By Jeff Moss
June 19, 2011
DetroitSportsRag@gmail.com
This Friday the NHL will hold its annual entry draft in Minneapolis and as usual, the Detroit Red Wings will be selecting near the end of the first round. This year they have the 24th pick to be exact.
And for the first time in years I actually find myself excited about this year’s draft.
Now, 20 years ago this wouldn’t have been very surprising. I was a huge fucking NHL draft geek. One of my favorite days of the year would be the afternoon that I would go to my mailbox and find The Hockey News NHL Draft Preview inside.
I used to read that damn thing cover-to-cover like I was a yeshiva bocher studying the Talmud. I remember one year when I was in college my Draft Preview got lost in the mail. I started freaking out. I called the magazine and they advised me that they would send me another issue. I seriously had to drive back and forth from West Bloomfield to Ypsilanti three times to check my EMU mail before it came. (For some reason back in the early 90s the preview came to subscribers a couple weeks before it hit the newsstands.)
I can’t stress to you enough how amped I was when that preview would come. The only thing comparable would have been any issue of Playboy that included Julie McCullough. (if this website was as cool as Grantland.com, this would have been an awesome place for a footnote. Anyway, McCullough played Kirk Cameron’s girlfriend in “Growing Pains” until that born-again lunatic got her fired for posing nude in the magazine.)
The main reason that I was so obsessed with the NHL Draft was my devotion to the Wings. And when I picked up the Draft Preview edition in the late 80s and early 90s, I immediately checked out two items:
1) The names and bios of the top Soviets in the draft.
2) What North American player was going to be available when the Wings selected in the first round.
And that was the order I read the magazine. While I was interested in the team’s first round selection, I was WAY MORE intrigued in what superior talent the Wings could cherry-pick in the middle rounds.
This was before the demise of the old U.S.S.R. Before Soviet-born hockey players were allowed to come to the NHL without defecting at the Goodwill Games or faking that they had cancer™ (Gary Fogel) like Vladimir Konstantinov did.
But something occurred in the 90s that severely curtailed my excitement for the NHL Draft. For one, thanks to the Russians that joined the Wings, the team would consistently post one of the best records in the league year after year. This meant that their draft pick selection would suffer.
And because the floodgates opened up after the Cold War ended, teams like the Wings could no longer wait until the second or third rounds to select a Sergei Fedorov or a Slava Kozlov. The top Russians like Alexei Yashin (SECOND OVERALL) were now being devoured in the first round.
The final blow to my obsession with the NHL draft occurred when the Wings decided to value their first round selection like a penny stock. The excitement of the entry draft completely dissolved for Detroiters when Wings management started treating the NHL trade deadline like a National Holiday for its’ fan base.
To compete for the Stanley Cup every single season, GM Kenny Holland rightfully made a decision to pawn the team’s late first round pick for immediate assistance at the March deadline.
It seemed like the Wings would go years without even having a first round selection, but four Stanley Cup championships eased the pain of having little to no rooting interest when the June draft came along.
And even when the Wings had draft related success it was nothing that could be gleaned from reading The Hockey News Draft Preview.
Pavel Datsyuk (sixth round) and Henrik Zetterberg (seventh round) were such non-entities that they most likely weren’t even included in the magazine.
Eventually the Internet enveloped print publications and I cancelled my subscription to THN because week old hockey news wasn’t that thrilling to me. And along with the subscription went the Draft Preview and so ended one of my favorite childhood habits.
In recent years though I started paying a little more attention to the draft. After the lockout ended and a hard salary cap was instituted in 2005, the Wings could no longer trade their first round pick away for high priced unrestricted free-agents. So once again building through the draft became more of a necessity.
In most years since the lockout ended the team has either had their first round pick or a very high second round selection, but I still couldn’t get very geeked about the draft because you knew barring an unlikely trade the Wings were not going to get one of the top talents available.
But just a few days ago I genuinely got excited about this Friday’s draft. I clicked on ESPN.com’s NHL Insider page and noticed that some guy named Gare Joyce had compiled a Mock Draft. And with a first name like Gare, I figured this dude HAD to be Canadian so I gave his column some credibility.
I instantly scrolled down to the Wings at #24 to see this guy’s projection and I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm when I saw the name, “Vladislav Namestnikov.”
You see, in the past decade, the God Hates Fags people have been more receptive to the thought of same-sex marriage and Ricky Martin CDs than the Wings have been to Russian-born prospects.
Detroit has not selected a Russian in ANY ROUND of the NHL Draft since 2004. And even in that year, the pick was some dude named Gennady Stolyarov in the EIGHTH FUCKING ROUND!!!
Based on the Ilitch Family’s recent organizational behavior, I figured we would have a better chance of Ken Daniels or Mo Cheese’s son getting drafted by the Wings than a kid born in the motherland.
The epidemic of avoiding Russians got so bad that this past winter that when Team Russia completed a miracle third period comeback against Team Canada at the World Junior Championships, Pavel Datsyuk immediately text messaged Ken Holland and asked if the Wings could FINALLY draft one of his fellow country mates now.
It is completely unfathomable to me that an organization that was a pioneer in the migration of Russians into the NHL has gone a decade since using a high selection on a Russian. I know the Igor Grigorenko experience didn’t pan out, but you’d think he tortured and murdered Holland’s family based on the team’s recent draft history.
The franchise known for assembling “The Russian Five” has in recent years conservatively picked guys like Landon Ferraro and Riley Sheahan. Two “prospects” who have done anything but set the world on fire since their selection.
Sheahan scored a whopping five goals at Notre Dame this past season which would be okay if he was a stay-at-home defenseman. Unfortunately, he is supposedly a power forward who can score.
And since the 2009 draft, Ray Ferraro’s son has been best known for getting injured and then alienating his head coach before getting traded from Red Deer to Everett in the WHL.
And yeah, I know that some teams are adverse to drafting Russians because of signability issues. The KHL offers these kids more money and then they don’t even have to pay taxes on their salary.
But we are talking about an organization that used to covertly sneak players out of Eastern Bloc nations after using high draft selections on kids they couldn’t be sure would EVER play in the NHL.
Now you are telling me that we refuse to take ANY Russians because there is no transfer agreement between the NHL and KHL?
But back to Vladislav Namestnikov (pronounced: I-have-NO-fucking-CLUE) and the potential for the Wings to nab him in the first round.
I was so jacked up about the thought of ending the Russian drought that I went on The Hockey News website and downloaded the Draft Preview digital edition to my iPad. (It was a whole hell of a lot easier than driving an 1987 Plymouth Sundance with 80,000 miles to Washtenaw County repeatedly.)
This is what I found out about Namestnikov. He played last year in the OHL for the London Knights and scored 30 goals in 68 games and averaged a point per game. (I have absolutely NO idea what this means because I am pretty sure that Kirk Maltby once scored 50 goals in the OHL.)
One scout stated, “He’s a niftier, offense-type of center. He does work in all areas of the ice, but his ability to make players either individually or as a playmaker is his biggest asset.”
ESPN.com graded the kid’s abilities as follows:
Skating: A-
Hands: B+
Two-Way Play: B+
Hockey Sense: A-
Now, unless those grades were handed out by Pope Jon Paul Morosi the Third, they are pretty damn impressive.
But here is the best news of all. Vladislav Namesicantpronounce is the NEPHEW of former Red Wing forward Slava Kozlov.
And once I got over the depression that I am so fucking old that Kozlov has a draft-eligible nephew, I was downright giddy about the potential of FINALLY acquiring another offensively gifted Russian to continue the legacy of Sergei Fedorov and Datsyuk.
So Ken Holland, please, please, PLEASE pull the trigger on this kid if he is available and piss off all of the Downriver fans who probably would like you to select a Canadian power forward who can fight.
And based on his uncle and Grigorenko’s automobile driving abilities, get him a limo service until he gets to Detroit as well.