Faceoff Factor

Lacing Up with Ash and Stoosh - 08.22.08

Ashley Gallant | National Hockey League

Aug 22, 07:43 AM | Hype this story!

Ash: Well Stoosh, we survived the first week of our column! Great job!

Now that it’s a new week, it’s time for a new topic. The current rules for the NHL Entry Draft say that a player must be 18 years old by mid-September of his draft year. John Tavares’ agent argued a year ago that there should be a special rule for ‘exceptional’ players to allow them to enter the draft early, which would have benefited Tavares because his birthday was only days after the cutoff date. Should the NHL adopt an ‘exceptional player’ rule?

Stoosh: That first column couldn’t have been timed better. We’ll have to revisit that in about two years because I know the future of NHLers in the Olympics was still up for debate beyond 2010. The 2014 Winter Games are going to be in Sochi, Russia and right now, the NHL and the Russian Hockey Federation seem to have all the chemistry of a Guns N’ Roses reunion right now.

Tavares argued last year that he should’ve been a part of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft pool because his 18th birthday (September 20) falls just five days shy of the September 15, 2008 cutoff for ’08 eligibility. The argument was that Tavares’s development will be stalled in the OHL if he’s forced to play one more season there. He has already played three seasons, scoring 157 goals and 329 points in 191 career OHL games. The NHL ultimately ruled that that he’ll play a fourth OHL season, so the 2008-09 season will be Tavares’s last in the OHL and he’ll be eligible for the 2009 NHL Entry Draft.

It’s a bit ironic because it was a similar rule three years ago that allowed Tavares to find himself in this little predicament in the first place. Tavares arrived in the OHL a year earlier than normal by virtue of an “exceptional player” rule that was revised in May of 2005. That rule allowed the Oshawa Generals to draft him first overall in the June 2005 OHL Priority Selection. He was 14 years old when the Gens drafted him and he turned 15 just as the 2005-06 OHL season was getting underway.

Tavares was allowed to enter the OHL early for two main reasons. In 2004-05, he racked up 158 points (91 goals, 67 assists) with the Toronto Marlboros Minor Midget AAA team, despite the fact that he was playing against kids who were a year or so older than him. To send him back there in 2005-06 against kids closer his age would’ve done little for his development. Even moreso, there were worries that he was going to humiliate some of his opponents, which isn’t what you necessarily want when you’re dealing with kids that are still a level below Major Junior. It made sense to get him to the OHL.

But I think the NHL made the right call here. Sticking just with Tavares, I don’t think he was ready. It’s ridiculous to say this about a kid who scored at a two-points-per-game pace in 2006-07 and maintained that exact pace in 07-08. But for as spectacular as he was during that 06-07 campaign, he didn’t seem to improve on it; even a ridiculous. In fact, there were some who felt his play tailed off, that he seemed disinterested too often, and that his conditioning and work ethic were concerns. Not even his status as the consensus #1 overall pick in 2009 was safe; many believe he’s since surrendered that to European defenseman Victor Hedman, but we’ll see.

OK, I’ll shut up now…

Ash: Oh Tavares, Tavares…what a gifted hockey player. That has never been in doubt by this whole ‘exceptional player’ argument; after all, we wouldn’t even be talking about this if he wasn’t a gifted player. But, you do seem to have touched on something, Stoosh: Tavares is good, but he is far from the perfect hockey player. For instance, I think he could learn to skate a little better, and he is learning to play a two-way game (something that was lacking a year ago). And besides, it’s not like he is scoring 500 points a season with the Generals.

My problem with this whole ‘exceptional player’ argument is simple: how do you decide who is an ‘exceptional player’? Is it by points? Or skating ability? An overall impression? A preference for golf as a summer hobby? And how do you determine the cutoff point? Tavares’ birthday was 5 days late; what about the kid who is a month late? Or two months? At what point is the kid just too young?

And just imagine the expectations heaped upon that kid’s shoulders once he is labeled an ‘exceptional player’. He will be expected to perform miracles on the ice, and heaven help him if he turns out to be more like Alexandre Daigle than Sidney Crosby.

Furthermore, how would his NHL peers treat him? On the ice would be a dozen players who have struggled to make it to the NHL, paying their dues in the minors and fighting for a chance. Then, here comes a kid who has been given a super special status by the League, a golden ticket to the NHL. His peers would welcome him for sure, a super special welcome that would see Tavares fighting to not only score goals, but to stay on his feet.

Stoosh: I think you bring up a fantastic point about the lack of a measurable standard by which an “exceptional player” is determined. It would be almost impossible to quantify that.

You can’t use points because a kid who leads the Western Hockey League in scoring could have numbers that would barely place him in the top ten in scoring in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. The WHL is a very defense-oriented league by most standards. That’s even more the case when put up against the constant back-and-forth pace of the “Q”, where players scoring at rates of 1.5 points per game are much more common.

Why limit it to forwards? What if we’re talking about a goaltender? Or a defenseman? You can have “exceptional players” at those positions as well. But again, where do you draw the line in determining that a goaltender or a defensive defenseman has achieved some sort of other-worldly status? When he posts a handful of consecutive shutouts? When he separates enough shoulders of opposing players or posts a plus/minus that rivals something Bobby Orr would’ve posted in the days of the Original Six?

There’s no measurable standard. The closest you could get that’s considered a common measurable is points, and we’ve already exposed the problems with that. We’ll be left to nothing but subjective determininations. It’ll boil down to things like the “eyeball test”, or perhaps a hockey-centric restatement of former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous “obscenity standard”, which basically said, “I know it when I see it.”

(And yes, I just equated a possible means to determine what constitutes an exceptional hockey player with a concurring opinion on the obscenity standard by the US Supreme Court. See? You just don’t get this kind of stuff in The Hockey News.)

But maybe that’s the best way to illustrate my point. The NHL didn’t make an exception for Alexander Ovechkin when he missed the deadline by something like 24 or 48 hours. They didn’t make an exception for Sidney Crosby when he was scoring at a clip of 2.71 points per game. Crosby’s game was much more well-rounded and was thought to be much more NHL-ready when he finished his second season with Rimouski. And his 2.71 ppg in 2004-05 might be the modern-day equivalent to the 4.03 points-per-game pace Mario Lemieux posted with Laval in 1983-84.

If they didn’t do it for Crosby and Ovechkin, they weren’t going to do it for Tavares. Crosby was an ever-so-rare combination of otherworldly talent and maturity & poise well beyond his 18 years, both on and off the ice. Ovechkin had the talent with the charisma and poise to match. Tavares just doesn’t strike me the same way.

The reasoning is so far against the inclusion of an exceptional player rule and the logistics to implement it are so full of holes, you almost have to wonder if Tavares’s agent (who I believe has since been fired) knew all along this had no chance, so he was just shooting his mouth off about this as a publicity stunt. It’s sad to think that he may have done the poor kid a disservice by putting him under an even bigger microscope than he already was.

I could never see a rule like this flying in the NHL. There is just no way to draw that line in the sand.

Ash: Excellent comparison, Stoosh. “I know it when I see it.” Yep, that’s about the only way the NHL would be able to pick out the ‘exceptional’ players from the crowd.

I’m not quite sure that Tavares’ agent’s intentions were to draw attention to JT. I think his wallet may have been calling him to the soapbox. Think about it – if Tavares gets to the NHL one year early, then that is a few million dollars of salary/bonuses AND several more million dollars of endorsements in JT’s pocket, with Mr. Agent getting a nice chunk of that money. He claimed that it was all out of Tavares’ interest, but I don’t buy it. I think he was just trying to cash in on his client’s talent and, instead, exposed him to much criticism.

Stoosh: The more I think about what I wrote regarding the potential publicity stunt, the more I probably should’ve rephrased that because I thought the whole thing was motivated by money as well (Tavares was getting enough publicity). I think your theory might be a lot closer to what might have happened. And really, with the evolution of the NHL into a young player’s game and the advent of Crosby and Ovechkin-mania, conditions were pretty ideal to try to use Tavares’s situation to usher in some sort of exemption.

Either way, I think the NHL made the right call. An “exceptional player” rule puts more undue pressure on kids who are already dealing with enough external pressure as it is. Bestowing that kind of title on a kid almost forces the team that drafts him to put him right into the NHL, and as we’ve seen in the past, even the most heralded junior players still find that transition in the first year difficult (Spezza, Joe Thornton, Carey Price, etc).

And besides, if the NHL had allowed JT to enter the ’08 Draft, we’d never have the opportunity to watch how the Leafs fans react this year to a team that has a very good chance at winning the Tavares Sweepstakes.