Some Men You Just Can't Reach
"Skill," he'd say, just as he's said it many times before.
Nine teams followed that mantra when it came to making selections with the top 10 picks of the NHL entry draft on Friday night.
One did not.
That team would be your Maple Leafs. While other clubs went for mobile, puck-moving blueliners, slick pivots or speed merchants, the Leafs aggressively moved up in the draft from the seventh to fifth slot to snag Luke Schenn, regarded as a stay-at-home, shut down style defenceman.
Schenn's an excellent prospect, and likely to be a solid player in the league for years to come. If not the Leafs, somebody was going to take him with one of the top six picks.
But nobody would describe him as the next Scott Niedermayer, not even Leaf GM Cliff Fletcher.
"If you're thinking of a guy who's going to go end-to-end with the puck, it's not him," said Fletcher.
Bill James wrote an interesting piece on skill in the 1987 Baseball Abstract. He told a story of a Kansas basketball coach named Jack Hartman, whose teams won tons of games without necessarily looking flashy or impressive. For years, sportswriters complimented Hartman on winning games without much talent, until finally a frustrated Hartman barked "Look, what is talent? Talent is being where you are supposed to be and doing what you are supposed to do." James commented:What he was saying, in essence, was that you may think that talent is being able to run fast and jump high and stop and start quickly, but I think talent is blocking out on the boards and cutting off the passing lanes and hitting your free throws. You recruit the guys that you think have talent, and I'll recruit the guys that I think have talent, and we'll see who wins.
So does Luke Schenn score highlight-reel breakaway goals? Does he make blind passes that land right on the tape of a streaking winger? Does he do this? No. Luke Schenn blocks out the boards and cuts off the passing lanes. Luke Schenn was rated the best defensive defencemen prospect in 20 years by McKeen's because he's smart, tough, the kind of guy that other forwards hate to face, who coaches change their game plan to avoid.
He's the type of player the Leafs haven't had since the days of Rouse and Lefebvre, who did the nasty work on a team that came closer than any to bringing a Cup back to Toronto; even the best teams of the Sundin era relied inordinately on good goaltending, with too many riverboat gamblers on the blueline and no lockdown guy to turn to when defending a lead (Yushkevich for a year or two, maybe). Isn't shutting down a Crosby or a Zetterberg a rare, valuable skill, especially now that hooking and holding are being legislated out of the game? Did high draft picks like Alex Daigle and Todd Warriner have talent and not guys like Scott Stevens or Adam Foote or Vladimir Konstantinov? No, Luke Schenn isn't going to be the guy setting off on end to end rushes. He's gonna be the guy who knocks that guy on his ass, makes a good first pass to clear the zone, and heads up ice with the Leaf attack. He looks pretty damn skilled to me.
Cox also writes that the Leafs could have stayed at seven and taken "flashy centre Nikita Filatov." Do you think Columbus would have been pissed, seeing as how they had taken him with the sixth pick? And, if we are going to draft other teams players, why wouldn't we take Stamkos? Or, better yet, Crosby?
"He's gonna be the guy who knocks that guy on his ass, makes a good first pass to clear the zone, and heads up ice with the Leaf attack. He looks pretty damn skilled to me."
Amen, brother, Amen...
"All the players they drafted were from North American teams, including a Belarusian playing for the Quebec Remparts, and all were at least 6-foot-1. Not a Henrik Zetterberg clone in the bunch."
So who's the Zetterberg clone that they were supposed to pick?
"Meanwhile, Fletcher dealt the negotiating rights to the club's classy Swedish captain, Mats Sundin, to the Montreal Canadiens, possibly for a second-rounder if Sundin signs with the Habs in the next seven days."
OK, so now Sundin's too classy for the Leafs to let go, in exchange for youg prospects to help the Leafs rebuild? What dopes the Leafs are!
"Fletcher is also busy trying to figure out ways to ship Bryan McCabe and Darcy Tucker, two of the club's better offensive players in recent years, out of town."
OK, so now Cox loves McCabe and Tucker? My head hurts.
Then for some reason, possibly gambling-debt-related, he goes on about the Senators at length.
Then the (intended) kicker: "That will leave behind a team with a big-name coach, a good goaltender, a veteran all-star blueliner and a handful of veteran forwards, none of whom are coming off 30-goal seasons."
Uh... Only Sundin had 30 goals last year. Who were they supposed to keep again? The "better offensive players" Tucker and McCabe? With 18 and 5 goals, respectively? And who aren't even gone yet? And is it certain Sundin's gone, anyway? And what about all the young players on the team? Something's funny here - who wrote this?
Oh, right.