Cole Fonstad’s selection by the Montreal Canadiens in the fifth round of last weekend’s National Hockey League Entry Draft is an accomplishment to be celebrated.
He’s made it so far already and will only go further with continued hard work.
A friend who isn’t all that versed of the nuances of the way hockey development goes asked if there were a lot of Saskatchewan boys making the NHL.
Well, it’s a lot fewer than there were a few years ago, but why?
Those of us in the sports industry, and those who just like the idea of sports drafts (it’s kind of a sports subculture that borders on cult hood) were mashing our refresh buttons on our web browsers Saturday morning and afternoon to see if the players we knew or our favourite teams were drafting 18-20 year old players we found acceptable.
For those of us who cover sports in the prairies, Saturday was an exercise in frustration and wonderment. How can our beloved prairie kids be going so low?
The first day of the draft was to be understood. From a Western Canadian perspective, this was always going to be known as one of those drafts where the talent was going to be blooming late. First overall pick Rasmus Dahlin is a great talent and beyond that there are only a couple of so-called sure things, NHL-ready.
The first Western Hockey League player taken was Spokane defenceman Ty Smith at 17 by the New Jersey Devils. He’s a Lloydminster kid and scored 73 (!) points in 60 games. He’ll be a great player even at the 17 slot in the draft and I’m sure there will be more than a few teams wishing they’d picked him.
But in one of the most shocking aspects of this years draft, only one more WHL player was chosen – Russian born Alexander Alexeyev of Red Deer. Only one junior A western Canadian was picked beside that, the AJHL’s Jacob Bernard-Docker.
Out of 31 picks, only three were born and raised in the western prairie provinces.
Okay, you’re saying, but the teams will stock the pool with good middle and lower round WHL picks. Not so fast, pal.
Fonstad was ranked 52nd among North American skaters but by the end of the second round, others had come to be chosen before him. I realized he wasn’t likely going to be picked till the third round, so I hovered the mouse near the refresh button and clicked a few times. Each time, the names that went by were surprisingly not as good as Fonstad.
In an apples-to-apples comparison at the 109 spot in the fourth round, Colorado picked Tyler Weiss, a taller but similarly weighted forward from the United States’ National Development Program. He hasn’t put up point-a-game type numbers since minor midget in Don Mills, Ont.
There’s a strong Toronto and Ontario bias to some of these picks. It doesn’t start with Don Cherry bellowing “The greatest players in the world come from Tronna!” every couple of weeks but it doesn’t help.
Scouts from all over come to Western Hockey League rinks all year to look at certain players, Certainly they’ve noticed how Fonstad, who had to wait to 128th overall, could make his linemates better and help make the Raiders a better team in the second half than the first. The scouts had to be telling their NHL team’s scouting bosses about the way Fonstad had more points than any other draft-age player other than Smith.
But it seems like it’s a waste of money for these teams to have these NHL teams to have these scouts and not listen to them. Fonstad will be a very good professional player, better than a lot of those who were picked above him.
And certainly better than a lot of overhyped players coming out of Tronna.
