STROME FINALLY GETS HIS CHANCE
Former No. 3 pick might be ready to justify his high draft selection this time around
Twice sent back to junior and unable to earn a spot with the last-place team in the NHL, there might have been a temptation earlier this season to question whether Dylan Strome should have been a No. 3 overall pick.
There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with his development. But compared to others, it sure looked that way.
Mitch Marner, selected right after Strome in 2015, was coming off a season in which he scored 61 points in 77 games and was named to the NHL’s All-Rookie Team. Noah Hanifin, selected fifth overall, already has close to 200 games under his belt. Even Clayton Keller, selected by the Coyotes a year after Strome, is among the league’s scoring leaders this season.
Strome has played nine career NHL games. He has one assist.
It was frustrating. You can tell yourself everyone’s path to the NHL is different. But it can be difficult to convince yourself the winding road you’re on is leading anywhere when others are enjoying success and you are stuck in the minors.
“You try not to worry about it,” Strome said, “but every day you’re hoping you get called. Just keep going day by day and keep working hard and hope you get the call-up at some point. I had some talks with the coach and thought it might be a possibility.”
On Monday, Strome finally got the call-up. It was out of recognition more than necessity. The 20-year-old, who was named the AHL’s player of the week for the second time this season, has scored eight goals and has 26 points in 15 games for the Tucson Roadrunners.
Heading into Tuesday night’s game against the Edmonton Oilers, the late-bloomer will try to show that, like Mark Scheifele before him, the wait was worth it.
“That’s someone you can use as an example,” Strome said of Scheifele, a seventh-overall pick in 2011 who was twice sent down to junior and took another two years before becoming an impact player in the NHL. “You look at how good he’s playing right now. Everyone’s path’s different. It’s about finding yours.”
Not everyone makes the seamless jump from the draft floor to the NHL. For every Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews who make it look it easy, there is a Scheifele or Nikita Kucherov who develop at a much slower pace. It’s difficult to remember now, but five years ago some were questioning whether Scheifele would ever make an impact in the NHL. Today, he’s grown into a top-10 scorer and an elite centre.
“I was on the (TSN) panel one night — it was right around the end of camp and Mark got returned for the second time to junior — and the question was ‘Is Mark Scheifele going to be a bust?’” Jets head coach Paul Maurice said. “And I remember thinking, ‘He’s going back to play junior because he’s supposed to.’ The pressure those guys are under to come in at 18, 19 and be great is so immense. And if they’re not, it’s, ‘What’s going on here?’”
Strome, who’s older brother Ryan also spent two years in junior and some time in the AHL before making the full-time jump, has been telling himself not everyone’s path is a straight line. Some need time to get bigger and stronger or quicker and faster. He needed to do both.
Selected after McDavid and Jack Eichel went No. 1 and 2 in the 2015 draft, he went back to junior and scored 111 points in 56 games in 2015-16. The following year, he scored 75 points in 35 games and led the Erie Otters to the Memorial Cup tournament.
For the past two months, the six-foot-three, 185-pound centre has been using his size and newfound speed to overpower opponents in the AHL, where he was on a line with 2015 first-round picks Lawson Crouse (11th overall) and Nick Merkley (30th).
“Why rush him?” Coyotes GM John Chayka said. “In the past, we’ve traded away good prospects. That doesn’t work. We’ve rushed good prospects. That doesn’t work, either. So as an organization, at some point you have to learn and say we’ve taken our lumps and now we have to do this the right way and be patient.”
Strome is also trying to be patient. He’s got a lot of catching up to do compared to some of his peers. But so did Scheifele. Today, only three players from Scheifele’s draft year — Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Gabriel Landeskog and Nikita Kucherov — have scored more points than him. And the gap is shrinking.
“You can’t look at other people,” Strome said. “You just got to worry about yourself and worry about what you can do to get better and I think if you do that, you’re going to find success eventually. You can’t worry about what other people are doing and what successes they’re having. You have to go on your own path and every path’s different.
“Hopefully, I can stay up here forever now and that’s my goal. We’ll keep working towards that and see how it goes.”