On Thornton, Tavares and irrational draft fears
by Dominik on Apr 24, 2009 5:30 PM EDT
in Islanders in Diapers
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PrintThe thing about enduring the Islanders season that was is, at least we had lowered expectations going in. We knew what was needed (youth evaluation, a high draft pick). A biblical plague of injuries from the get-go helped us get there.
Personally, it allowed me a detached observer's enjoyment, an ability not to take losses too hard. (Or, as an ex-girlfriend might describe it: "Cold and emotionally withdrawn. As if my existence is incidental." Hey, whatever. We always allow multiple interpretations here. Now gimme back my Bossy jersey.)
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't have loved to have the San Jose Sharks' season instead. (Ex- says: "Ah-ha! I knew you were eyeing that hussy's legs.") But: Lurking in the background of the Sharks' season was that dark, repressed fear that drops an asterisk in every post-victory beer: "This is great, but if we get to the playoffs and pull the same old..." That stuff wears on you, too.
I'm of the belief that playoff reputations can be greatly exaggerated, thanks the the small sample size and amplified focus (John Druce, anyone?). Take any 4- to 7-game stretch of a season and judge a star player by that stretch, and -- depending on which stretch you choose -- you'll either find some interesting, "choke-worthy" conclusions, or you'll find a man on pace for a 300-point season.
But I watched Joe Thornton's performance in a near do-or-die playoff game last night, for a squad that has all that baggage but also its best shot (on paper) yet to go all the way, and I was horrified. Helium does not begin to describe how lightly he floated into his own zone while Bobby Ryan and Ryan Getzlaf were showing him what clutch playoff hockey looks like.
I used to give the Sharks the benefit of the doubt -- "They're still learning," I'd say, pulling for Sharks fans I've encountered -- but no more. Pretty much the entire team didn't show up in its first critical test of the 2009 playoffs. I stayed up late, geared for an epic Battle of California clash to rival the intra-divisional playoffs of yore, eager to see an entire state grasp the intensity of a real, regional, NHL playoff rivalry. Instead I got a mismatch. A disturbing failure. Something is rotten in the state of them Sharks.
Even in restraint, disappointed Sharks coach Todd McLellan paints an ugly picture:
"We have a core of players, goaltender included, some top defenseman, some key forwards that have to match up against their core. If that core is outplayed as it was tonight, the odds of us winning greatly diminish... It's core against core right now, and the goaltender, defenseman and forwards have to be included in that."
But Enough about Me; Let's Hear You Talk about Me
How does this apply to the Islanders? (Ex- says: "It's always about you!") Well, I'm glad I asked that question. Among the Tavares vs. Hedman (now Duchene, too) debate has been an underlying thread of "Defense wins championships, offense sells tickets." If you could throw marketing and sales and franchise uncertainty aside, and just focus on rebuilding a team, where would you start? (Admittedly, I've been a constant purveyor of this debate while fan voting everywhere has gone heavily in favor of JT. But serious voices like Al Arbour, Bill Torrey, various scouts and Islanders beat writer Greg Logan have at least given it some legitimacy.)
And that's what scares me (Ex- says: "Yeah, you fear commitment. Have a nice life."): Joe Thornton has unquestionably provided Sharks fans with several years of regular-season excitement. He's also been part of several seasons, perhaps including this one, of devastating playoff disappointment. The degree to which that's under his control is debatable, but the effect is the same: that lingering stink and fear that he can't get it done when it matters. That the franchise's most dynamic regular season threat is no threat at all when the Cup is up for grabs.
Now, I'm not buying the sudden questions about John Tavares' heart or initiative -- he sure seemed motivated in the WJC's. I'm not worrying about the sudden comparisons to Jason Spezza's um, "mixed" level of engagement. I don't think. And I know those two are different players than what Tavares is purported to be. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice that in the Battle Landslide of California, the team with the all-world scorer is being left behind, and the team with the towering, nasty two-way defenseman is likely moving on.
(Ex- says: "If that's how you see it, I wish we'd never had this discussion. In fact, I wish we'd never met.") Wait, we still have a date June 26th, right?
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Interesting Article...
Firstly, the occasional ‘what she said’ bit were very funny…but doesn’t it seem like the scouts have a little bit of a fear of commitment themselves as Tavares has been the consensus number 1 pick for a long time? It seems fair enough that scouts are critical of his playoff performance with London, but then this could be partially because of a lack of chemistry, as he only joined London in mid-Jan? Despite any fears on who the Islanders pick at 1 (is Tavares motivated, is Hedman potentially injury prone, who is the best fit for the rebuild etc), hopefully it’ll pan out well (nothing has screwed it up yet….right?)
Thanks. Yeah, I think the chemistry thing (and the number of games he’s played the last four years) are just as plausible explanations for his OHL playoff as saying the kid everyone’s followed for four years suddenly doesn’t have “it.” Certainly his coaches in London think he’s the real deal.
Ultimately I comfort myself by thinking — like you said — no matter what happens it should pan out well. Heh, just like matching up with the right girl.
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
Well who knows. Maybe Wilson will take Okposo and the 1st overall pick for Thornton and make everything simple- oh wait, Milbury isn’t GM anymore, nevermind.
Tavares worries me; his numbers peaked two years ago and he isn’t even the best player on his team in the OHL playoffs. I’d probably take Hedman, or at the very least threaten to take Hedman and try and extort a pick out of Tampa Bay.
It's only my opinion, but it's right.
Writer for The Copper & Blue, OilersNation, and CanucksArmy.
by Jonathan Willis on Apr 24, 2009 6:42 PM EDT reply actions
So let me get this straight – a players numbers have peaked in a league he has lead in scoring (and broke the all time scoring record) and yet he hasn’t had the best playoff performance in his draft year so we assume that’s all he had?
Number one, nobody has given this enough thought; ever think that he has reached his highest potential at the level he is at currently? What’s more, he was traded to a team mid-season and hasn’t been the same. Good players need to be challenged in new areas in order to reach their fullest potential, the next stage for John Tavares is in the NHL.
Number two, this is HIS DRAFT YEAR. I seriously doubt for a nano-second that the excitement about his future has absolutely zero affect on his play. Please, I know I would be super excited and scared out of my mind about the next few months of my new life in the waning moments before my draft year.
Hedman may be a talented defenseman that will be a cornerstone to your franchise, but players like Tavares only come around so often. My concern over Hedman is his adjustment period to the North American style of play and if his game will translate the same to the NHL.
Tavares is my one and only selection for the 2009 entry draft.
Islesblogger is a contributor to Lighthouse Hockey: SBN's New York Islanders blog who's lost the most man games to injury.
by Michael Schuerlein on Apr 24, 2009 6:56 PM EDT up reply actions
Tavares numbers
As a 15-year old: 67GP – 72G – 134PTS, +25
As a 16-year old: 59GP – 40G – 118PTS, +22
In his draft year: 56GP – 58G – 104PTS, +10
He’s a dynamic offensive talent, but that decline would scare me. He’s going to be a very good player offensively, but there are questions about the rest of his game and his numbers this season bear a striking resemblance to those of Steve Stamkos last season (with Stamkos being bigger and having a better reputation for playing an all-round game).
Maybe Tavares has been bored for two years; maybe he’ll return to the form that saw him be one of the most dominant 15-year olds in the history of junior hockey. But it’s hardly the slam dunk that it was two years ago. I imagine that he will go first overall, but for the Islanders sake I sure hope they got some real answers out of him as to why he’s slumped so badly.
It's only my opinion, but it's right.
Writer for The Copper & Blue, OilersNation, and CanucksArmy.
by Jonathan Willis on Apr 24, 2009 7:24 PM EDT up reply actions
Tavares Numbers
Tavares’ decline that you speak of is less pronounced when you look at the his points per game for each of the season:
As both a 15-year old and a 16-year old he averaged exactly 2 points per game (although there is a notable decline in his goals per game from 1.07 to 0.68).
Then in his draft year has averaged 1.86 points per game – somewhat of a drop (8 more points on the year would make it the same as prior years) but this is offset to some extent by the fact that this goals per game rate rose again to 1.04, which is very close to his rate as a 15-year old.
Looking at his regular season stats this way would make it appear that this year he has been superior (at least offensively) to that of at least the previous year and possibly, when factoring out age, his best year overall considering the number of other games he has had to play outside of OHL.
Maybe Tavares has been bored for two years; maybe he’ll return to the form that saw him be one of the most dominant 15-year olds in the history of junior hockey.
Heh, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Damn unpredictable teenagers. Like: “Are you bored? Are you not what we thought you were? Or are you just feeling really emo because your girlfriend is putting you through the ringer?” Please advise, as our franchise’s future depends on the answers.
Thanks everybody for weighing in so thoughtfully. Some interesting stuff here.
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
Additionally...
I do tend to ignore judgements based on small samples (one junior tournament, one playoff year, etc.) but it is also the draft year of Tavares’ teammates Philip Varone and Nazem Kadri – and they’re both performing at the same pace as Tavares despite being inferior players.
I’m not saying judge Tavares based on 20 playoff games, but it should certainly be a consideration.
It's only my opinion, but it's right.
Writer for The Copper & Blue, OilersNation, and CanucksArmy.
by Jonathan Willis on Apr 24, 2009 7:29 PM EDT up reply actions
All of the pressure is on the Isles right now. Personally, I think the Isles should take Tavares. The reasoning being that the Isles were horrible offensively last year and a goal scorer is need. Even though the defense was equally bad, I think a good portion of that is attributed to Dipietro being out.
But then again, a defenseman like Hedman is more valuable in my opinion. There aren’t a whole lot of super star defenseman in the league and Hedman has that potential..
quite a situation on LI
It is quite a situation, but it’s a somewhat win-win.
In regards to defense – they were actually pretty good, you know until injuries and the lack of a real number one goaltender got in the way.
Islesblogger is a contributor to Lighthouse Hockey: SBN's New York Islanders blog who's lost the most man games to injury.
by Michael Schuerlein on Apr 24, 2009 6:58 PM EDT up reply actions
As a decided attached Sharks fan...
First off, thanks for your posts here and on the BoC. It’s great seeing the perspective of other fans, at least the ones that don’t just post about how much we suck.
I agree with you about our season, which is almost assuredly going to end with another early exit.
I know that Sharks fans can sound overindulged and spoiled compared to teams that haven’t had the regular season track record we’ve had. Nonetheless, it’s bitterly disappointing when the entire Sharks organization has been repeating the mantra, and convincing their fans, that the focus is on how the team fares in the playoffs. And then the team plays like they don’t care, from Nabokov to Thornton to Grier to Marleau, and on down through the rest of the lineup.
It’s humiliating to see this train-wreck happen again, and doubly so after the changes they made going into this season to address last year’s problems only to leave the dance even earlier. This will mark the 4th time in 5 years that we’ll be eliminated by a lower-seeded team. If that’s not choking, I don’t know what is.
Being a fan is being in a state of hope, but being a fan of a great team that predictably falls apart at exactly the wrong time seems, to me, worse than a rebuilding team. There’s no point in hope when hoping for success means being set up to be repeatedly sucker punched.
The Other Side of this is...
At least the humiliation doesn’t last for the entire season.
False hope does suck though…
Thanks for those thoughts, ievans
Really interesting to hear your perspective.
I know that Sharks fans can sound overindulged and spoiled compared to teams that haven’t had the regular season track record we’ve had.I actually haven’t experienced this much — but I may be just selectively exposing myself to the fans I enjoy hearing/reading.
The situation is just amazing to me, though. I mean, this is the peak that the Sharks franchise has been building toward over all these years — the shock underdog upsets in the mid-90s, the first signs of a true threat in the Nolan/Ricci years. Choke or not, those last two rounds are necessarily the hardest hurdle and sheer numbers dictates not every franchise that “does it right” is going to get there. I can’t fault Doug Wilson for his offseason moves — without ridding himself of core members, they sure seemed like a reasonable bet that this would finally get them to the promised land.
Oh well. They’re not eliminated yet. You never know…
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
Yup, winning a Cup is incredibly hard. You have to be both a great team, and a lucky team. The Sharks have had a good enough team to make a run for a few years now, but haven’t gotten close. I used to think it was luck, but now I’m not so sure. I’d feel better about their future if they had at least gotten to the Conference Finals once. At this point, though, I don’t see what more they can tweak, roster-wise, to get better. They’ve got all the pieces. Mentally, they just don’t seem to have the swagger needed to overcome their opponents. shrug
As for the Isles, as a franchise they’ve won the Cup, even if it was a long time ago and under very different circumstances, management- and league-wise. Their recent troubles notwithstanding, they can look toward their past success and draw on it. They have less to prove as an organization. A little bit of competence in management would go a long way.
As an outside observer (Devils fan) this is a tough call. Id probably lean towards taking Hedman but with some exceptions (Pronger and Niedermayer come to mind) it takes a few years for stud defensemen to develop and have an impact. 18 year old forwards traditionally seem to have more of an immediate impact for the teams that draft them. Tavares and Hedman are both great prospects so I think it comes down to two things: what the team needs more and how patient they are willing to be when developing the player (essentially when do they want this prospect to be the team’s star – right away or a few years from now).
Yeah, I think you have the dilemma there in a nutshell. And I don’t know that we can even say which “need” the Islanders have is greater: They need offense, they need defense (and hell, they just might need a goalie, too).
So we end up agonizing over whether there is something we can see in one of these prospects that tells us he will or won’t be all he’s hyped up to be. And of course, that’s impossible, so we debate and agonize all over again.
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
your headline said it all "irrational fears"
It is ridiculous to compare Joe Thornton to John Tavares and Victor Hedman to Chris Pronger. What about all the cups Lemieux and Gretzky and Yzerman and Sakic won without a huge towering defenseman on their blueline? Granted im not comparing players im just stating the offense/defense factor. As ive said b4 defense is played as a team defense. The whole team must play it. Anaheim is not winning these games b/c they have Chris Pronger and SJ doesnt. You said it yourself how Getzlaf and Ryan are playing great and Thornton should take notes. Thornton and Tavares are not even built in the same mold or is Hedman built in the same mold as Pronger. The only thing they have in common is their size. Is every1 also forgetting that Tavares went up against Hedman at the WJC and Tavares prevailed. Take a look at every great players stats. They are up and down all the time. Nobody improves their stats every season they play. Once people know how good you are the other team will also start paying much more attention to the player as an individual. Tavares also was not playing for a very good team so im sure he was the main focus of the other teams every game. Ovechkin didnt reach his goal output of last season. Would you worry about him too?
Welcome
Thanks for joining.
Yes, you rightly picked up on the “irrational fears” in the headline. I wouldn’t read too much into my specific player comparisons (you might note the photo at the top is … Eric Nystrom, who belongs nowhere in this conversation except that it’s fun for an Islanders fan to see him scoring a big playoff goal).
As I said in the post, Thornton is a completely different player than Tavares — the point is not to compare their skills, specifically. The point is exploring all the unknowns (and irrational fears) that ruminate in a fan’s head when there is no easy answer. As I mentioned above, we have no way of really divining at age 18 which great prospect will hit, and which one might miss or even lack those “intangibles” that are spouted about every playoff season. So we (and the scouts, apparently) grasp at little straws and hope they tell us something reliable.
I mention Pronger not because of the current series but because he was an absolutely critical performer in the ’06 finals run for Edmonton and the ’07 Cup for Anaheim. While I agree defense is necessarily a “team game,” it sure helps to have a dominant force playing 30 minutes back there. It helps cover a lot of mistakes and bad games. That is all.
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
Or, in other words: Is there some knowable quality about Thornton that appears to be making him have a disappointing playoff yet again? A question of "heart" [insert broadcaster cliche here]? An inability or unwillingness to adapt his game when targeted at a more intense playoff level? (In a similar, indefinable vein, free agent suitors might wonder the same thing about Jay-Bo, never having seen the mild-mannered, two-way blueliner perform in the NHL’s postseason).
And if so, it’s not a leap for an Islanders fan to look at that, hear the playoff whispers about Tavares (small sample size and all) and mutter, "God, no, that could be us!"
A glorious problem to have; unpredictable consequences seven years down the line…
Lighthouse Hockey: Side effects may include Weight gain and frequent game loss.
I’m not sure that I would worry too much. According to all accounts, Tavares and Hedman are both highly likely to be excellent players. As you said, the Islanders need offense and defense, so it isn’t as though one of them would be more useful than the other. Both would be important pieces, although Tavares might be part of the roster more quickly than Hedman just based on position.
An amazingly talented scorer or an imposing defenseman. Either way, I don’t think the Islanders can make a wrong choice. Just ensure that whoever is drafted has a supportive environment and teammates, and let him develop without expecting the kid to save the future of the franchise in his first six weeks as a professional.
(Besides, odds are the team won’t be so incredibly improved that they won’t be completely out of the lottery next year, either. Rebuilding is going to take a little while, but add another good player each year and before you know it the team won’t be so horrible. Patience.)
"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with." -- Tennessee Williams
by Baroque on Apr 26, 2009 2:02 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs
take hedman.
but i’m a flyers fan. so take tavares and score goals and have him perform exceptionally well and demand a huge salary and be exported to wherever phoenix is going and phoenix will win the cup with tavares and all their dormant prospects.
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1979-80
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May 24, 1980: Tonelli to Nystrom. At long last, the steady build of the New York Islanders from expansion doormat to surprise semifinalist to annual contender reaches the promised land: Buoyed by a late season trade for Butch Goring that gave the team the depth up the middle GM Bill Torrey had been seeking, the Islanders knock off the Philadelphia Flyers in six games.
The victory justified the faith in coach Al Arbour who guided them from their second season to their first Stanley Cup seven seasons later. The Islanders would not be the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup, but they would be the only one capable of a dynasty.
1980-81
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May 21, 1981: This time it was much easier. After falling to "only" 91 points in the 1979-80 season, the Islanders returned to their division title tradition, piling up 110 points -- a whole 13 points over second-place Philadelphia.
Between the quarterfinals (where they beat the upstart Oilers in six games) and the finals, the Islanders reeled off eight consecutive wins -- with a four-game sweep of archrival Rangers in between. As they defeated the Minnesota North Stars in five games for their second Cup, their goal difference in the final was a combined +10.
1981-82
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May 16, 1982: Another year, another landslide title. The Islanders won the Patrick Division by a whopping 26 points over the second-place Rangers, and were seven points clear of their nearest competition for the President's Trophy, the still-not-quite-ripe Edmonton Oilers.
A first-round scare against the Pittsburgh Penguins turned in the Isles' favor thanks to John Tonelli's heroics, and a true dynasty was on its way: Past the Rangers in six games, then an eight-game sweep of the Quebec Nordiques and Vancouver Canucks to run away with the Stanley Cup.
1982-83
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May 17, 1983: Not so fast, whipper-snappers. The Edmonton Oilers' steadily rising challenge for league supremacy took them all the way to the finals for the first time, where the New York Islanders summarily dispatched them in a four-game sweep. For the Islanders, the Dynasty was secured. For the Oilers, it was a powerful lesson in where talent ends and the demands of playoff hockey begin.
Four years, four Cups, 16 consecutive playoff series wins (a record that would grow to 19 until the rematch with the Oilers the following year). Mike Bossy scored 60 goals yet again, and Wayne Gretzky became acquainted with Billy Smith's crease.
