WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME
After being drafted in 1999, University of New Hampshire offensive ace Darren Haydar was never truly granted the chance to assert himself in the NHL, writes Ian Shantz
Measuring Up: A three-part series examining the undersized NHLer
Today more than ever, the NHL is about speed and skill. The clutch-and-grab days are long gone and it’s welcome news to the undersized athletes who are benefiting like never before. A glance around the league shows the NHL is flush with pint-sized talent — and the trend to go smaller does not appear to be going away any time soon. With that in mind, we examine the new small man’s game, how it came to be and where it’s going.
In Part 3 of our three-part Measuring Up series, we look at an undersized player who had all the talent in the world, but never could stick around the NHL for more than a cup of coffee:
Darren Haydar filled the net with pucks at every stop.
As a teenager in junior hockey in the late 1990s with the Milton Merchants, he registered 32 goals and 100 points, then 71 goals and 140 points. In his four seasons at the University of New Hampshire, Haydar flourished with a pair of 41-point seasons sandwiched between 61- and 76-point campaigns in the historically low-scoring U.S. college system.
By the time his American Hockey League career had come to a close in 2012-13, Haydar was among the league’s most accomplished scorers, ranking 14th all-time with 292 goals and 788 points in 780 games, to say nothing of his winning two Calder Cups, being named league MVP and landing in the record books for a 39-game point streak that is unbroken to this day.
Still, his NHL resume stands out like a sore thumb in comparison. Twenty-three games. One goal. Seven assists. Two penalty minutes. Exit stage left.
It begs the question: how could a player so dominant at every step of the way hit a wall so abruptly at the gate to the sport’s pinnacle? One likely theory goes as follows: Haydar, who stands five-foot-nine and weighs 170 pounds, was a victim of the system and era in which he played.
“Back then, if you were a little guy, you really had to prove you could play. And if you were a big guy, you really had to prove you couldn’t play,” said five-footeight, 170-pound former NHL centre Keith Acton, who played 15 years in the league in the 1980s and 1990s before joining the coaching ranks for another 18 years. “The odds were against you.”
Indeed, for all the fairy tale endings we hear of undersized players overcoming long odds to land permanent jobs in the NHL over the years — Martin St. Louis, Theo Fleury, et al — there are that many more who are denied genuine opportunities almost exclusively based on their size. And while today’s NHL is well stocked with smaller players as the game has evolved to feature more speed and skill than ever before, the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s might have felt like a career death march of sorts for the small-statured aspiring NHLer.
Haydar can attest to that. After being drafted by the Nashville Predators in the ninth round in 1999 and upon completing his college career at New Hampshire, the right-winger was assigned to the team’s AHL affiliate in Milwaukee, where he recorded 29 goals and 75 points in as many games and was named AHL rookie of the year, along the way earning his first NHL call-up — single-game sojourns on two separate occasions that did not result in any points.
Haydar spent the next three seasons with the Admirals — winning his first Calder Cup in 2003-04 and finishing with 92 points two years later — but he couldn’t turn it into a ticket to the big club and was ultimately released.
“When (Predators general manager) Dave Poile and myself met at the end of my time with Nashville’s organization, he kind of apologized and said maybe we misevaluated you from the start,” Haydar said. “By then I was already labelled as the minor-league guy because I was small.”
In keeping with his career theme, Haydar was undeterred and his best statistical season came the following year. On the heels of signing with the Atlanta Thrashers in 2006-07, he was assigned to the Chicago Wolves, where he put up 41 goals and 122 points and was named league MVP. Included in that stretch was his 39-game point streak, an accomplishment that, while notable and memorable, might have come at a heavy price.
“They didn’t want to break that (streak) by calling me up,” said Haydar, who was summoned by the Thrashers for four games earlier that season to fill in for the injured Marian Hossa and didn’t register a point. “To me, looking back on it, if my goal is to get to the NHL, if I could have helped the NHL team, why would you not do that? It’s a doubleedged sword. I enjoyed that streak, but they wanted to wait for that to be over with.” Haydar’s best NHL opportunity came with Atlanta in 2007-08. He made the team out of camp playing on a line with Bryan Little and Brett Sterling and scored his first and only NHL goal on Oct. 13, 2007, slipping the puck past Martin Brodeur in a 6-5 shootout loss to the Devils. But when coach Bob Hartley was fired following an 0-6 start to the season, replaced on an interim basis by GM Don Waddell, Haydar’s line was broken up and he was eventually demoted, having registered eight points in 16 games. He went on to win his second Calder Cup that season with the Wolves.
Haydar was later signed by the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche, appearing in one more NHL game with the Avs in 2009-10.
If he was given a chance to succeed at the NHL level, the opportunities were certainly limited. Aside from being taken with one of the remaining few picks in his draft year and subsequently receiving a handful of NHL games in which to showcase his abilities, Haydar was never truly granted the minutes required by most players trying to assert themselves in the top league.
“I feel I was definitely not given that opportunity,” Haydar said. “(His coach) Claude Noel said to me when I was with him in Milwaukee ... the way that I was going to get there was having a coach that I had already played for that trusts me and that would give me that opportunity. That was pretty much the only way I was going to get there.
“I was nobody’s project. And being smaller, you have an uphill battle. So I needed someone to be pulling for me. And I don’t feel I had that person in the NHL that would be that guy that would say, ‘OK, Darren can fill this role in this opportunity.’
Haydar might have been one of the purest goal-scorers of that era to not find regular work in the NHL, but he wants it to made clear that he is grateful for his time in hockey and is not bitter about how things turned out.
“The game of hockey allowed me to play and travel and get paid. I don’t feel like the game owes me anything,” Haydar said. “I feel like I was fortunate to play the game for my professional career of 14-15 years and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I grew up with the dream of playing in the National Hockey League. I achieved that.
“My goal once I got there was a heck of a lot more, but it didn’t come.”
Blame the system, the era, the way in which the game was played at the time — with two scoring lines, a glut of big bodies and not much room for a fivefoot-nine potential sniper. For every Ray Ferraro, Cliff Ronning, St. Louis or Fleury, there was an Eric Lindros, Mats Sundin, Peter Forsberg or a million other similarly imposing figures casting their shadow over the undersized guys.
In what was a game full of clutching and grabbing, mammoth players and power forwards like Brendan Shanahan, Keith Tkachuk and Bill Guerin ruled the roost.
“I don’t blame coaches for that philosophy. I blame, I guess, the makeup of teams, the model that GMs were going with at the time,” Haydar said. “I just think that was part of the game at the time.”
Would Haydar succeed in today’s NHL?
“I’ll be honest, my friends and family remind me of that all the time: that if I was breaking into the league now, it would be a different story,” he said. “I still fully believe that I could have helped and added more to many teams during the course of my career.”
I was nobody’s project. And being smaller, you have an uphill battle. So I needed someone to be pulling for me. I don’t feel I had that person in the NHL.