Stars' Klingberg has grown into huge talent on blue-line
DALLAS Scouting isn’t like throwing a dart at a board, but it is an inexact science.
Take John Klingberg, who has come out of nowhere the past two years to become that rarest of rare birds — a true No. 1 defenceman in a league where there might only be a dozen.
Klingberg was a fifth-round draft pick of the Dallas Stars in 2010. Beer fridges are heavier than he was when they called out the Swede’s name, 131st overall.
“In his draft year, he was maybe five-foot-10 and 155 pounds, and he’d been playing forward, not defence,” said Stars GM Jim Nill, who was in charge of Detroit’s draft table back then, and knows you have to take a step back as a scout. “People want to see them as finished products. They’re not. In Detroit, they picked (Pavel) Datsyuk and (Henrik) Zetterberg, who weren’t big.”
Klingberg chuckles at the memory of his draft days.
“I was pretty small,” he said. “They were taking a chance, for sure. Maybe the scouts were thinking I’d grow to be the size of my brother Carl (six-foot-two, 205 pounds, who was drafted 34th overall the year before by Atlanta.)
“I was also a forward until I was 14 or 15, which is why I have so much offence to my game. I was too small and not that fast at forward and couldn’t grow any muscles, so my dad talked to me and said if I played defence, I’d be able to see all the plays (developing) from back there.”
It was the right call. You can overcome a size deficiency with good work habits and great hockey sense, and hopefully, the calories start adding up.
Klingberg is now six-two and 180 pounds, thin for his size but still a growing boy at age 23.
His talent is huge. He’s part of the stable of great young Swedish defencemen — Erik Karlsson, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Victor Hedman.
Klingberg has a low panic point when he’s got the puck on his stick, and he can fool checkers with a little head-fake as the great Russian Sergei Zubov did.
He makes the Dallas offence tick (78 points in 112 NHL games the past two seasons), and teams have started laying the body on him to see if he shrinks. He hasn’t. Nill, as good a judge of talent as you’ll find, says scouting is part smarts, part intuition.
“That (Colton) Parayko in St. Louis used to be five-10 and he’s sixfive now. You can’t scout that,” Nill said. “You can scout hockey sense and say, ‘He’s a smart kid on the ice, but what if he doesn’t grow?’ You should sit in on scouting meetings to hear what they say.”
“A scout will say, ‘I really like this John Doe with the Calgary Hitmen but he’s five-nine and 150 pounds, and another scout will say, ‘Well, maybe he’s going to be Johnny Gaudreau.’ Or, he could be a second-round pick who turns out to be a bust,” said Nill. “That said, if you take a player in the fifth round, you roll the dice and away you go.
“We’re never trading those fifth-rounders away (Jamie Benn was one, too). I’ve said, ‘You can have all the fourth, sixth and seventh-rounders, but not the fifth.’ ”
Klingberg played just 13 AHL games, and was an instant hit in the NHL after his call-up last season, where he became the highestscoring rookie defenceman with 40 points in 65 games. This year he has 38 in 47. Only Karlsson and Brent Burns have more points from the back end.
“I’m the most similar to (twotime Norris Trophy winner) Karlsson, but we have differences,” said Klingberg.
“He’s more of a skater; I try to be more patient.”