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.

Swedish players are expected to shine at the 2009 NHL Entry Draft.

Okay, I don't want to be accused of too much Euro-love, the risk of saying anything positive about a hockey program on the other side of the Atlantic. I've always thought of the Canadian approach to developing players the way Winston Churchill viewed democracy: It's the worst possible system except for all the others they've tried. That said, I think there's something that we can take away from looking at what's going on in Sweden. And something good clearly has been going on.

Take it to the bank: On the first night of the draft this June five Swedes will get up and walk over to the stage. In the first hour you can count on defenceman Victor Hedman though Sweden won't dominate the proceedings - there will be more kids from the CHL drafted that night than from any other source. Still, Swedes will have a big impact, almost certainly more than the rest of hockey's League of Nations.

You might think that doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot. You might think that there's nothing new about Swedish players making the jump to the NHL but if you look at past drafts you can see that this is well outside business as usual.

Most years one or two Swedish players get scooped up in the first round, though in 2004 nary a one went selected on the first lap. Some of the Swedish first-rounders have been familiar names, i.e. the Sedins who went Nos. 2 and 3 overall to Vancouver in '99 and who, no matter what your opinion of their virtues, have proven to be the best players to come out of the first round of a very ordinary draft. Others are gone so quick that you have a tough time remembering them ... Lars Jonsson? Anyone? No. 7 to Boston in 2000, eight NHL games before washing out. Boston didn't do a heckuva lot better at No. 27 of that draft, taking Martin Samuelsson, whose career was not quite twice as long as Johnsson's. Fourteen games.

Those two drafts represent the extremes. The average year for Swedish draftees falls roughly in between. A player or two of decent talent. One break-out talent for every bust. If I was trying to find a trend it would be a miss-and-hit proposition: A lot of years the best Swede isn't the first drafted. Or the second. Niklas Kronwall went two picks after Martin Samuelsson and picked up a Stanley Cup ring with the Wings. (Am I the only one who wouldn't have guessed that he had 15 assists in last year`s playoffs? I knew he was an effective contributor but that's a big number.) It seemed like a comment on the state of the Tre Kroners' game that twice in recent years the highest-drafted player out of Sweden wasn't a Swede-Slovenian Anze Kopitar and Denmark's Lars Eller.

But now it seems like the Swedish program has righted itself. Four of the first 31 players last season, five in the top 25 for this June as projected by ISS last month. Two consecutive appearances in the world juniors final (and the widespread belief in the scouting community that next winter's Swedish side will be even better). Stronger performances in under-18 tournaments. And in NHL Central Scouting's mid-season rankings of European skaters, Swedish players take the first eight slots.

1. Victor Hedman, Modo

2. Magnus Svensson-Paajarvi, Timra

3. Jacob Josefson, Djurgarden

4. David Rundblad, Skelleftea

5. Tim Erixon, Skelleftea

6. Marcus Johansson, Farjestad

7. Carl Klingberg, Frolunda

8. Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Leksand

Nary a Russian, Finn or Czech to break up the list. Not quite like the planets falling into a line, but still pretty impressive.

Interestingly, it's not a cluster of talent in one program. Seven teams are represented, suggesting that the uptick is not regional or specific to one program. It really looks like a rising tide has lifted all boats.

How have they done it? And what can Canadian hockey learn from this development?

I had a long chat with Anders Hedberg the other day and he told me that a lot of things were in play.

No. 1. Escaping the trap.

"For a long time Swedish hockey was a defensive, trapping game, which is fine for trying to win games with limited talent but a very bad way to develop players' skills," said Hedberg, the former Swedish international star and a longtime NHL executive and scout, these days working for the Rangers. "Players were over-coached, over-controlled. It was close to the model that we saw in the NHL. We stifled our own talent."

Too true. I remember working the world junior final in Boston in '96, the last time prior to last year that the Swedes made an under-20 final. (The tournament site here.) It was one of those years when the semi-final, Canada vs Russia, was the real final.) The 4-1 score in the final flattered the Swedes. What was comical and telling about that game was that the Swedes fell behind a couple of goals but sent no one in to chase the puck. Trailing, they sent only one forward into the Canadian end but he didn't venture as deep as the dots. His two line-mates were out at the red line. A Canadian defenceman could have taken the puck behind the net and ran out the clock for the entire third period. It looked like surrender but in fact it was the only thing that crew knew.

"The trap and the defensive game is something a player can learn but it's not the only thing he should learn," Hedberg said. "We might have developed creative players but we stifled them. Now coaches at all levels in Sweden and with the national age-group teams are taking a new, more aggressive philosophy, forechecking, creating pressure, and the result is clear. We are producing more offensively skilled players."

No. 2. Stopping the puck.

"We didn't develop goaltenders for many years," Hedberg says. "It wasn't a priority. Because of weak goaltending teams, especially national teams, had to look at the trap and a low-risk defensive approach just to be competitive. Better goaltending is allowing Swedish teams to be more aggressive. You can't be aggressive without confidence in your goaltending."

True enough. Jacob Markstrom was the first pick of the second round last June, third goaltender overall, but, if you put value in what scouts say, it might turn out that he'll be the best goaltender to come out of the 2008 draft. It sure looked that way at this year's under-20s. And NHL Central Scouting has a Swedish, Robin Lehner of Frolunda, ranked as the No. 1 Euro goaltender eligible for this year's draft.

"We never had goaltending and Canada always did," Hedberg said. "It was an obvious thing that we needed to upgrade but for some reason over the years, Sweden didn't. It wasn't an attractive position for the best athletes, but that's changing and it's being given much more attention in coaching."

No. 3. Management of national sides

"The personnel in management of the under-18 and under-20 teams should get credit for taking a much more professional approach to Sweden's teams," Hedberg says.

Well, I'll only go so far on this count. I did think that this year's coach, Par Marts, was just the latest in a succession of wet blankets to head up the program - though nothing this contraption couldn't fix. He seemed about the last guy that you'd think players would fear or respect. Sort of if-we-win-good-but-if-we-don't-we-tried guy. About the only thing he could inspire is someone looking for a name for a chain of golf stores. Or maybe a take-out place.

The lessons that we can take away from this: The development of skilled players rides on a coach's implementing a game that demands skill. You don't teach anyone to paint by only allowing them to work with charcoal. And, of course, goaltending is the first thing you need to win, followed by more goaltending. It doesn't hurt if you also have a six-foot-seven defenceman who can skate.

An insightful theory or wild guess on my part: I do think there has been a bit of a draft trend through a decade or so of drafts. A lot of years the best Swedish players in the draft were often scooped up in the later rounds. I'd suppose that the d-first system denied them an opportunity to show what they could. That's about the only way I can explain how Henrik Zetterberg fell to No. 210 in 1999. The conventional wisdom in the scouting ranks is that Swedish players (and Finns for that matter) develop later than North American prospects. It just might be that the Swedish game held them back.

Prediction: Though it might seem outside the Swedish character, coaches there will have to implement more aggressive systems (and continue to inject a little more fun into the game) or risk losing more players like Oscar Moller and Mikael Backlund to the CHL. At one time they used to be able to count on young players' loyalty to their club teams but more of them are feeling the pull to the CHL.

Stuff that fell out of my notebook: I went to the Bulls-Battalion game in Brampton on Sunday, a preview of Saturday night's tilt in Belleville and likely the Eastern Conference final. It was a great tilt, as close as could be-come-from-behind victory for the visitors and a game-winner by P.K. Subban in the third. It basically locked in my vote for the OHL's most valuable player: Bulls netminder Mike Murphy. Yup, John Tavares and Taylor Hall are up there in scoring, Ryan Ellis is a phenom on the point and Subban has been more fun to watch than anybody, but Murphy is the difference between Belleville winning the Eastern Conference's top seed and having to scrap for a playoff spot. I've caught eight Bulls games and he's been his team's story in all of them. One scout's read: "He looks like he's about 10 years old and technically he's not great but he competes so hard, sort of like Tim Thomas that way" ... Hockey Canada had a lot of success going with under-agers (Matt Duchene, Brayden Schenn, Ellis and Hall) to last year's under-18s in Russia, a tough roadie to be sure. One friend in the outfit said that he expects that they'll stick with that strategy this time out. (When Hockey Canada first went to the tournament they eschewed under-agers and it didn't work out.) Until the end of the first round of the playoffs you don't know a lot of the players, under-age or not, that you might land. I'd bank on forward John McFarland of Sudbury and defenceman Erik Gudbranson of Kingston who were go-to players on the Ontario team that won the under-17 challenge... Not much suspense when Windsor confirmed that U.S. under-18 program d-man Cam Fowler is heading to the Spitfires next season. I've just seen him once this year but the late-birthday 2010-draft-eligible is the real deal, easily the best pro prospect in Ann Arbor. Just another reason to think that the CHL's top-ranked team might be even stronger next season.