As someone who was on Team Sanford pretty much from the beginning (I remember going back and watching his Caps and Boston College games when we traded for him... oh to have that kind of free time anymore!), I just feel like I have to say that the amount of rope this board gave him vs Ty Rattie couldn’t have been more different.
People here were very skeptical of Sanford from the beginning, and a lot of the arguments were petty, like “he was basically only a 3rd rounder,” or “we got the wrong prospect.” People had high expectations for what we could get for Shattenkirk after rumors of Drouin and Hall, so Sanford had an uphill battle from the beginning here. It really only got worse with time as people became fixated on what their mental image was of him instead of what he was doing. There was hyper-focus on his mistakes and full dismissal of his successes. The artifacts of that attitude are still with us in the snide little nicknames people have for him. I remember that beautiful set up he had on a Berglund goal, and it devolved into like a full thread about how he reached in to get the puck out of a scrum instead of playing the body. The Sanford hate got pretty hysterical for awhile.
Rattie, on the other hand, scored two goals off his butt and people were ready to hand him a top-6 spot on a platter, despite way fewer successes, and way more mistakes than Sanford ever had. But he scored like 130 points in Portland (where everybody was scoring like 130 points at the time), and we didn’t trade Shattenkirk for him, so people weren’t as ready to dismiss his learning curve.
Sanford has been through a lot, including three coaching changes, a big shoulder injury, the loss of his father, and being pummeled by a teammate in practice. He has found consistency, which is what he always needed to do, but the player he is right now was always what he was building towards, and his flashes indicated as much.
I just think it’s silly to say he got the same benefit of the doubt or was held to the same standard as someone like Rattie by posters here. He *always* had promise, he always had it in him to be this player, people were just introduced to him as the return player from a trade of a fan favorite and their patience level was extremely low.
He’s on pace to be a 50-point player this year. I’m glad that many people are coming around on him, and lord knows the Sanford-bandwagon has plenty of room on it, but trying to rewrite history to make it seem like people were pretty cruel and nasty towards him out of some equally-applied standard of performance for young players is just crazy. A lot of people just straight up didn’t like him, and didn’t need any more reason than that.