Free washer | Shane Wright: imagine the outcry in Montreal…

The situation would have caused a terrible outcry in city A. It made no headlines, or barely, in city B.

City A has had a National League hockey club for 116 years and has 24 Stanley Cups. In 2022, she is drafted first overall for the third time in her history. There was Guy Lafleur in 1971, a monument alongside Maurice Richard and Jean Béliveau, then Doug Wickenheiser in 1980, a great disappointment.

City B got its club just three years ago. She holds the fourth choice. And the popular favorite magically lands in his backyard. We have the pleasant feeling of having fished out the first.

Shane Wright was scratched from the Seattle Kraken lineup for the second straight game Wednesday night. To add insult to injury for the young man, Seattle defeated Nashville 3-0.

After 18 games, the 20-year-old Wright had 2 points, 1 goal and 1 assist. He played only 8:34 in his last meeting with the Kraken and averages 12:25 of usage per game. He’s not necessarily bad, but he doesn’t generate much offensively.

Now let’s reverse the situation. Kent Hughes, general manager of the A team, sows hysteria in the Bell Center on July 6, 2022 by drafting Shane Wright, the favorite of experts and fans, the long-awaited first center, a forward with exceptional player status in the junior ranks, probably already better than Nick Suzuki at 18, the Canadian’s Patrice Bergeron.

The New Jersey Devils draft a defenseman, Simon Nemec, as expected, and the Arizona Coyotes also choose a center, Logan Cooley. The Kraken falls back at fourth on 6-foot-3, 225-pound Slovakian winger Juraj Slafkovsky, who very few have heard of in Montreal. We are obviously not making a case for it here.

Thursday November 21, 2024. Shane Wright has just been scratched from the lineup for the second game in a row by Martin St-Louis. He has 2 points in 18 games, after spending the season in the American League last year. He doesn’t provoke anything in attack and lacks explosiveness.

The second choice, Simon Nemec, is in the American League, but in Montreal we always prefer to compare its bad choices with the best of other clubs. Cooley has 12 points in 18 games in Arizona, after a 44-point season last year. But also, above all, Slafkovsky amassed 11 points in 16 games on the Kraken’s first line. He managed 50 points last year while Wright was stuck in the American League.

Ah! We have been waiting for a power winger for so long in Montreal. We made the same mistake as in 2018, drafting a center instead of a power winger. Imagine the Canadian with Slafkovsky and Brady Tkachuk…

Wright was not available to reporters this week. We want to protect him, rightly, from delicate questions, including those from the oldest players, which would undoubtedly bring Wickenheiser back into the equation.

To add insult to injury, the Kraken also drafted at the end of the second round a candidate for the Calder Trophy awarded to the rookie par excellence, defender Lane Hutson, 11 points in 19 games, employed 23 minutes per game. Team A, in addition, held four second-round picks and chose Jagger Firkus, Jani Nyman, Niklas Kokko and David Goyette ahead of Hutson.

Obviously, almost all of these beautiful people are still 20 years old. If we advocated patience with Jesperi Kotkaniemi at this age, we must also do it with Wright. Even if Kotkaniemi, despite all his faults, was clearly ahead of Wright at the same age, with 62 points in his first 171 games.

It is therefore not a question of condemning Wright at such a young age, since four of the first ten players chosen in the 2022 draft are playing in the American League at the moment.

But we can also rejoice in the favorable start to the careers of the hopes of this A team, if we are so quick to condemn their bad choices.

Quote of the day

It’s a very disappointing, frustrating day. It reflects our game. And it was avoidable. This is the difficult part. If we had done our job, he would still be leading the team. We feel very bad. He is a very good coach and a good person.

Bruins captain Brad Marchand on firing Jim Montgomery

Give or take a few commas, this is the declaration of every athlete, since the dawn of time, after the dismissal of their coach…