Waived: Svechnikov waived amongst others

ShelbyZ

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Apr 8, 2015
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I'm sorry, but if you're a prospect and your reaction to a guy like Erne playing is "Man, I'm getting a raw deal.." I don't want you on my f***ing team.

Excerpt from Sean Avery's book

LAST CHANCE

I’ve wanted this since I was five years old. I’m now twenty-one, and time is running out.

Of course, looking back I realize I had lots of time, but in September 2001, all I knew was that playing the game I loved more than anything in the NHL was the only option. There was no Plan B.


My heart is pounding. I am here to earn a spot on the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. The fact that people are already talking about this as one of the best teams in history isn’t going to make things any easier. I am going to have to take a job away from someone the Red Wings actually want on the roster. And they’ve already told me in several ways that they don’t want me. This is my third crack at making the NHL—I’ve already played two seasons in the minors. Every year, a new bunch of rookies shows up, diminishing my odds. When I look around at the guys in camp, or when lying awake in bed last night, I have to ask whether I am good enough. I’m not an idiot. I know most people would say no. The Red Wings already said no.

I had been good enough once. As a kid, I played for an All-Ontario rep team. (By the way, that’s a big deal.) In my last year of junior hockey, I had twenty-eight goals and fifty-six assists for eighty-five points in fifty-five games. To put it in perspective, my fellow OHL player, Jason Spezza, had thirty-six goals and fifty assists and eighty-six points for the Windsor Spitfires in his best junior season. Spezza was chosen second overall in the first round of the 2001 NHL Entry Draft. He was beaten out by Ilya Kovalchuk, who was drafted first, and tore up the NHL for a while before walking away from $77 million and twelve years on his contract with New Jersey to play in Russia. Being drafted by the NHL doesn’t guarantee anything.

I know this too well as I wasn’t drafted at all. On draft day in 2001, part of me believed that there was at least one NHL general manager out there who would see what I could bring to a team, and another part of me believed that getting drafted was too good to be true. I wasn’t going to sit by the phone—I spent draft day at a pool party. When I came home, neither of my parents even mentioned the draft, and I didn’t ask if anyone had called. It was as if we had all moved on to the next plan of attack. I’d go to training camp as a free agent.

But still, it hurt. No one wanted me. Nearly 300 guys were taken, and not one GM wanted to use a ninth-round pick on me.

Well, I know why. The knock on me was that I was a “bad teammate.” Did this mean that I stole other players’ girlfriends? That I was an arrogant puck hog? That I put Tiger Balm in guys’ jockstraps and thought it was the funniest thing ever when they tried to extinguish the three-alarm fire burning up the family jewels?

No, none of the above. What it meant was that I played to win on every shift, and some other players don’t see the game that way. So I would let them know that they could do better. Since no one likes to be called out for dogging it, the rap landed on me that I was “bad in the room,” which in hockey-speak means you’re not one of the guys. Maybe it’s the same in other sports, but in hockey being one of the guys goes a long way. What it won’t do, though, is win you a puck battle in the corner. And it’s certainly not going to win you a fight.

So if I wasn’t going to make it as everyone’s best friend and all-round good guy, well, I’d have to make it as the opposite.


I did have one friend in Detroit, though. I knew Kris Draper from growing up in the same town that he did, Scarborough, Ontario, which is part of Toronto but so far from the city center that it’s known as “Scarberia.” In 1997–98, when Draper was then in his fifth season with the Red Wings (the one in which he’d win the second of his four Stanley Cups), we worked out at the same gym. I was playing for the Ontario under-17 team, which fell under the umbrella of the Canadian national hockey program, so as “elite players” we trained at the same facility as pros like Drapes.

He had success, money, and a lovely wife, he was a good husband, and he took care of everyone around him. He was close with his dad, he had friends, and when he let loose he could put any frat boy to shame. He was the best guy. Drapes also had the Red Wing workout gear, which was sponsored by Nike and which was very foreign to a Canadian kid—we had Bauer and that was it. Draper would show up in this gear and hand it out to guys like me. I saw how organized and disciplined and dedicated he was, and at that moment, I was the most in awe of anyone that I had ever been.

Draper was physically a specimen. He was not big, and that was important because neither was I. He was five-nine—and some days when he was feeling supreme he was five-ten—and 180 pounds of lean, cut muscle. He was one of the first guys to make being in top shape a cool thing. Spend any time in the gym with a guy like Drapes, and all you want is to be as chiseled as he is.

Drapes liked me because I pushed him hard and wanted to beat him at everything. So every day he showed up at the gym he had a hungry dog on his ass who reminded him that I wanted to take his job. He later told me that I added years onto his career, but at that point I was just working as hard as I could to keep up with him.

One of Detroit’s scouts, Joe McDonnell, helped me, too. McDonnell had been a minor-league defenseman who played a few games in the NHL for Vancouver and Pittsburgh. He’d moved on to coaching in the Ontario Hockey League, and he knew I could play. Mac was not a suit-and-tie guy, he was a players’ guy, a real hockey man—he loved the game and wasn’t interested in playing politics, so when he said that I had a shot in Detroit, I believed him. He wasn’t the kind of guy to flatter a no-hoper. I had a reputation as bad as they come and Mac’s job was to have good judgment. In my mind, he’d put his job on the line by taking a chance on me, and I wouldn’t let him down.

But even with Drapes and McDonnell in my corner at that training camp in September 2001, I needed to do more than just play. Everyone in camp could play hockey at an elite level, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. And they all know me, because I’d played against most of them in junior. There will be times later in my career when I will most definitely wish I could take a break from my reputation, but now it’s the thing that makes me stand out and I am going to use it to my advantage. I’m here to get noticed, and a bad reputation makes that a lot easier.

Basically, Avery knew he had to make a HUGE splash to make the team. It was his third shot and he had to beat out a guy currently on the roster. Yeah, yeah, I know you'll say that year was the greatest hockey team ever and this past year was the worst hockey team ever... That is the point. This is the drive you should want from your prospects. "You said I'm not good enough and you're gonna play Adam Erne over me? Well, f*** you, I'm gonna make my mark and make you take notice of me." This is also why you might want a veteran who is "shitty at hockey" around. Draper was not shitty at hockey, but he was certainly no superstar. But he instilled a work ethic in everyone because he was a red ass. Brendan Shanahan once said the biggest help to him in his career was some nobody, Doug Sulliman. He helped refine Shanny's shot. He was a complete non-entity in the history of the league, but he took under his wing one of the premier goal scorers of the 90s and 2000s.

I sometimes see fans who question certain signings or the addition of certain players who maybe don’t measure up based on some metrics. And I think what they overlook is that it’s not necessarily the superstar on the team that imparts the most knowledge to young players who are developing. There are guys who can make a huge, franchise-changing difference with the leadership they provide off the ice.
For example, people will always ask me, “Who taught you how to shoot? Brett Hull?” And I’ll tell them, “No actually, it was Doug Sulliman.” Doug was a veteran guy when I joined the Devils early in my career. Playingwise he was in and out of the lineup, but he impacted my career because he had the time and the interest to pay it forward to us young guys and help us learn how to be pros. You can learn from superstars by watching them, but those guys have so much pressure on them that they need to put all their focus into doing their job. So it’s hard for them to spend a lot of time dissecting the game of a young player who’s coming up, and explaining to them how to improve. Also, sometimes a guy with that level of talent is just so naturally gifted that they can’t really fully explain it to others.
And that’s why healthy organizations need guys like Doug Sulliman. He transformed the way I shot the puck at a young age and that made me a much better player. And then when I went to St. Louis, I learned from Brett Hull by watching him.
I think people want to assume that you learn everything from NHL All-Stars, but when you look at the Matthews, the Marners and the Nylanders, you don’t really know who’s going to say the right thing at the right moment or provide an example that will put your young players on the right course. So our job sometimes is identifying those veteran players who can impart the right values and tasking them with sharing their wisdom so that our young players can get the most out of their careers.


TL;DR

This isn't to give guys like Erne and Biega and otherwise a pass. Just that if you want to be in the NHL? It's on you. It's never anyone else. If the Red Wings sign Adam Erne over promoting Givani Smith? Givani Smith didn't do enough to impress them to force the issue. That's how you improve. That's how you get better. Detroit got too fat on its own hype and kept guys around long after their usefulness had waned. Dennis Cholowski wants to make the roster? He needs to be better than Alex Biega. By your standards, that shouldn't be a difficult task.

You aren't owed a shot... if you're drafted? That's your shot. Don't throw it away by pissing and moaning. I personally feel bad for Svech because every time it looked like they were going to invest in him, he went down with a long term injury. But sadly, that is the way the cookie crumbled. He's still got an opportunity because he's still on the roster, but he's got to make it impossible to let him go if he wants to stick.

I bet if Ken Holland reads this, he calls Dan Cleary to see if he wants to be on the Oilers taxi squad.
 
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HoweFan

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I don’t want to take a day out of my life reading that post. It’s longer than some of the chapters of the book I’m reading
 

Lil Sebastian Cossa

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Jul 6, 2012
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Smith won't enjoy a long career in the NHL if he's running good players like Larkin or Hronek in practice, are hitting veterans like Filppula/Nielsen in practice.


Don't act like the regular NHL player is in any way like Avery.
Few players have a chip on their shoulder the way he does.

I’m not saying “run them” or “bury them”. But he should definitely make it damn clear that he’s incredibly engaged in practice. It’s like Rudy. His job as a healthy scratch or a taxi squad guy is to have the team ready to go.

If you’re talking about what you want from a bottom six guy? I want them to be like Avery. I want them to have a chip on their shoulder and know that they’re the f***in guy and they’re gonna make it damn clear to you that they are. Give me a truly gritty, grindy guy down there.

Smith won’t enjoy a long career in the league nor get a lot of chances if he’s just a dude in non game action. A guy like Larkin? He’s probably gonna prod Smith to get him to try to do something. It’s what Draper and Maltby used to do. They were f***ing pests and they were f***ing pests to their own team too.
 
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MBH

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I’m not saying “run them” or “bury them”. But he should definitely make it damn clear that he’s incredibly engaged in practice. It’s like Rudy. His job as a healthy scratch or a taxi squad guy is to have the team ready to go.

If you’re talking about what you want from a bottom six guy? I want them to be like Avery. I want them to have a chip on their shoulder and know that they’re the f***in guy and they’re gonna make it damn clear to you that they are. Give me a truly gritty, grindy guy down there.

Smith won’t enjoy a long career in the league nor get a lot of chances if he’s just a dude in non game action. A guy like Larkin? He’s probably gonna prod Smith to get him to try to do something. It’s what Draper and Maltby used to do. They were f***ing pests and they were f***ing pests to their own team too.

I was one of the few guys who liked Avery when he was a Red Wing back on the old Red Wings newsgroup. And over the years, I've been one of the few guys who praised what he could bring to a team.
Maltby was one of my favorites, too, though sometimes he woke up sleeping giants. I remember one game we had the Avs in hand, and then Maltby lit up Forsberg and Forsberg took over the game.

At the end of a day, you don't want a buzz saw who injures teammates and who angers them and makes them worried about getting hurt. Players have enough injury concerns in games.

That said, of course I want Smith to work hard and be engaged.
But I don't expect him to practice the way he plays. I expect FAR more physical engagement against opponents.
 
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Lil Sebastian Cossa

Opinions are share are my own personal opinions.
Jul 6, 2012
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I was one of the few guys who liked Avery when he was a Red Wing back on the old Red Wings newsgroup. And over the years, I've been one of the few guys who praised what he could bring to a team.
Maltby was one of my favorites, too, though sometimes he woke up sleeping giants. I remember one game we had the Avs in hand, and then Maltby lit up Forsberg and Forsberg took over the game.

At the end of a day, you don't want a buzz saw who injures teammates and who angers them and makes them worried about getting hurt. Players have enough injury concerns in games.

That said, of course I want Smith to work hard and be engaged.
But I don't expect him to practice the way he plays. I expect FAR more physical engagement against opponents.

That’s really what I’m saying. He doesn’t have to lower the boom on a dude, but I want/need the guys like Larkin, Bertuzzi, Mantha and the coaching staff being like “damn, G, you’re a bowling ball”. And the players to go to bat for having a monster on line 4.

Like how the guys valued the hell out of Drapes, Maltby, Witter, Downey, even Cleary before his legs abandoned him.
 
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Gniwder

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Well, at least Erne played like he gives a shit. Probably the best game out of him in a WIngs jersey. Nielsen should be the first one to sit when Helm comes back.

I'd still rather see Smith, but he's not the worst forward out there right now.
 

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