Point living up to his name
Tampa Bay star a contender for the Co nn Smythe Trop hy
The phone rings and Mike Stothers answers, but he doesn’t say hello. Instead, he asks a question.
“So, you want to talk about the best player in the world?”
Well, yes. But more specifically, we want to talk about why the best player in the world wasn’t selected until the third round of the 2014 NHL entry draft.
How was Brayden Point, who is on a short list with Dallas’s Miro Heiskanen and Vegas’s Shea Theodore as Conn Smythe Trophy candidates, not a top 3 or a top 5 pick?
How is it that he went ignored in the entire first round? And then again in the second? How was a player who scored twice and picked up five points in a 8-2 win against the New York Islanders in Game 1 of the Eastern
Conference final, still available when the Tampa Bay Lightning finally made their 79th overall pick?
Stothers, who coached the Calgary native with the WHL’S Moose Jaw Warriors, has spent the past six years wondering the same thing. Chances are, so has every other general manager in the NHL.
“What’s interesting was that I joined the Los Angeles Kings that summer ( as the head coach of their AHL team) and was in on one of their scouting meetings,” said Stothers. “They had their draft list and they asked me what I thought of Point.
“I told them straight up, ‘I’d take him in the first round if I could.’”
The Kings passed on Stothers’ recommendation and instead selected Adrian Kempe with the 29th overall pick. With 103 points in 256 games, it wasn’t a bad choice. But considering that Point has 116 goals and 262 points in 295 games — only Leon Draisaitl, David Pastrnak and Dylan Larkin have scored more from that draft year — it’s clear they chose wrong.
Then again, it’s not that Tampa Bay took him in the first round. He was their fourth pick in 2014. Still, the fact that the Lightning once again ended up with a player who repeatedly fell through the cracks might not be a coincidence.
While the Lightning selected their captain ( Steven Stamkos) with the No. 1 overall pick, their Norris Trophy- winning defenceman ( Victor Hedman) with the No. 2 overall pick and got their Vezina Trophy-winning goalie ( Andrei Vasilevskiy) near the end of the first round, the bulk of their roster is filled with late-round gems.
Tampa Bay’s top line, which combined for four goals and 11 points in Game 1, features a second- round pick ( Nikita Kucherov), a third- rounder ( Point) and a seventh- rounder ( Ondrej Palat). They found secondline forwards Anthony Cirelli and Alex Killorn in the third round, while Cedric Paquette was selected in the fourth round. Tyler Johnson and Yanni Gourde, who scored twice Monday, were unearthed as undrafted free agents.
“I honestly think ( Lightning director of amateur scouting) Al Murray is the best in the business,” said North American Central
Scouting’s Mark Seidel, who had Point ranked as the 39thbest prospect in 2014.
“The first round is the first round. When I’m judging a staff, it’s the later rounds that I’m looking at. And the Lightning have made a living off those picks. When you get a guy like Point in the third round and some other guys like Cirelli and Palat, that’s how you win. You look at their draft record, it’s just phenomenal.”
Tampa Bay’s draft record is a result of a draft philosophy that places character and hockey I.Q. above everything else. The Lightning don’t necessarily want players who are big or who can skate fast. They want players who know how to play, who are competitive and who will do anything to win. In Game 1, we saw all those aspects on the opening goal, in which Point turned a 1-on-2 into a highlight-reel goal.
“He set the tone for the entire game,” said Stothers. “For a guy who’s undersized, you would think he would stay to the outside. Instead, he cuts back to the front of the net even though it means he’s going to take a couple of whacks. But he doesn’t care. I don’t use the word small, because he doesn’t play small.”
A top 20 scorer in the WHL during his draft year, the knock on Point was that he undersized at a time when the NHL hadn’t yet heard of Johnny Gaudreau or Sebastian Aho or Mitch Marner. What’s worse, he also didn’t have great speed or a great shot. But he had something that couldn’t be taught, something that Stothers realized from the moment Point was called up to Moose Jaw as a 15-year-old.
“We had a pretty good team. A pretty big team,” said Stothers. “So I didn’t know what he was going to be able to do. But right from his first practice, it was evident he was special. He had the puck every time he was on the ice. It got to the point where I told the trainers go get me another bucket of pucks so everyone else can have a turn.
“It was a hard sell to get him drafted. I don’t know why. We were saying, ‘Just watch him. Just watch what he can do.’ I have scouts come to me now and say, ‘ We should have listened to you.’
“You’re seeing it right now. He’s a beast.”