By Gare Joyce
SPORTSNET.CA
MONTREAL — Scouts consider hype unbecoming. They are, by nature and by job description, skeptics. They go out of their way to understate their positive reads of players. They consider it a far, far better thing to under-rate a prospect than over-rate one. For instance, a kid scores a hat trick on end-to-end rushes, he was "okay" or even "not much of a passer."
This is true 99 times out of one hundred. Mark it on your calendar when a scout actually enthuses.
Last season I can remember the scouts I know enthusing about only two kids.
The first would be easy to guess: Steven Stamkos, the top-ranked prospect at the start of the season and at the end, an all-around talent, an unimpeachable character, a known talent. After two full seasons of sustained excellence and blossoming talent, his selection by Tampa Bay with the first pick in the draft had all the suspense of a coronation.
The other one is another story completely. No one saw it coming. Off the radar one week, scouts’ jaws dropping and heads shaking the next. Scouts don’t do "overnight sensations" or "a star is born" but that’s pretty much the story of Jake Allen, previously known as "Jake Who?"
When NHL Central Scouting released its mid-term rankings last January Allen was No. 25 among draft-eligible North American goaltenders.
A couple of things worked against Allen, a long, lanky native of Fredericton, NB.
One: He played for the St. John’s Fog Devils and NHL scouts rarely got over to The Rock, mostly for moose-hunting. So half his team’s games were basically blacked out.
Two: Role. He was slotted as a back-up. St. John’s had an established No. 1 goaltender, a German kid named Timo Pielmeier, who had been drafted by San Jose, the team most likely to mine the Rhineland.
"I really hadn’t played much in the first half of the season," Allen says. "I started to get a chance in the second half. [Based on that] I thought I had a chance to go between the fourth and seventh rounds but I also thought there was a chance that I wouldn’t get drafted. I was prepared for that. I wasn’t drafted the first time I went through the Quebec league draft. "
Allen’s stock was on the rise in the second half. He ended up posting a 9-8-4 record and a .905 save percentage. He was the goaltender of record in the Fog Devils’ two wins in their first-round playoff series against Acadie-Bathurst. Still, when the Fog Devils’ season was on the line on the road in Game 6, Pielmeier got the assignment and the loss.
Based on that, it would have seemed like the final Central Scouting rankings were a better reflection of his talent: He went up 17 slots to No. 8 among North American netminders.
Those rankings were rendered meaningless by Allen’s breakthrough performance at the world under-18s in Russia.
It was amazing on a couple of counts.
One: In the most important games he had ever played Allen was absolutely lights out. He stopped 35 of 36 shots versus Finland in the quarters and 35 of 37 versus Sweden in the semi. He was perfect against Russia in the final, 29 at him and stopped, but that was just a victory lap in a stunning rout. It was the two stolen wins over the Scandinavians that won him the tournament MVP and had the scouts raving. "Unconscious," one told me. "It would have to be up there with what Jimmy Waite did at the world juniors, maybe a couple of others at the under-20s. There hasn’t been anything you could compare it to at the under-18s."
Two: Hockey Canada essentially bought a lottery ticket with the selection of Allen. There wasn’t a player on the roster that the staff knew less about going to the tournament. "They told me that they only saw two of my games with St John’s," Allen says. When the Canadian coaches first got look at him on the trip in an exhibition, it looked like one of those Sorry-Play-Again losing loto tickets. "I really played a bad game against Belarus and we lost," Allen says.
In a course of a week Allen went from virtual unknown to a priority for NHL scouts.
The NHL Central Scouting final ranking came out right at the end of the under-18s, so it’s likely that the tournament weighed in Allen’s rise on the list. It moved Allen more dramatically on NHL teams’ list. The week before the draft, one scout told me that he didn’t think Allen would be there when his team’s turn came up in the second round. He wasn’t. St Louis grabbed him in the first hour of the draft’s second day with the 34th pick overall, the first player selected from the Q.
I caught up with Allen this past weekend at the arena in Verdun, the home of the Juniors de Montreal, formerly the Fog Devils de St John’s. The once and new hometowns of the franchise are fairly different—not as much as Jake Allen from one fall to the next.
"Last year I was going to St John’s to learn about junior hockey, knowing that I was supposed to be a back-up, at least at the start of the season," Allen says. "This year I’m coming in with a boatload of confidence and I have clearer goals."
One of those goals will be earning a spot on the Canadian under-20s. On the strength of Allen’s performance at the u-18s Hockey Canada invited him to the summer camp. All things equal he’d be a good fit. The other goalies at the camp, Vancouver’s Tyson Sexsmith, Dustin Tokarski of Memorial Cup champs Spokane and Chet Pickard of Tri-City, are ’89 birthdays, while Allen’s a 90 and clearly the favourite for the 2010 Canadian junior squad.
Another of the goals will be getting les Juniors into the playoffs in their first year in the league’s biggest market.
"Even when he wasn`t getting starts last year I knew that Jake had a chance to be a No. 1 and one of the league`s best,"says defenceman T.J. Brennan. "He never gives up on the puck and he can make himself so big to shooters. He handles the puck better than anyone we`ve seen. He probably would have one of the best shots on the team."
Pascal Vincent, freshly appointed Montreal coach, is still getting to know the personnel and doesn’t want to do hype any more than a scout would. “All I’ve seen of Jake I’ve seen in practice,” he says. When he sees a great junior goaltender he’ll know it: He coached Marc-Andre Fleury in Cape Breton.
Vincent will have to wait to see if he has Fleury redux. Allen’s taking a turn with the Blues` prospects at the Traverse City rook tournament in a few days.
Another interesting story in Montreal will be Allen’s teammate, Angelo Esposito, who wasn`t around last weekend, having left camp to prep for Atlanta`s training camp. Esposito`s career has followed an opposite trajectory to the goaltender`s. One`s upcoming, the other downcoming. At 16 he played for the Quebec Remparts`Mem Cup champs; the next season Central Scouting`s No. 1 North American skater mid-winter; he wore the C for the Canadian under-18s at both the summer and spring tournaments. But his stock sank, getting drafted by Pittsburgh 20th overall in 2007 and then being traded to Atlanta in the Marian Hossa deal. He was cut twice in the world junior tryouts and wasn`t even invited to this summer`s camp. From wonderboy to afterthought. An off-season trade is giving him a chance to mount a comeback — yup, talking about a 19-year-old making a comeback— in his hometown. If he doe s— and it`s well within his ability — it will be a more likely storyline than Jake Allen`s last April.
Follow-up to last week: I finally had a chance to speak to Chris Legein, whose son Stefan caused quite a stir when his "retirement" was reported in the media last month. Mr Legein sounded a little shell-shocked, though mostly by the attention the story’s receiving. "I’m amazed by the amount of coverage," he said. "There has been a lot of speculation and the way these things go, speculation focuses on the negative. It’s hurtful. It was a long season for Stefan last year—from playing in the summer series against Russia and going straight to Niagara and finally getting sent to Syracuse for the AHL playoffs. He didn’t want to go [t o Syracuse] and they didn’t need him there—Columbus missed the playoffs so they sent their players down and Stefan wasn’t going to get a real chance to play." Of course, there’s a good reason that this story made the news: Stefan Legein made a heck of an impression on hockey fans in that summer series and at the world juniors and it would be hard to think of a kid who seemed ever happier and go-luckier. Chris Legein sounded a hopeful note—at least a hopeful one for the Columbus Blue Jackets who drafted his son in the second round of the 2007 draft. "Nineteen-year-olds don’t retire," he said. Well, some do. As I suggested in the column last week, the only ones who do retire at 19 don’t have a choice in the matter. They’ve been retired. Not the case here. If Stefan Legein has decided to give up the game at 18, after scoring all of 10 goals in 108 games in his first two seasons with the Mississauga Ice Dogs, no one would have noticed. He made the jump from a fourth-liner to a 43-goal scorer over the course of a year on talent and willpower. At 19 talent doesn’t retire,it just goes dormant. At 19 his tank might be empty, but just for now. No one should be surprised if he comes back and comes back better than he left.
Gare Joyce will be writing on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca this season. 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.
