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Where are they now?


ALEX SHPRINTSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
November 30, 2007 at 9:46 PM EST



Forget Paul Maurice.


Forget the board of directors of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.


Forget the debate over whether Mats Sundin can lead a team to a Stanley Cup title.


If one really wants a portrait of why the Leafs have been so mediocre for the past 40 years, remember those famous words from the franchise's most successful general manager over those four decades.


"Draft shmaft."

That was Cliff Fletcher's response on trade deadline day in March, 1997, when the then-GM confirmed the Leafs had turned down the offer of a first-round pick for Wendel Clark. Alas, Fletcher couldn't deliver a Cup, and looking at the cold, hard facts, performance at the draft has played a major role.


The truly abominable drafting era for the Leafs began 20 years ago, and has continued unabated to this very day. The 1987 entry draft is a good point of departure because the previous year was the last time the Leafs used their first-round draft pick to choose a future star: Vincent Damphousse. Toronto's drafting performance since then has been truly inept.
And it is unquestionably the main reason for the general futility of their 40-year quest for the Stanley Cup.

First-round woes
Contrary to what has often been said and written, the Leafs have not given away most, or even many, of their first-round picks. In fact, in those 21 drafts, they have had 19 picks — which is pretty close to the NHL average.
Here are those 19 players in chronological order: Luke Richardson, Scott Pearson, Scott Thornton, Rob Pearson, Steve Bancroft, Drake Berehowsky, Brandon Convery, Grant Marshall, Kenny Jonsson, Landon Wilson, Eric Fichaud, Jeff Ware, Nik Antropov, Luca Cereda, Brad Boyes, Carlo Colaiacovo, Alex Steen, Tuukka Rask and Jiri Tlusty.


What is remarkable about this group is how unremarkable they are. The highest career scorer among them is Thornton with 278 points over 18 NHL seasons with six different teams. The highest individual accomplishment in one season was the 26 goals and 43 assists by Brad Boyes in 2005-06 with the Boston Bruins.


What's most incredible is that the highest number of goals in a season by one of these picks in a Leafs uniform came from Rob Pearson (23) in 1992-93. No one else has ever scored as many as 20 goals. Of the 20 teams that have been in existence since 1987, the team with the second-lowest career scorer drafted in the first round is the New York Islanders, whose highest point-getter has been Todd Bertuzzi with 546 points.


The league average over the same period is more than 900 points.
Averaging out the stats for all the NHL players who were picked in the first round during this 20-year period, if we were to prorate them over 82 games, those 19 Leaf picks would average 10 goals and 16 assists a season.


The rest of the NHL has been almost in a different league. The best franchise — Quebec Nordiques/Colorado Avalanche — has its first-round roster averaging 24 goals and 37 assists for 61 points a season. The NHL average is 42 points a season, more than 60 per cent better than the Leafs.

The competition
Of the four teams that have won more than one Stanley Cup since 1990, Colorado/Quebec, the Pittsburgh Penguins and New Jersey Devils have been the three most effective drafters in the first round.


The Penguins have been very good at giving themselves a high draft position by being awful for many consecutive years — that's how they got Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, and after many years in the wilderness, they may now again be on the verge of another young, Cup-contending team. Still, the Devils (Martin Brodeur, Petr Sykora, Jason Smith and Scott Gomez) and the Avalanche (Joe Sakic, Alex Tanguay, Adam Deadmarsh) prove that you can pick very good players with low picks in the first round, disproving some of the excuses provided by and for the Leafs over the years.

The Leafs all-stars
For a better idea of the players the Leafs have drafted since 1987, here's a look at the all-Leafs team composed of 20 players:


Goalies: Felix Potvin and Damian Rhodes


Defence: Tomas Kaberle, Dmitri Mironov, Danny Markov, Ian White, Nathan Dempsey and Yannick Tremblay


Forwards: Daniel Marois, Tie Domi, Yanic Perreault, Grant Marshall, Nikolai Borschevsky, Fred Modin, Sergei Berezin, Alex Ponikarovsky, Kyle Wellwood, Mike Eastwood, Matt Stajan and Darby Hendrickson


There would only be one star on this team: Tomas Kaberle. In 20 years of drafting by the Leafs, only one player has developed into a borderline star. And so this "fantasy" team of Leaf draft picks would certainly not strike fear into anyone, especially when you look at some of the others, particularly the Detroit Red Wings.


Over this period, the Red Wings have not drafted particularly well in the first round, partly because they had traded away many of their picks (only 14 first-round picks since 1986) and when they did have one, it was often very low because they have been such a consistently good team.


Detroit, however, has been a consistently good team because they have more than made up for first-round failures by drafting well in subsequent rounds. The 1989 draft is an excellent point of comparison with the Leafs, who happened to have three first-round picks. They selected Scott Thornton (third overall), Rob Pearson (12th) and Steve Bancroft (21st), who in a bizarre twist all came from the Ontario Hockey League's Belleville Bulls.


In the very same draft, the Red Wings used later picks to select Nicklas Lidstrom (53rd), Sergei Fedorov (74th) and Vladimir Konstantinov (221st).
Detroit's post-first-round team of the last 20 years:


Goalies: Chris Osgood, Norm Maracle


Defence: Nicklas Lidstrom, Dan McGillis, Vlad Konstantinov, Jason York, Anders Eriksson, Mathieu Dandenault


Forwards: Sergei Fedorov, Slava Kozlov, Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk, Mike Knuble, Thomas Holmstrom, Jiri Hudler, Dallas Drake, Darren McCarty, Johan Franzen and Valtteri Filppula

A new frontier
The striking comparison makes one wonder how the Leafs have avoided the depths of the cellar all these years.


There is a rather simple explanation — trades and free agency — which today make for a particularly bleak future. Two of the most lopsided trades in the NHL history were carried out by Fletcher. One brought Doug Gilmour to the Leafs, the other Mats Sundin. In both instances, Fletcher used previously successful Leaf draft picks — Gary Leeman and Wendel Clark — to pry those superstars.


During the Ken Dryden/Mike Smith/Pat Quinn era, successful free-agent signings, like those of Curtis Joseph, Ed Belfour, Gary Roberts and Alex Mogilny, allowed the Leafs to ice a respectable team.


It's a strategy that is no longer possible because of the salary-cap system, and the Leafs' postlockout signings of Eric Lindros, Jason Allison and Pavel Kubina show how difficult it is to improve your team via that route. It is only possible when a team has several great young players who don't earn a lot of money in their first few years, leaving them with sufficient cap room to sign stars.


Most of the Leafs' budget is tied up with veterans such as Sundin, Kubina, Bryan McCabe, Jason Blake and Darcy Tucker, making it all but impossible to improve by simply buying players.


Similarly, with regard to trades, the new cap system has made it very difficult to do anything more than patch minor holes in time for the playoffs.



The bottom line in the NHL is that contenders cannot be built through trades and signings.

A spendthrift solution
On the other hand, there is no salary cap on management and this is where Toronto must now spend its money.


It is patently obvious the Leafs have had an utterly incompetent collection of scouts during the past 20 years. That must change and quickly, but it's not that difficult to do. For the $5-million a year the Leafs are paying Kubina, they could hire the best general manager in the business and complement him with the combined scouting staff of the Red Wings, Devils and Avalanche.


This could happen quickly or slowly. Quickly, if the Leafs management were to decide to blow up the current team, getting rid of everyone they could and securing draft picks along with cap space, rebuilding the Penguins' way by getting high first-round picks for several years. The other — the slow or the very slow — way is to rebuild the team through attrition and gradual smart drafting.


Either way, ultimately, the Leafs' simplest direct solution is to spend their money to raid the scouting staffs of the most successful teams.