Walker, after a legendary college career that included a Heisman Trophy -- and festooned with the Big Blue Star on the side of his helmet that virtually guarantees national exposure -- was awfully famous. But he wasn't nearly valuable enough to offset the loss of players and draft picks the Minnesota Vikings surrendered in exchange for him.
Which brings us to this past weekend's blockbuster NHL trade. One of my favorite sayings -- which gets a lot of use when the topic of the Cowboys comes up -- is "he's more famous than good." (Think, in the NFL, of Roy Williams -- either Roy Williams; your choice.)
Dion Phaneuf was drafted ninth overall by the Calgary Flames in the watershed 2003 Entry Draft.* In his rookie year of 2005-06, he scored 20 goals, an outstanding total for any defenseman and a virtually unheard-of accomplishment for a rookie defenseman. (It happened twice in the high-scoring 1980s and never else.) He was the third nominee for the Calder Trophy alongside two guys you might have heard of, Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.
*This draft was possibly the greatest assemblage of talent in the history of any professional draft. Among the first 50 picks in that draft were the following All-Stars/Olympians/general bad-asses: Marc-Andre Fleury, Eric Staal, Ryan Getzlaf, Zach Parise, Jeff Carter, Thomas Vanek, Corey Perry, Mike Richards, Dustin Brown, Ryan Kesler, Shea Weber, Brent Seabrook, Braydon Coburn, Loui Eriksson, Patrice Bergeron, and Matt Carle. Jesus fuck. All but one of the 30 first-round picks reached the NHL, which is, frankly, absurd.
On a good team in a Canadian market, with a heavy-hitting style that lent itself to highlight reels, and blessed with a totally righteous name (seriously: Dion Phaneuf), Phaneuf became an overnight sensation. He scored 17 more goals the following season (mostly at age 20), and was lavished with a 6-year, $39M contract in 2007-08 en route to another 17 goals, this time with career highs in assists (43) and plus/minus (plus 12).
And from that point forward, his progress ground to a full halt.
(To prevent the dreaded Plaschke Paragraph there, I considered pointing out, apropos of absolutely nothing, that Phaneuf shares a birthday with my late Grandmother. But I thought better of it.)
Still chasing the highlight-reel hits that helped make him famous in the first place, by his fourth season in the NHL he had still failed to develop any sense of how to play without the puck -- not good for a defenseman. (Miss the check or arrive a split second too late, and the other team is off to the races toward your net while you're standing around in the neutral zone.) In 2008-09 -- while gracing the cover of EA Sports' NHL 09 -- Phaneuf led the entire NHL in total minuses.* He offset them in part with 26 points at even strength, but still finished a lousy minus-11 -- not acceptable for a presumed number-one defenseman on a 98-point team that fell 2 points short of a division championship.
*In other words, he was on the ice for more even-strength and short-handed goals by the other team than any other player in the league.
Furthermore, it's apparent -- to me, at least -- that Phaneuf was never as good as he was perceived to be. Power-play goal-scoring by a defenseman is about as non-predictive a statistic as you'll find in the NHL.* It's not quite at the level of blocked extra points in football, but it's close. Of Phaneuf's 20, 17, and 17 goals in his first three seasons, 17, 13, and 10, respectively, came on the power play. Those shots aren't always going to get through all the traffic between the blueline and the net, and when this inevitably happens, your offensive production is going to crash into an iceberg: last year Phaneuf had only 4 power-play goals and 11 overall.
*Ask the Edmonton Oilers about the predictive value of Sheldon Souray's 19-PPG season in Montreal in 2006-07... If you can distract them from their dogged efforts to find a team to eat the 5-year, $27M contract they lavished on him in the subsequent offseason. That has bought them 14 total PPGs since.
The Flames, understandably leery of Phaneuf's status as an elite blueliner, then signed free agent Jay Bouwmeester to a 5-year, $33M contract this past offseason. Combined with the Phaneuf contract and those of stay-at-home veteran D-man Robyn Regehr and world-class goaltender Miikka Kiprusoff, the Flames had committed a ludicrous percentage of the salary cap to defensemen and goalies, while winger Jarome Iginla -- one of the true superstar offensive players of the era -- continued to dutifully smash his head into a wall without the help of a better-than-adequate center.
The Canadian media members (and Flames fans) who rushed to crown Phaneuf the Next Big Thing in 2006 reacted swiftly in the opposite direction once his development stalled. With the Flames underachieving wildly this season, Phaneuf -- even despite his still-incomplete game -- was probably blamed unfairly. So, after a nine-game losing streak knocked the Flames out of the playoff picture entirely, the Flames front office hunkered down with Toronto GM Brian Burke and unloaded Phaneuf for a package of half-decent players.
Sports history is littered with "three-quarters-on-the-dollar" trades, the best recent NHL example of which being the Boston Bruins' indefensible exile of Joe Thornton to San Jose. But is Phaneuf actually a dollar? Was he ever? Would he be a dollar if Nashville had drafted him seventh overall in 2003 and Calgary had taken Ryan Suter* ninth instead?
*More steady in his own end of the ice but less explosive offensively; also, perhaps relevantly, American. The point, though: Would anyone think Phaneuf was a superstar if he played for a low-profile team?
The take: winger Niklas Hagman, center Matt Stajan, defenseman Ian White, and winger Jamal Mayers. (Winger Fredrik Sjostrom -- a/k/a "Freddie Shoes" -- and defensive prospect Keith Aulie were packaged with Phaneuf.)
Even Flames fans who became disenchanted with Phaneuf were left wondering, "that's all we got for Dion Goddamn Phaneuf?"
But, to quote Ed Olczyk, "Lookit!" -- Hagman was leading the abysmal Maple Leafs in goals, Stajan was leading them in assists, White is a low-salaried and reliable defenseman, and Mayers is... um, a token black guy. Most importantly, the Flames purged Phaneuf's outrageous contract.
With the sudden development of defenseman Mark Giordano this season (13 even-strength points, plus-4), Phaneuf (10 even-strength points, plus-3) had become the team's fourth best defenseman. As outrageous as it seems, at this point he is replaceable by White, a guy no one had ever heard of until last season. White has 26 points this season, with only 5 on the power play, and (at plus-1) is one of only two plus players on a garbage barge of a Maple Leafs squad that is dead last in the Eastern Conference.
(White, by the way, was immediately issued Phaneuf's number 3 upon his arrival to Calgary. Not having trouble moving on, are we?)
The Flames have face-planted so badly this season that it'll take an act of God to prevent them from facing the world-beating Blackhawks or Sharks in the first round of the playoffs... if they make it at all. But at least now they're free to upgrade their offense next season -- and they've upgraded it already with Stajan (albeit just this season, as he's in the final year of his contract) and Hagman (who has 2 more years left at $3M each).
And meanwhile, the Maple Leafs have a grand total of one legitimate top-six forward on their roster (Phil Kessel). They've committed a metric shit-tonne of money to their defense, with Phaneuf ($6.5M/y) joining the grotesquely overpaid Mike Komisarek ($4.5M/y), Francois Beauchemin ($3.8M/y), Tomas Kaberle* ($4.5M/y), and Jeff Finger ($3.5M/y). And they followed up the Phaneuf acquisition by trading for goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere, who has a whopping $7M salary next season.
*Kaberle is actually pretty decent, despite his atrocious plus/minus. He also has only 1 year left on his deal. The point, though: look at all that fuckin' money they spend on defensemen!
Um... Does this roster's composition look familiar? Good news for Kessel, I guess -- he could become the next Iginla!
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2 comments:
I heard Phaneuf was traded to federal pound me in the ass prison. At least next Thursday is Hawaiian shirt day, so he can go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt, you know, if he wants to.
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