she’s familiar with in her other role as Team Canada GM. “But I’m excited for what’s to come, so I have a positive outlook right now.”
In Ottawa, difficult as it was losing two core leaders, Charge GM Mike Hirshfeld was elated adding Larocque’s leadership and physical presence, and Bach's offensive upside in believing she was underused the past two seasons in Toronto.
“For us, it was a really tough trade ... but one we think moves our organization forward as a whole,” Hirshfeld said.
The trade came with both teams having the same records — 2-3 with an overtime loss — and with all four expected to be in the lineup on Tuesday night when Toronto hosts Ottawa.
Previously, the most significant PWHL trade was the league's first one, a three-player swap made on Feb. 11, when Boston acquired Finland national team player Susanna Tapani and Abby Cook, by dealing 2023 women’s college player of the year Sophie Jaques to Minnesota.
Harmon, from Illinois, was the key to the deal for Toronto in providing the Sceptres another play-making defenseman to take the offensive load off of blueliner Renata Fast. Harmon will be initially teamed with Fast, in reuniting a tandem that played together at Clarkson University,
After leading Charge defensemen with 12 points (three goals, nine assists) last season, Harmon’s yet to score a point this year.
Kingsbury said the timing of the trade had nothing to do with the Sceptres' slow start, but the opportunity to land Harmon, the fifth pick in PWHL’s inaugural 2023 draft.
“We’re constantly trying to look at it with a critical eye of how can we perform better, how can we be a more threatening team,” Kingsbury said. “We’ve always liked Savannah’s game. ... She brings something that we're missing bit.”
Her puck-handling skills fit the Sceptres’ high-tempo, attacking approach, and with Toronto still awaiting the return of 2024 season MVP Natalie Spooner, who has resumed skating after tearing a ligament in her left knee in May.
The 30-year-old Scamurra is from Buffalo, New York, and has yet to register point this year after finishing with five goals and 10 points last season.
Larocque, the No. 2 pick in the 2023 draft, was the key player for an Ottawa team that placed an offseason-long emphasis on adding size and strength.
“We wanted to make it harder for opponents to operate in front of our net. And so Jocelyn is the ultimate competitor,” Hirschfeld said. Another benefit is Larocque’s veteran experience helping influence Ottawa’s younger blueliners such as Ashton Bell and Stephanie Markowski.
Being better in one-goal games has been an issue for Ottawa. The Charge have yet to score four or more goals this season and are 1-2-1 in one-goal games. Last year, Ottawa was eliminated from playoff contention on the final day of a season in which the team went 1-6 in games ending past regulation.
As for Bach, Hirschfeld believes she can recapture her scoring touch after combining for three goals and six points in 22 games over the past two seasons. The Charge’s scouting staff includes Brian Durocher, who coached Bach during her time at Boston University, where she set program records with 198 career points and 104 goals over four seasons.
“Brian was very excited about the offensive skillset and talent,” Hirschfeld said. “Maybe she didn’t get the opportunity she wanted (in Toronto), but we’re going to give her that in Ottawa.”
The headline, summary and story have been corrected to reflect only three Olympians involved in the trade, with Bach not a member of Canada’s 2022 Olympic team.
AP Women’s Hockey: https://apnews.com/hub/womens-hockey
Toronto Sceptres' Jocelyne Larocque (3) vies for position with Boston Fleets' Hannah Bilka (19) in front of the net during third-period PWHL hockey game action in Toronto, Friday, Dec. 27, 2024. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — In an extraordinary turn, a judge Friday set President-elect Donald Trump's sentencing in his hush money case for Jan. 10 — little over a week before he's due to return to the White House — but indicated he wouldn't be jailed.
The development nevertheless leaves Trump on course to be the first president to take office convicted of felony crimes.
Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, signaled in a written decision that he'd sentence the former and future president to what's known as an unconditional discharge, in which a case is closed without jail time, a fine or probation. Trump can appear virtually for sentencing, if he chooses.
Rejecting Trump’s push to dismiss the verdict and throw out the case on presidential immunity grounds and because of his impending second term, Merchan wrote that only “bringing finality to this matter” would serve the interests of justice.
He said he sought to balance Trump’s ability to govern, “unencumbered” by the case, against other interests: the U.S. Supreme Court's July ruling on presidential immunity and the public’s expectation “that all are equal and no one is above the Iaw,” and the importance of respecting a jury verdict.
“This court is simply not persuaded that the first factor outweighs the others at this stage of the proceeding,” Merchan wrote in an 18-page decision.
Trump communications director Steven Cheung reiterated that the case, which Trump has long described as illegitimate, should be dismissed outright.
“There should be no sentencing, and President Trump will continue fighting against these hoaxes until they are all dead,” Cheung said in a statement. He didn't elaborate on Trump's potential next legal moves.
Former Manhattan Judge Diane Kiesel said the ruling can’t be appealed under New York law, but Trump nonetheless might try to appeal it. In any event, he can appeal his conviction, a step that can’t be taken until he is sentenced.
Trump takes office Jan. 20 as the first former president to be convicted of a crime and the first convicted criminal to be elected to the office.
He was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records. They involved an alleged scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the last weeks of Trump’s first campaign in 2016. The payout was made to keep her from publicizing claims she’d had sex with the married Trump years earlier. He says that her story is false and that he did nothing wrong.
Trump, a Republican, has decried the verdict as the “rigged, disgraceful” result of a “witch hunt” pursued by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat.
The conviction left Trump, 78, facing the possibility of punishment ranging from a fine or probation to up to four years in prison. His sentencing initially was set for last July 11, then postponedtwice at the defense’s request.
The case centered on how Trump accounted for reimbursing his personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, for the Daniels payment. Cohen on Friday called Merchan's decision to go ahead with the sentencing “judicious and appropriate.”
Merchan had postponed the sentencing after Trump's Nov. 5 election so the defense and prosecution could weigh in on the future of the case.
Trump’s lawyers urged Merchan to toss it. They said it would otherwise pose unconstitutional “disruptions” to the incoming president’s ability to run the country.
Prosecutors acknowledged there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insisted the conviction should stand.
They suggested various options, such as freezing the case during his term or guaranteeing him a no-jail sentence. They also proposed closing the case while formally noting both his conviction and his undecided appeal — a novel idea drawn from what some state courts do when criminal defendants die while appealing their cases.
Merchan ruled that Trump’s current status as president-elect does not afford him the same immunity as a sitting president. Setting the verdict aside and dismissing the case would be a “drastic” step and would “undermine the Rule of Law in immeasurable ways,” Merchan wrote.
Before Trump’s November election, his lawyers sought to reverse his conviction for a different reason: the Supreme Court's immunity decision, which gave presidents broad protection from criminal prosecution.
Trump was a private citizen — campaigning for president, but neither elected nor sworn in — when Cohen paid Daniels in October 2016. He was president when Cohen was reimbursed, and Cohen testified that they discussed the repayment arrangement in the Oval Office.
The Trump hush money attorneys contended that the jury got some evidence that should have been shielded by presidential immunity. Merchan later rejected that argument, but in the meantime, the election raised new issues.
While urging Merchan to nix the conviction, Trump also sought to move the case to federal court, where he could also assert immunity. A federal judge repeatedly said no, but Trump appealed.
The hush money case was the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial.
Since the election, special counsel Jack Smith has ended his two federal cases. One pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss; the other alleged he hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
A separate, state-level election interference case in Georgia is in limbo after an appeals court removed prosecutor Fani Willis from the case.
Trump's lawyers argued that Smith’s decision to dismiss the federal indictments against Trump should propel a dismissal of the New York hush money case, as well. But Merchan said he found that argument unpersuasive, noting that the hush money case was in a “vastly” different stage.
Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister contributed.
FILE — Michael Cohen leaves his apartment building in New York, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE — Adult film actress Stormy Daniels attends the opening of the adult entertainment fair "Venus," in Berlin, Oct. 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
FILE - Judge Juan M. Merchan sits for a portrait in his chambers in New York, March 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE - Former President Donald Trump waits for the start of proceedings in Manhattan criminal court, April 23, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, Pool, File)
