Patrick Coulombe, I was surprised to discover, is still playing hockey.
The guy who was a surprise star early in the Vancouver Canucks’ 2006-07 campaign is 40 and still going in the French league, where he has spent more than a decade.
It’s a long way from the heights of his rookie season, when the undrafted ex-Quebec junior surprised everyone in Canucks training camp and then was an early-season callup, playing seven games for the Canucks that November. He wouldn’t play in The Show again, but he has made a good long career as a pro, and that’s worth something.
It’s a teammate of his in that campaign who bears a lesson here, another rookie on that blue line: Alex Edler.
Edler obviously became the surprise defensive star, the best D-man to wear Canucks colours before Quinn Hughes. But Edler, like Coulombe, was something of a long shot.
His story is well-told, the guy playing in the depths of Swedish semi-pro hockey, a player who Canucks scout Thomas Gradin was tipped off about by a hustling hockey agent. The Red Wings had shown interest and the agent let Gradin know that. The rest, of course, is history.
The Canucks would pick Edler in the third round of the 2004 draft, indeed they traded up to get him, so they clearly had reasonable hopes for him becoming a pro, but surely not the Ring of Honour candidate he became.
Your teams are built on hitting draft picks such as Edler, though. Your stars are supposed to come from the first round, but the quality characters who make up the rest of your lineup, you need at least a few to come from the middle rounds of the draft.
And when you look at this Canucks roster, you can see some of this principle playing out. You’ve got the three youngsters on the fourth line, the Calder Cup Line of Arshdeep Bains, Linus Karlsson and Max Sasson. Bains and Sasson were signed as free agents in their 20s, while Karlsson was an astute pickup from the Jim Benning era, a player targeted by former team analytics guru Jonathan Wall.
All three present a strong chance of becoming depth performers for this team. They are unlikely to become stars, but all three have two tasks in front of them. First of all, to become NHL regulars, that’s the obvious one, the one right in front of them. Second is to be NHL regulars on a team with serious playoff ambitions. That’s the dream.
The same story goes for Elias (Jr.) Pettersson and Victor Mancini. Both young defencemen have impressive things listed under “skills” on their CVs: physical play and strong skating.
Like their forward cohorts, they have to now prove they can be NHL regulars. Then they need to show they can be contributors to a team that’s going places.
If any of those guys can become even close to Edler, the Canucks will be gushing. How big did Edler become? “He was the Canucks,” Thatcher Demko declared to Vancouver Is Awesome last year. Edler was a decade into his career when the Canucks’ current No. 1 first joined the organization.
Edler, it’s well understood now, set a tone for the dressing room. He learned all that from the Sedin brothers, but also from the likes of Trevor Linden and Markus Naslund. There’s a professionalism, a standard to work toward, that is so much a part of his story.
If any of these young players on the Canucks roster, all long-shots to be NHLers at one point or another, are to become more than just names on a season roster sheet, they will need to find that same professionalism as Edler once did.
All five are big on character, there’s no doubt of that. Now let’s see them do it.