Ryan Ellis is the best player on the best team in major junior right now. More than that, the Windsor Spitfires defenceman is the most exciting player to watch.
Ryan Ellis is the best player on the best team in major junior right now. More than that, the Windsor Spitfires defenceman is the most exciting player to watch. If you get a chance to see him, take it. I saw him in Belleville on Saturday night and in Kingston on Sunday and he put on a real show in a couple of tight wins for the Spitfires.
In some ways Ellis reminds me of Brian Campbell when he was in Ottawa and over the course of the 1998-99 season went from Buffalo's middle-round pick to the CHL's player of the year. In some obvious ways they're similar. Barefooted they're both no more than 5-foot-10. In street clothes they look more like fans than players. But by the end of every shift that Campbell took, he dictated play. The same goes for Ellis these days.
Yet on a couple of points Campbell and Ellis are very different players. In that player-of-the-year campaign Campbell was the best skater in the junior game and nobody else was in the conversation. He passed opponents like they were standing still, rushed 150 feet to crash the goal but could be counted on to pick up a dangling opponent on the long break-out the other way a breath later. It was like he could be in two places at once - maybe there were junior d-men who skated faster but there's been none who skated more.
It's hard to judge Ryan Ellis's skating. That was the first question a scout asked me the other day when I told him that I saw a couple of Windsor games. I could only tell him that it never hurt Ellis. He was never out of position, never beat wide, never out-raced. Ellis's skating isn't the difference-maker. His approach is economical. He lets the puck do all the work. Campbell would go from end to end but Ellis's specialty is the 130-foot tape-to-tape pass. Hands and hockey sense: On those counts Ellis is off the charts and, yes, ahead of Brian Campbell when I saw him back when.
Making Ellis's game all the more impressive is the fact that he's draft-eligible this spring - he's going to turn 18 while Campbell in his CHL POY season was 19.
I've talked to other people about him and they all have their own takes.
"He's Phil Housley," one OHL general manager told me the other day. Well, there's something there. Housley made the seemingly impossible jump straight from Minnesota high school hockey to the NHL while likely getting mistaken for a stick boy on occasion. (Enlarge this rookie card and imagine that this guy who would hardly strike fear into the hearts of men scored 19 NHL goals as an 18-year-old and 31 the next year. And then imagine that he was going to retire as the leading career scorer among American-born players.) Again, there are probably similarities on a couple of counts. Yeah, Housley was a baby-faced assassin and so is Ellis. Yup, Housley's hockey sense was uncanny and you can say the same about Ellis. And, yes, Housley's skill set was so out-of-the-box that he was used and miscast as a forward early in his career and it's easy to imagine that a NHL coach will be sorely tempted to try to make-over Ellis the same way. But again, like Brian Campbell, Housley was a much more explosive skater than Ellis seems to be.
Others point to Kris Russell, late of Medicine Hat and currently trying to make it with the Columbus Blue Jackets. Again, Russell and Ellis are out of the same mould in physical stature. And at the major-junior level Russell's hockey sense resembles Ellis's-telepathic anticipation and sharp reading of game situations. Again, Russell's influence on junior games was like Ellis's these days. Russell, however, looked more like an athlete than Ellis does at this stage - not a knock on Ellis by any stretch, just the facts.
There is one thing that separates Ellis from the others aforementioned: his shot. When he gets the puck back at the point on a power play it's like handing Tiger Woods his one-iron. Block it at your peril. Drop in front of it and you might not be able to get up.
On Saturday night in Belleville, it was a matchup of arguably the best team in the Eastern Conference and indisputably the best team in the league. Mike Murphy was credited with 35 stops of 36 Windsor shots but that doesn't do the Bulls goaltender justice. The scorers probably stopped recording shots on the home team's goal after two periods. He was the first star in a 1-0 win for the Spitfires, but it was Ellis who decided the game and on a play that you might not see if you faithfully watch games the rest of the season.
Late in the second period, coincidental minor penalties set up a four-on-four and on the Olympic surface at the Yardmen Arena that means a couple of acres of icy real estate for players like Taylor Hall and Dale Mitchell to operate. Ninety seconds had passed without stoppage when Ellis picked up the puck at his own blue line and found himself as the centrepiece of a 130-foot widescreen three-on-two. It was a lead-legged sequence for everyone on the ice and Ellis carried the puck up the middle and patiently waited for a Bulls defenceman to brake and force the issue. It never happened. The Belleville defencemen were preoccupied with Hall and Mitchell, so as his teammates bore down on Murphy, Ellis curled into the slot, picked his spot and loosed a wrist shot that woke up the goal judge.
"It was a really weird play that, for sure, and it was a long shift, but you take what's there," Ellis said after the game.
That's what Ellis has been doing all season. He has been in the chase for the league lead in points scored and a lot of hockey watchers would assume that this is a byproduct of a power play led by the explosive Hall, last season's CHL rookie of the year and the frontrunner for the first-overall pick in the 2010 draft, and Mitchell, a dependable major-junior first-liner in great form these days. Fact is, however, Ellis is the quarterback and the catalyst on this team right now.
The Spitfires give out grades to players for each game, one to five, and Ellis has been a five night in night out. "Ryan's been our most consistent player so far this season," Windsor coach Bob Boughner said.
Performances are graded at both ends of the ice and you would imagine that traffic in front of the net and heavy going in the corners would be an issue for a player who says he's 5-foot-10 (even if scouts figure he's closer to 5 foot-9). Yet against Belleville and in Kingston Sunday afternoon Ellis was seemingly ahead of every opposing winger, crashing the net and winning loose pucks along the boards.
Said the NHL scout who asked me about Ellis's skating: "He's so smart that he never gets himself in trouble. He's always in the right position. You don't know how fast he is (as a skater) because he's so quick in making his decisions. He gets to his position because he leaves early, while other guys would have to scramble."
And Ellis is not soft by any stretch either. Over the weekend he didn't have any moments like Brian Campbell's career highlight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Gvfr9GUC0, but he still used the element of surprise and went low, hip to thigh, to take out a couple of wingers trying to climb over him going wide along the boards.
On Sunday in Kingston the Spitfires stumbled out of the blocks and fell behind 2-0 to the Frontenacs. When the Spitfires skated out to the faceoff circle Ellis went over to Taylor Hall and told him to look for a pass up the middle on a set piece that they'd been working on in practice. Then he was talking to and positioning everyone else on the ice. Seconds later, Ellis sent Hall in on a partial breakaway. Hall was stopped but slashed on the play and scored on the ensuing power play. At the end of the day, Hall had two goals and Ellis had a goal (yup, a power play point shot) and two assists in a 5-4 OT win.(Mark Cundari scored the winner three minutes into extra time on Windsor's 45th shot on Kingston's Mavric Parks.)
Ellis, the Spitfires' best student, believes he has come along at the right time. "I think that the way the game is played these days the NHL is more open to the type of defenceman I am," he says.
True enough. Maybe the real comparable for Ellis isn't Campbell or Housley or Kris Russell but rather someone closer to home in Windsor - Brian Rafalski, collector of Stanley Cup rings these days drawing a cheque with Detroit. That was the one name a scout cited in a conversation about Ellis over the weekend and it made the most sense: He has a chance to be more than a simple complementary player in the NHL but not a classic all-situations, top-two D-man.
Those who think he's a novelty act - a good junior with no NHL prospects - won't get any support from the scouts I talked to. They pegged him as a player who will likely fall in the second 10 on draft night. That seems about right. That's higher than he was picked in the OHL draft in 2007: He was Windsor's second-rounder, 22nd overall. Since then, though, all he has done is win. First on a painfully young but over-achieving Windsor team last season. Then on the Ontario team at the under-17s last winter. Later as an under-ager on the Canadian team that won the spring U-18s. And as a key component for Canada at the summer 18s. Now for the top-ranked team in the CHL. Probably a good bet for the home side at the under-20s in December.
Ellis, a native of Hamilton, is an unassuming sort off the ice. "As a rookie last year, I heard everybody say that I was too small to play in the O and really I didn't know until I actually got on the ice how it would turn out," he says. "I came into this season more confident in my ability to play here."
A look at the league standings in scoring are proof that that confidence is justified.
Things that fell out of my notebook:
What makes the Spitfires' run to the top spot in the CHL rankings all the more impressive is that they are doing it without Josh Bailey, who is sitting in a hotel room in Uniondale, N.Y., these days while his hip heals. Bailey, the Islanders' first-round pick last June, was banged up during training camp and has yet to play in a regular-season game. With every passing day it seems likelier that he'll be sent back to Windsor when he's healed. As tough as it would be for a kid to skate right out of juniors into the NHL at the start of the season, it's even more daunting when the pros have a 10- or 15-game head start on him ... Unusual stat: A weird note on one of the hockey chat rooms got me thinking the other day. While Ryan Ellis is among the OHL leaders in scoring, another D-man was in fact leading his league in scoring several weeks in the season: defenceman Mitch Kriz was leading the Greater Metro Junior A League in scoring with 35 points in 13 games for the Elliot Lake Bobcats. Making it more interesting is his 35 points came on 35 assists. No goals. I emailed Elliot Lake to investigate to see if this was on the up and up. Ryan Leonard, the Bobcats coach and GM wrote back: "Mitch Kriz comes from Chicago and played for the prestige AAA program CYA. He was drafted into the NAHL but opted for here because he wanted to play in Canada and didn't trust the hockey politics (in the U.S.) He'll probably receive scholarship offers from Division I NCAA schools. He heard from a few Division III schools last year. He is by far the best junior a Tier II player I have seen play and coached." . . . I half-expect one of the Palin sisters to run off with Kingston's Mavric Parks ... I asked Matt Duchene how his team matches up against Windsor and he suggested that the Battalion had an edge in one area: goaltending. Prophetic as it turned out. Brampton's rookie goaltender Brandon Foote won the OHL's player of the week award with four wins in four games and a GAA of 1.75 and a .929 save percentage. That includes two shutouts, one of them a 1-0 win over Mississauga. Scouts I spoke to were pretty impressed with Foote. I hadn't mentioned him last week's entry about the Battalion taking on the Spitfires--truth is, he seemed to have a decent but not great game but his numbers that night (39 saves on 44 shots) look pretty good.
