My Special Purpose
Registered User
- Apr 8, 2008
- 8,151
- 21,787
I'm generally not comfortable with giving anybody under the age of 25 the captaincy. No matter how good Aho is, usually younger captains are picked either when there is no established leadership structure on the team (Toews, McDavid, and Crosby were all centerpieces at the time for fledgling cores) or if the older captain decides to pick a young player as his successor to the throne (as Hejduk did for Landeskog right before he retired). The only way that I would be OK with Aho as captain is if the entire veteran core agrees to do it. If not, make Jordan Staal the captain.
The thing I think what we're skipping over entirely is that guys like Toews, McDavid and Crosby were named captain at a young age because they have exhibited leadership skills at every level and were abundantly qualified for the job. It had nothing to do with age. Toews is such a leader that he was probably named captain of street hockey games growing up.
The bottom line here is that we're trying to shoehorn somebody into a role for which they have no experience. We can argue all week (and we have) about who deserves the job, but at the end of the day, the list of players on our team who have *established* leadership abilities at any level of hockey is a very short one. Put it this way, if Aho is such a born leader, and the easy answer for us, why have his leadership abilities never been recognized at any level growing up in Finland, aside from a two-week gig as alternate on the 2016 WJC team?
Captain is not a new role for these guys. They start naming captains around age 10 or 11. And even then, it's a pretty easy call. My kid wanted to wear a letter so bad, but when the coach named the captains of his U10 team, my 9-year-old looked at me and said, "that makes sense." Two years later, the same kid who was captain of my kid's team was named captain of the Junior Hurricanes team that went to Quebec.
The fact remains, we don't have a Messier. We don't have a Toews. We don't have a Crosby. We don't even have an Owen C. And age has nothing to do with it.