Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

Everyone deserves a second chance. It might be that 18- and 19-year-olds deserve second chances more than most.

It seems unfair that kids who haven’t reached their 20th birthdays should be judged to be disappointing or have damaged reputations. A couple of the more interesting stories over the next month, in advance of the world junior tournament in Ottawa, focus on a couple of young men who are rehabilitating their reps.

Kyle Beach and Angelo Esposito are names known to those who track major junior — they’re known mostly as talents whose stock had dropped. They don’t offer comeback-of-the-year awards in the CHL — at 18 or 19, how far can you really come back? But fact is, these players’ games are much more highly regarded going into November than they were last spring.

It’s hard to imagine that Beach, the Everett Silvertips winger picked 11th overall in the 2008 NHL draft, wasn’t invited to Hockey Canada’s world junior camp last summer. I spoke to one scout who bird-dogged the workouts and intrasquad games and he said that Beach "was exactly the player that they needed but didn’t have ... a big winger who plays a physical game."

And this will give you an idea of how much Esposito’s stock had fallen by last summer: I mentioned to the same scout that I wondered why Esposito hadn’t been invited to the summer camp. "Esposito ... yeah, I forgot all about him, he is eligible."

Two very different explanations have to be laid out here.

In the scouting community Beach was the most discussed kid before the last NHL draft. He was 6-foot-3, 210 pounds, the prototype of the NHL power forward as a young man, and hands that would place him in the 99th percentile — stuff that you can pick up in this video (but with the volume down unless you’re the surviving fan of The Prodigy). But Beach had baggage, some of it real and deserved, some wildly inflated by scuttlebutt. The real and deserved: Bad judgment in the heat of the game, a push-button temper, and an issue with concussions. The stuff that had been blown up: some acting out off the ice with the Canadian team at the 2007 summer under-18s, a traffic beef, and a reputation that he was on his own program. The questions that hung out there: Was he damaged goods? Was he a bad kid? Was he just immature? Or was he a complete rockhead? Opinions ranged widely. Some scouts liked the promise and it might have been that they exaggerated his rep with the hope that he might fall a couple of slots. Prior to the season he was being projected as a top-five player. Some teams at the draft in Ottawa wondered if they might have a shot at him at around high-teens or early-twenties. That Chicago drafted him suggests the Blackhawks are comfortable with Beach’s character and like the edge and toughness. That Hockey Canada didn’t invite to the summer camp is an indication that their staffers dissent.

I sniffed around a bit on Beach and it seems like he was made the fall guy for a Canadian summer-18s team that was dysfunctional and clique-ridden. The kids from Ontario moved as a group, the kids from the west did the same although they might not have been too eager to bring Beach (with his in-your-face game) into their fold. And Beach told me that he had just one concussion not two — though that’s what appears on the medical records that teams circulated.

According to some accounts, including this one Beach is exercising unprecedented discretion and good judgment. In a situation where he’d previously go off, Beach is more wisely picking his spots and staying in the game. He missed a game with back spasms the other day but it doesn’t seem to be anything serious or chronic — just the expected price of playing his usual game. If NHL teams had been reasonably confident that Beach had any self-control he would have gone higher than 11th overall to Chicago. And if Hockey Canada thought the same (and was convinced that the back spasms were a one-off and he was no longer fogged in by concussion) he’d have been at the Canadian team’s summer camp.

There seemed to be no brakes on Esposito’s descent. In his draft year, 23 months ago, he looked like a good bet to make the Canadian under-20 team. He was coming off a season with the Memorial Cup champion Quebec Remparts and NHL Central Scouting ranked him the No. 1 North American skater eligible for the ’07 draft. Esposito was invited to the u-20s’ tryout but was cut and didn’t impress. It’s been downhill ever since. Central Scouting ended up dropping him to No. 8 and he ended up going 20th to Pittsburgh (which left him barely able to conceal his disappointment). Then Esposito and was traded last winter to Atlanta in a package for the rental of Marian Hossa. His rookie card was being traded for a Zimbabwe dollar. It wasn’t just a sense that he hadn’t progressed — the consensus was that he was going backward and the numbers provided a good argument. As noted, his absence might have escaped the notice of scouts — that’s star to afterthought in the course of less than two years.

Whether it was that slight or a trade from Quebec to the Juniors de Montreal or a chance to make the talent-bereft Thrashers this fall, well, we’ll never know. But Esposito has been very good to great for Montreal so far, better than his numbers (a couple of goals and nine points in eight games) would show. He has done everything but sing the anthem (and he should at least audition for the job after this assault on the song at a Juniors home game).

It’s hard to say why Esposito went sideways as a prospect — last winter Shattuck St Mary’s Tom Ward told me that Esposito was his favourite player among all that he coached — and that includes, among others, the current captains of the Chicago Blackhawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Not that Esposito was the best or possessed the most talent, just the most likeable and socially adept kid. He had originally planned to go the NCAA route coming out of Shattuck but the Quebec Remparts looked like an opportunity too good to turn down — it might be that his career would have unfolded more smoothly if he had stuck by that. Oh well, there’s no unscrambling the egg at this point. It’s not too late for Esposito to live up to the No. 1 billing and in the next month he has a chance (and all the motivation) to show Hockey Canada that he should have been invited to the camp last summer and deserves a spot on the under-20 team.

Major roles in Ottawa over the holidays would go a long way to rehabilitating Beach’s and Esposito’s reputations. With his nuclear banging and playing in the 200 x 80 rink, Beach is a player the fans would get the fans on their feet and in full voice. With Esposito’s skill, skating and makeup, he’s a player that they could pull for and look to when things go bad.