It's that time of year when CHL teams say goodbye to their best players.
We’ve reached a peculiar juncture in the junior season: a point when the excellent teams have established themselves and playoff races are emerging. Why peculiar? It’s at this point that the very best talents duck out for a few days or even a few weeks and leave it to their teammates to play on. This is a phenomenon peculiar to the world under-20 tournament (and to a lesser extent the international under-17 challenge).
Imagine major league baseball teams sending their clean-up hitters and staff aces to a training camp around July 1 and not getting them back to the end of the month. If that sounds goofy, imagine the NFL’s best players being called to try out for Pro Bowl squads and telling their usual teams that they won’t be available for the stretch run of a season. Those would be parallels.
Junior hockey can find no parallel with the NHL. When the league has released its best to play in the Olympics, common sense prevailed (seemingly for once) at the head office and opted for hiatus. It’s hard enough to watch the Thrashers at the best of times, but without Ilya Kovalchuk, one word comes to mind: Refund. Apply the same thinking elsewhere, well, except in Toronto, where the Leafs might be at risk of not losing anybody in an Olympic year (unless your counting the possibility of losing a general manager and coach to the American team).
The Windsor Spitfires have raced to the top of the national rankings over three full months of play. They’ve developed so much chemistry and momentum that you couldn’t imagine anything getting in their way. But now they’ll be without their top players, centre Taylor Hall and defenceman Ryan Ellis, for a few days at the tryouts at the very least, for a few weeks if they stick (and they should) with the Canadian under-20s.
Then again, Windsor should be better off than the Brampton Battalion. Brampton stands to lose the three forwards who carried the squad to that long win streak in the early season: forwards Cody Hodgson (who’ll be seeking to match his heroics for the under-18 gold-medalists last spring), Matt Duchene (who’s one of the six players at the tryouts who’s eligible for the 2009 draft) and Evgeni Grachev (who’s listed on the Russian team’s roster). Toss in the fact that a fourth Brampton forward, Sam Carrick will be heading out to the under-17s over the holidays.
Take the Spokane Chiefs—please. At least over the holidays. Right now the defending Memorial Cup champions have two players at the Canadian under-20 camp (including Dustin Tokarski), three with the U.S. under-20 squad (including Drayson Bowman) and one on the Team Pacific going to the under-17 tournament.
What you have are major-junior games that could pass for Grapefruit League baseball games, everybody is there except the stars. The big difference is the Grapefruit League games don’t count in the standings.
If I had one wish, or at least one wish that I could waste in a hockey arena, it would be that the under-17s and under-20s were staggered. Ideally the under-17s would go off a week or two after the under-20s. This isn’t just based on a gluttony for the game, as it would be nice to watch all those games. No, the fact is, when those top players are heading off to the under-20 tournament, a lot of the best 17-year-olds would play larger roles on their teams. Or face more favorable match-ups against opponents short a first-line player or two. With that set-up an under-17 tournament in mid-January would be bringing in the kids after a stint of logging the most ice-time in their junior careers to that point. And it would make things a heckuva lot easier to major junior teams. Imagine if Brampton and Spokane were to lose a couple of players to injury while all those other players are off at the tournaments.
And imagine if any of the teams lose those tournament players to injury ...
You don’t have to go back very far to find an instance of that. Stefan Legein went down with a shoulder injury in the early minutes against Sweden in the under-20 final and was lost to the Niagara Ice Dogs for weeks. And it seems clear that he was never quite right when he came back, if his shoulder was whole, his confidence wasn’t. Make no mistake: Legein’s hiatus away from the game wasn’t a case of burn-out as widely advertised. Its root cause was the injury. If he hadn’t suffered it, if he had been able to wave to the crowd after the final, if he hadn’t missed a shift the rest of the major junior season, he wouldn’t have been burned out and would have had an honest shot sticking with Columbus this season.
I remember working the under-17s in Timmins years back and Brendan Bell, a defenceman with the Ottawa 67’s, might not. I saw a lot of Bell early in that junior season and he looked like a break-out player, a first-round prospect. But Bell’s bell was rung in the under-17 semi-final against the U.S. His was no small concussion but he wanted to sit on the bench in uniform for the final vs Russia. He probably should have been in a quiet, dark room with a doctor looking in on him every two hours. Bell was a very good junior player for the rest of his career but I’m convinced he was never quite the same player after that concussion at the under-17s.
Back at the spring, the Canadian team (Hodgson, Duchene, Ellis and Hall included) headed to the world under-18 teams assembled at the Hockey Hall of Fame for a quick photo op and tour before heading off to Russia. One of the assistant coaches for that under-18 squad was Jesse Wallin. These days Wallin is the head coach of the Red Deer Rebels and some of the kids on that team might have known him from the Dub (though probably not). I’m sure none knew that Wallin was a defenceman for Red Deer and captain of a Canadian world junior team back in 1998. He didn’t make it to the end of that tournament, or at least he was on crutches when he did. That was the infamous Canadian team that lost to Kazakhstan in the seventh-place game. No one took that loss harder than Wallin. He missed the rest of the regular season and only made it back to play a handful of games for Red Deer that spring. It seemed like a black cloud followed him around. He was a good player, a sure pro, he was one of two returning players on that Canadian under-20 team and he compared pretty favorably to the other, Cory Sarich. Wallin should have had a good NHL career, but he lost something at that world junior tournament and a lot more when he suffered a concussion in the minors.
Players at world junior tournaments I’ve worked have taken needles to play and taken regular shifts in games when they were not truly fit to go. That’s not Hockey Canada pushing them to play. Those are the players’ own wishes and wills.
In an ideal world, top players go to these tournaments, face greater challenges than they’ve ever experienced, and build on their successes there. Steven Stamkos, for instance, took his play to another level after last year’s under-20s. But hold onto those images of those star juniors as they head off to the tournaments over the holidays and hope they come back whole and better for the trip.
