This year’s Aberdeen Wings will feature a blend of veterans with familiar names to go with a mix of newcomers who possess familiar names.

The North American Hockey League (NAHL) squad starts its season with four games this week at the NAHL Showcase in Blaine, Minn. Wednesday through Saturday. They will hit the ice with combination of returning players combined with recent additions.

Back for another season with the Wings are Luke Backel, Bennett Koupal, Luke Lindsay, Jackson Anderson, Landon Steffen, Roope Tuomioksa, Nick Comfort, and Zachary Reim.

“There’s about eight returners right now, so there’s some familiar faces,” said Wings coach Scott Langer. “We had a lot of turnover as well so we had to do a lot of recruiting, bring in players that are going to be able to do well at this level. We’ve done that so far.”

Among those newcomers are three sons of former National Hockey League standouts.

“Lucas Lidstrom, Isak Holmstrom, obviously come from a pretty good blood line. I think their dads (Nicklas Lidstrom and Tomas Holmstrom) both won four (Stanley) cups,” Langer said. “We also have Lawson Kimble. Kimball’s dad (Darin) played in the NHL as well. It just worked out right, getting good players with good blood lines.”

The Wings haven’t been able to spend much time on the ice, but are doing the best they can to build team chemistry as they approach the upcoming season.

“It’s a process every day. There’s no other way to battle it than to view it like that. There’s a lot of ups and downs. You have to work on a lot of stuff,” Langer said.

Aberdeen faces Corpus Christi on Wednesday, Lone Star on Thursday, Johnstown on Friday, and the Minnesota Wilderness on Saturday during the Showcase.

The Wings have had to make the best use of their resources, since ice time is limited.

“We don’t get off to the races very quick here, just because we don’t get ice until after the fair. We’ve only practiced 11 times. We’ll have 13 practices before we see competition in the Showcase,” Langer said. “It’s a scramble to get them to gel and to trust each other and all that stuff that goes into team building. We try to do a lot of that early so guys are really comfortable with one another.”

While there will be plenty of newcomers on this year’s team, look for the Wings to play a similar style and have the same demeanor under Langer’s guidance.

“Obviously, you have to tailor some of your game to the type of players you have each and every year, but there’s some non-negotiables within our culture when you talk about how hard we’re going to work and what we’re going to do each and every night against an opponent,” Langer said. “People expect to see certain things out of our program year in, year out. These guys come in and it’s drilled into them right away, there’s a certain standard. They have to meet that standard, or they can’t be a Wing. The past so far have done a really good job in that area.”

Last season, there was a logjam in the Central Division as the playoff order wasn’t determined until the final night of the regular season. Langer expects the same type of parity to prevail again this year.

“Austin lost by one goal in the final game of the year in the Robertson Cup and then they end up bringing back 15 of their players. I think Bismarck has got 12 or 13 returners,” Langer said. “I think all the teams are going to be just as good this year and there’s going to be a fight to make those last four spots.”

That type of intense competition within the division is what makes this week’s Showcase so important, even though it’s just the start of an eight-month season.

Langer said teams need to make sure they don’t come away from the four-game Showcase empty handed.

“You can’t afford to drop points in the showcase. It puts you so far behind and it takes a lot to catch up, so you have to take some points when you go into that showcase,” Langer said. “It’s why the competition is so good at it. Teams know if they come out of there and they don’t bring any points back, they’re going to be sitting in the bottom of the division right from the get-go, and that’s not an easy thing to get out of.”

While time will tell how things will shake out this coming season, the Wings will definitely hit the ice on a mission after a frustrating close to last season when they were swept by St. Cloud in the opening round of the playoffs.

“We want to have a better season than we did last year. There was just so many ups and downs and then getting knocked out of the playoffs three in a row to a team we had beaten five in a row, that’s hard. That makes for a long summer,” Langer said. “We don’t want to be in that situation this year. We want to work every day so we can put ourselves in a situation to make teams chase us.”