Emelin needs inner Gretzky to regain confidence
On the surface, Wayne Gretzky and Alexei Emelin have almost nothing in common except that they both play hockey.
Gretzky is, with Bobby Orr, one of the two greatest players in the history of the game. Emelin is a hard rock, stay-at-home defenceman — although of late, his play is more in the category of “E.T., phone home.”
Emelin’s struggles are difficult to understand. He’s never been Larry Robinson but he’s been far better than this. Against Chicago last week, Emelin had one of the worst games I’ve seen, singlehandedly defeating his own team with mistake after mistake on a night when they outplayed the powerful Blackhawks.
Obviously, Emelin has lost his confidence. It started with Michel Therrien putting him with Shea Weber on the top defensive pairing. Emelin wasn’t up to the task. Failure (and a subsequent benching) destroyed his belief in himself. Game after game, he’s making bad decisions.
In every sport, scouts measure height and weight and strength and factors like how hard a player’s shot is or how far he can chuck a football when a player’s most important asset, his ability to make good decisions at top speed under big-league pressure, is almost impossible to measure.
What if it was possible to better understand what was behind Gretzky’s superhuman skill and apply it to drafting, coaching young players and teaching established players to make better decisions? What if Gretzky’s abilities hold the key to getting a player like Emelin out of a slump?
The most difficult question is deceptively simple: How did Gretzky do it?
He didn’t have Mario Lemieux’s size or Jaromir Jagr’s physique. He couldn’t skate like Pavel Bure. He didn’t have Guy Lafleur’s charisma, or Brett Hull’s shot, or teammate Mark Messier’s bull-like strength and determination. And yet, this slender, rather unprepossessing young man shredded the NHL record books so thoroughly that they’ll never be put back together again.
The real test is always how a player stacks up against peers from his era. I realized how enormous the gap was between Gretzky and the great players of his time when I went to check where Mats Naslund finished in the 1985-86 scoring race. (Naslund finished eighth that season with a respectable 110 points, just behind Denis Savard’s 116 for Chicago.)
But Savard’s point total was 99 behind No. 99: Gretzky finished with a career and league record 215 points — including 163 assists. Second place in the scoring list that season went to Mario Lemieux, who had 141 points, ahead of Paul Coffey in third with 138 and Jari Kurri in fourth with 131. Nor was that season a fluke: Gretzky had 208 points to Kurri’s 135 the year before, 205 to Coffey’s 126 before that, 196 to Peter Stastny’s 124 in 1982-83, 212 to Mike Bossy’s 147 in ’81-82.
Season after season, Gretzky was so dominant that he routinely finished with a third more points than the runner-up. Convert that to contemporary proportions and it’s like Connor McDavid putting up 120 points while Sidney Crosby finishes second with 80.
How was this possible? The word that always comes up is “vision.” Gretzky could see the ice like no one else. That means more than simply seeing where everyone is at any given moment. It means seeing ahead to where all the moving parts will be in another two or three seconds.
But that’s not enough. Seeing isn’t reacting and reacting isn’t necessarily making good decisions. I’m convinced that it was his decision-making that set Gretzky apart more than any other factor, vision included. He broke down the situation on the ice with geometric precision and he made the play, with almost no elapsed time between sight and action.
Why was Gretzky so much better than everyone else? Parents chasing the NHL dream for their children now spend tens of thousands of dollars and condemn their sons to icy indoor arenas in the summer, when Gretzky was playing baseball and running track — but that isn’t a complete answer, either.
Which brings us back to the struggles of Emelin, who returned to the lineup Sunday after being a healthy scratch on Saturday. What if we could come to understand Gretzky’s excellence to the point where it could be applied to coaching young athletes? What if we could develop techniques based on Gretzky’s abilities to improve decision-making and to shave fractions of a second off the time necessary for a veteran player to make the right decision?
In the world of high-performance sport, decisions have to be made at a speed that bypasses the thought process. If you’re thinking “here comes the rush, I have to avoid making a mistake,” you’re already toast.
Somewhere in there, I’m convinced, lies the key to to helping a struggling athlete out of a slump. It’s not that Emelin can’t do it. He’s a veteran player with solid seasons behind him. He can be useful and the Canadiens are going to need the physical element he brings when the playoffs begin.
If only Emelin could tap into his inner Gretzky to make the decisions he has to make on the ice and make them quickly.
It sounds easy, but it’s so very, very difficult.