This is a very small hockey blog, so I tend not to pay attention to page hits or “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) of headlines, blog entries or the occasional self-written piece.
I know that there’s a small but incredibly loyal readership base here, and I tend to write for them (you), and the rest just doesn’t matter very much, because we get by financially, and we get by in terms of making the loyal and dedicated readers happy in terms of the content delivered.
Today, I wrote an article about the tremendously uphill climb that Red Wings prospect and Russian phenomenon Dmitri Buchelnikov may very well face beginning when he comes over to North America next spring.
There were two things that got left out of the article that I want to highlight for you this evening:
- First and foremost, I’ve been doing this blog thing and the hockey bulletin board thing on a semi-professional basis since 1999. I’ve seen a LOT of prospects come and go by the wayside over the past 26 years, and I can tell you that the road to the NHL has an uphill gradient for every prospect who dares to venture into the realm of pro hockey. It’s incredibly difficult to find a way to develop one’s body, brain and hockey skills to fruition at the same time, because we all develop our skills at disparate rates, and when you add in injuries, lucky breaks and the plain old grind of professional hockey, it’s really damn hard for the best prospects to make the NHL. Out of the 7 to 10 players that the Red Wings tend to draft on a yearly basis, if 1 of those picks becomes a star player, and 2 or 3 players develop into roster players per draft class, you’re doing pretty damn well. It’s hard to make the NHL, regardless of how incredibly skilled and well-trained these players are these days, and Buchelnikov is just no exception here.
- Second, and perhaps moreover, I’m a partisan here. I’m a blogger, not an objective journalist, and as much as I try to stay on an even keel, I really want each and every one of the Red Wings’ prospects to succeed at their hockey endeavors. From Niklas Kronwall and Nicklas Lidstrom to Tyler Haskins and Danny Groulx, prospects come and go over the years, and while an extreme minority of them make “the show,” some do make it. I honestly try to accentuate the positive, and I really and honestly try to believe that each and every one of these prospects are going to make their dreams come true, even though the vast majority of them end up in the AHL, ECHL or European hockey leagues. There’s a league of the very good, and then there are the truly elite ones, and truly elite prospects (by this standard) might end up as 3rd or 4th liners in the NHL, but they’re still making the NHL, and that’s a victory.
- As far as Buchelnikov is concerned, the soon-to-be 22-year-old may be 5’10” and 170 pounds, and he’s been raised and is still training and playing in the “Wild West” of Putin’s Russia, so he’s not had the same extraordinarily structured hockey upbringing of his North American counterparts, but the boy has skills, and even playing on a larger rink against competition that doesn’t hit as hard or skate in as straight lines as North American opponents do, in terms of skill alone, Buchelnikov definitely has the chops to make the NHL on skill. My caution is simply involving the facts that his work ethic is going to have to match his extraordinarily elegant skill set, that he’s going to have to adapt to both the North American hockey culture and the North American culture in general after having so much of his living moments structured for him by his KHL teams, and that it’s just bloody frickin’ hard to out-compete a dozen other players who want to take your spot on whichever team you’re playing.
The fact that Dmitri Buchelnikov has an insane skill set does not necessarily mean that he’s going to make the NHL. He’s got a lot of uphill battles left to face and uphill climbs left to make, and there are very, very few players who I look at and say, “Okay, he’s an NHL star in the making.” The Larkins, Raymonds and Seiders of the world are tremendously rare, and when you look at somebody from even one of the KHL’s model “big-market” franchises in CSKA Moscow, Buchelnikov hasn’t been able to train the way North American NHL-bound players train, and he hasn’t been able to learn the game in the way that North American NHL-bound talents learn it.
Those aren’t red flags per se; they’re areas of concern as his contract ends in late April and he heads over to begin his North American hockey journey, and I want to emphasize the fact that it’s a journey that is a marathon, not a sprint.
I never said that he won’t make it. I’m saying that even someone with Buchelnikov’s talents has a hard road ahead of him. My bottom line is that I’m rooting for him, too.
