With the NHL Draft coming up tomorrow, there’s a
ton of focus on the top picks. Teams and fans are salivating over the prospect
of adding defenceman Aaron Ekblad, or centres Sam Bennet and Sam Reinhart
to their roster. The sports radio station in Vancouver has been hypothesizing
all the ways that the Canucks can trade to get the first pick. But I suspect
that sports pundits in every NHL city but Miami are hypothesizing the same thing.
Lots of crazed fans even watch the draft—not
me of course(cough, cough). Most only pay attention to the first
round. What about the later rounds?
I recently flew to Montréal and one of my
entertainment options was a National Film Board feature on junior hockey.
Naturally, I chose that. As an aside, what could be more Canadian than flying
Air Canada and watching an NFB film on hockey? Oh, it was bilingual too. The
film is called Junior and it follows
a Quebec junior team called Drakkar Baie Comeau for one season. The focus is
mainly on a couple of players who are in their draft year and working hard to
get noticed. It begins at with the first win of the season and concludes at the
draft where only one of the players is selected—in the last round. If you’d like to watch this movie, which is mainly en français, you can see it online here.
While watching, I thought it was a fictional movie where they combine real footage with filmed segments—in part because
there was so much emotion and the central player was quite good-looking. But it
turned out to be a documentary, and all the emotion was completely real. The
players, who range in age from 16 to 20, have the bodies of men, but the minds
of young boys. There was a lot of crying, not only about losing games, but
about getting traded, not playing enough, or even being lonely. The players are all under a ton
of pressure, and they are far from
home and without family support. They have to perform for the team, their agents, and
for the NHL scouts. Sometimes those goals are in conflict. But the main
goal is always the same: getting drafted.
Superfans analyze past drafts and moan
about the players their team shoulda, coulda, woulda taken. But in reality not everyone
in the first round even makes the NHL, and if you’re drafted in the later
rounds, it’s a complete crapshoot.
This movie allowed me to see the pain of
being an extremely talented player who was used to being the best, made tons of sacrifices and then had his dreams shattered in one day. If you’ve always believed you’d play pro hockey, what happens when that dream is exploded? It’s this human drama that always inspires me, both to watch sports and to write about sports.
Of course, you can keep hoping. As the hero
of my upcoming book says, “And there was one guy who went to our school, he got taken
in the last round of the draft and he still made it to the NHL. You couldn’t
ever give up.” He
is referring to the real-life David Jones of North Vancouver, who was the last pick of the
Colorado Avalanche and still made it to the NHL. He is currently playing for
the Calgary Flames. But he never played Major Junior, he stayed at home and played Junior A, went on to an Ivy League college, and then made the NHL. He obviously didn't count on playing in the NHL.
Maybe the better message is to keep those dreams, but have a backup plan. If you
watch the draft, spare a thought for those lower round guys out sweating it out in the stands.