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.

Bryan Rodney has played in five games with the Hurricanes this season.

The game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Carolina Hurricanes the other night got me thinking ... and not about changing the channel. No, it got me thinking about how players can fall through the cracks and somehow resurface even though you'd bet major body organs against it.

The player in that game who got me onto that theme was Bryan Rodney. You'd probably have to care an awful lot about major junior hockey for that name to mean anything at all. And you would have had to have been a member of his immediate family to know that he was still playing hockey before this season.

Rodney was out there taking a fairly regular shift on the blueline with the Hurricanes and even getting some time on the powerplay against Toronto. He had some decent looking moments I thought. Okay, by saying this I know I'm playing the straight man here and you're dying to say: "Wait 'til he has to play against an NHL team." No matter.

I did the quick Google search and hit on a little write-up, a fairly positive review of his contributions as a call-up in a Carolina season that's as dark as a coal mine during a power outage.

Now there was a time when it looked like Rodney was going to be a surefire NHLer. He starred in all age groups growing up in London and was an all-star in Junior B with St Mary's at 15. Rodney was a first-round pick of the Ottawa 67's in 2000 and at 16 played on an Ottawa team that made a miracle run to an OHL championship. He was a fifth or sixth D but everyone ahead of him ended up being a pretty high draft pick. He was still a pretty talented kid who would have played more on some other teams. A few months later he was invited to the tryouts for the summer under-18 World Cup.

All good, right? If you're in consideration for the summer U-18s, you're on the draft radar. (More so than, say, the spring 18s when a lot of the best players aren't available due to CHL commitments.) You're in the top 30 or 40 Canadian draft-eligibles, certain to be top 80 North Americans.

I spoke to Rodney while he was sweating out the tryouts. Most 17-year olds are not much on talking and Rodney was probably in the tenth percentile. Not much to say. That was okay, though. That stuff would come, I thought.

Then things started going sideways. In a hurry.

He was cut by the under-18 team and during his next season he went to Brian Kilrea and asked to be traded to the Knights so that he could play close to home. There are few truly more negotiation strategies worse than pulling the chute on 67's boss Brian Kilrea. The payoff: Rodney was dealt by the 67's to Kingston. Rodney immediately announced that he wasn't going to report to the Frontenacs. "I've just got no interest in going there," Rodney said. "They've already traded away their best players and making the playoffs is questionable. I told them both (teams) that I'm not going to go to Kingston."

Mistake No. 2. Nothing chills scouts' interest more than a prospect saying and doing something like that. Rodney only stayed away a couple of days but the damage to his rep was done.

Bad break No. 1: Rodney was diagnosed with colitis not long after arriving in Kingston. That was one piece of the puzzle that fit. I remember going into the dressing room of the 67's after they were knocked out of the Memorial Cup in 2001 and it seemed like Rodney, just a complementary player at that point, took the loss worse than anybody. A chronic worrier, Rodney seemed like a real candidate for the chronic condition and no doubt it was aggravated by his unhappiness in Ottawa and trade to Kingston.

How bad was it? Rodney dropped from 187 to 150 pounds. Okay, maybe that's one thing that terrifies scouts more than a junior demanding a trade.

Predictably Rodney fell through the draft like a meteorite plummeting to earth. Undrafted. And then undrafted again. That is pretty much all she wrote in most instances.

He had a nice send-off from junior hockey taking a turn as an OA with his hometown Knights on their Memorial Cup run but he was a pretty anonymous member of the supporting cast. In these circumstances players in this bracket either go to OUAA, slug it out in low minors or ask you if "fries go with that shake" at the counter of neighbourhood McDonald's. I figured it would be all good for Bryan Rodney if it were the former but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was the latter.

I know that reads as a pretty mean-spirited judgment but bear with me.

It seemed to me like Bryan Rodney didn't like the game that much. Or, at least take much joy from it. You can be good at things you don't like, stuff that makes you miserable. It happens. But you're almost certainly never going to be great. And even marginal NHLers were great at levels moving up.

Why didn't he like the game with all his talents? I don't know. Maybe he doesn't know. And just about everyone else didn't want to know, I guess. Junior hockey is one of those deals where you either get along or you don't and it was determined early on that Rodney didn't.

That he was sick was something that didn't seem to occur to anyone. In retrospect I can see how he aggravated his condition -- I remember after one practice when everyone else on the 67's was re-hydrating and putting back protein bars, Rodney was sitting in front of his stall knocking back a big bag of potato chips. And he looked like a physically soft kid as well, didn't look particularly athletic at all.

By the time things started to get fixed for him -- treatment for his colitis, a new setting in Kingston, priorities, a sense of urgency -- his junior career was already in wind-down.

That Bryan Rodney was playing the other night can be attributed to a couple of things.

A: Talent. Everyone knew when he was a first-round pick of the 67's.

B. Perseverance. I don't think that there were many who suspected he had that in any great supply.

You have to be pretty tough minded to stick out three full seasons split between three teams in the East Coast league. That's what he had to log before he could stick in the AHL for a couple of years with the Albany River Rats. When you factor in his OA season in London you're looking at looo-ooo-nnng apprenticeship and almost certain journeyman status. A scout would feel like he was stealing your money if you had bet him that Bryan Rodney was ever going to get into a NHL arena without a ticket. A lot of people in junior hockey would have likewise felt like they were picking your pocket. I know I would have felt that way.

And yet Rodney made The Show: eight games as a call-up with Carolina last year, a couple of weeks more lately. Even if it wasn't for long, even if that's all there is, that's something. If it ends up being something more than that, even if he's in a limited role, it's a heckuva comeback.

Watching Bryan Rodney made me think a little bit about his time in Ottawa but a lot about other players whose junior careers don't unfold neatly, whose promise isn't quite delivered. Junior hockey is a tough business. Becoming a good player isn't good enough. Being good right now is the priority. NHL teams will look at junior players as projects but junior teams don't have the luxury of waiting for a couple of years for a player to figure it out. There are only so many slots on the roster, only so long you can wait -- like a few weeks.

It's either a funny or cruel aspect of junior hockey: Teenagers most often don't get second chances and snap judgments are made and stick. The clock doesn't click quite as loudly for the pros and the hands don't move quite as fast.

Bryan Rodney isn't the first undrafted player to make the jump and he won't be the last. He does stand apart from most of those, however. Most don't look like players at 16 or 17 but develop late. Rodney, though, looked a real prospect at 15 or 16 and then looked like his talent either dissipated or was squandered. As it turned out, it was neither.

Bryan Rodney fell off the radar in 2002 and stayed off it in subsequent drafts. He was returned to the AHL the other day but still, he has already played more games in the NHL than six first-round picks in '02 and 20 second-rounders. He has played more games than the ninth overall pick ever will.