jeff@dciem.UUCP (Jeff Richardson) (03/18/85)
I can't argue against Dave Vacca's statments about the Flyers. Being
outside of the area of their division, I haven't seen them play much this
year, but I managed to catch the second of their back-to-back wins over
Washington and I was very impressed. They played the type of hockey that
will get them far in the playoffs, and it worked almost perfectly against
one of the best teams in the league, who had demonstrated to me a week
earlier that they were capable of beating the defending champs.
The Flyers played the type of hockey you would expect to see only from a team
of veterans of several years in the NHL trenches, but they did it with a bunch
of no-namers like Dave Poulin, Peter Zezel, Ilkka Sinisalo, Murray Craven,
Lindsay Carson, Rick Tocchet, Derrick Smith and Len Hachborn. These guys
fill almost all of the Flyers' full time forward positions and none of them
have more than two years of NHL experience. Not only that, few if any of
them were drafted in the first round by the Flyers. Craven was a first-round
pick of the Red Wings whom they had given up on, but I think the rest are all
Flyer draftees. Their top goal scorer, Tim Kerr (50+ goals two years straight,
and he probably would have done it four times if it weren't for all his injury
problems), wasn't even drafted by anybody! The Flyers signed him as a free
agent. Sure they have a solid and experienced crop of defensemen (who were
picked up mostly through trades), but to be as great as the Flyers are, you
can be sure that those forwards are a lot better than they look on paper.
The other teams in the league can learn two valuable lessons from the 1985
Flyers on how to build a contender:
1. It is much more important to have experience on defence than on forward.
(This is a lesson that our Maple Leafs should have learned by now.)
2. Great teams are built in the second round of the draft and later, not
in the first round. That's where players like the Flyers' young forwards
are found, but since they have some quality that's difficult to detect
at junior age (it certainly doesn't show up on paper), it takes a great
scouting staff to separate these players from the bulk of players from
these rounds who will never make the NHL.
--
Jeff Richardson, DCIEM, Toronto (416) 635-2073
{linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd}!utcsrgv!dciem!jeff
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!dciem!jeff