I'm reminded of young Kadri after seeing a comment from ex-Leaf Johnny Wilson- a window into how the game is so different now

When I was working on a piece about Ron Wilson and his contract extension recently, I remembered that I had written some time ago about Ron’s father Larry, and uncle Johnny, both well-known professional players in the 1950s and ‘60s. Both had nice careers, Johnny spending quite a bit of time in the NHL, including with the Maple Leafs briefly in the late 1950s.  (He actually helped the Red Wings of Gordie Howe and many other greats win a number of Cups in the early 1950s...)

Both gentlemen,  later coached the Detroit Red Wings and were respected hockey guys, for sure.

When it was announced that Johnny Wilson had died last week at the age of 82, I came across a thoughtful piece on Johnny (pictured in his early 1950s Red Wing days at left) by one of my favorite mainstream media guys, Mike Zeisberger of the Toronto Sun.  In that piece, Mike recalled an interview that his Sun colleague Steve Simmons had penned before the current season got underway, in which he spoke with Johnny Wilson.  Wilson spoke proudly of his nephew Ron, of course, but also made a very relevant observation about the way the game is played nowadays.

The elder Wilson was quoted as saying, “I was a left winger. I don’t know how I’d react to all this coaching today. (In my day, as a player) I’d go out there and react to the situations as they transpire. I’d do it instinctively. Today, you’ve got somebody telling you, you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that. I think I’d go out there and be too afraid of making a mistake.”

The comment is of particular interest to someone like myself, because I am old enough to actually remember watching Johnny Wilson play in the NHL, and I, too, have seen such a massive shift in the way the game is played in this era, compared with the 1950s and ‘60s, particularly.

Given the passage of time, I guess that's not a shock, eh?  Oh, sure, hockey is the same sport, but it’s a very, very different game these days.  It’s not just that the players are bigger and faster, though that certainly contributes.  But players are able to do such high-skill moves at lightning speed that it's, well,  quite remarkable. And beyond that, the game is, of course, coached in such fine—sometimes excruciating—detail.

In the elder Wilson’s day, back when I was just a kid, there was one coach on the bench.  He wasn’t the “head coach”—he was the only coach.  There was nobody “upstairs” sending messages to the three guys behind the bench.  There was no one by the coach’s side in charge of, say, the defensemen.  Video was introduced by some teams in the 1960s (there was actually a Hockey Night in Canada feature about Punch Imlach's use of video in the mid '60s), yet wasn’t used so much to break down opposition tendencies until people like Leaf coach Roger Neilson made such opponent analysis part of his daily game preparation in the late 1970s.

But what really caught me about Wilson’s comment was his reference to doing things on instinct.  I’m not saying that’s a lost “art”, because the players today (at least many of them) are supremely skilled and are not only talented but in many cases very creative, too.  They think on their feet awfully well, and again, at very high speed.

I just think that the game is coached in such a way that many guys are, as Johnny Wilson put it, “afraid to make a mistake”. 

If you played for Jacques Lemaire in Jersey or Minnesota over the past fifteen seasons, or you play now for Ken Hitchcock (or any number of other systems-obsessed modern-day NHL coaches) you better be at the “right” spot on the ice- or else,  It’s all there in their “x’s” and “o’s” coaching and systems manual.

I think of a player like young Nazem Kadri now with the Leafs.  How many times has he been up and down already, between being sent back to junior hockey and of course, the Marlies.  And he's still only 21.  Every time the kid comes up, we all micro-analyze his play, look to see whether he “turns the puck over” at the other team’s blueline or loses his man defensively, etc.

And we’re just the fans.  Imagine what he’s hearing from the coaches.  Like the elder Wilson said, “Don’t do this, don’t do that….”.

I've said here many times about Kadri:  I wish they would just let him play.  I don;t mean he should be allowed to free-wheel and just do whatever he wants on every shift, but I've always believed that an athlete gets better by making mistakes- and being allowed to make mistakes without instant punishment.  And Wilson is not even as dogmatic as some NHL coaches, I don't think.  But Kadri has certainly been on a very short leash, it seems to me.

It strikes me that guys are rarely just allowed to play and develop naturally.  Sometimes making mistakes is in fact the best way to learn.

If you watch games from the ‘50s, ‘60s and even into the ‘70s, you see all kinds of mistakes, all over the ice.  Mistakes were just part of the game.  Oh, I’m sure coaches weren’t thrilled if a defenseman gave the puck away in his own zone, or a forward threw the puck blindly somewhere and it caused a rush going in the other direction.

But it was just a different mindset.  Some teams were always a bit more “defensive”, sure.  In fact, the Leafs, under Imlach, were never a star-studded team and tended to be more of a checking team, as opposed to a team like the Red Wings or the Black Hawks.  Heck, the always-successful Habs were famous for being a “fire wagon” team for decades, until Scotty Bowman (in the ‘70s) started also focusing on defensive awareness, tied into a still explosive attack.

No one spoke in those days of the “transition” game, the “trap”, the “left-wing lock”, “fronting” or any of the modern-day jargon that now populates the game.  Most of the statistics we focus on now weren’t a thing, even for GM’s, in those days.  As Johnny Wilson said, guys basically went out and played, and reacted to what was happening on the ice.  Players didn’t sit back in a football-style defensive posture, just waiting for the other team to try to find a way to break through the human logjam.

I always sound awfully out-of touch when I say this, but I do sometimes prefer the way the game was in those “olden days”, including after expansion in 1967 when there were suddenly twice as many jobs for players—and a little more job security, on the one hand (I realize if you were a young guy playing for someone like Imlach in Toronto in the ‘60s, a trip to the AHL was always a possibility if you made too many mistakes…).

But in that post ’67 era, especially, there were tons of mistakes, goals—and goalies who didn’t cover the entire bottom half of the net with technical precision and perfection.

And the era was filled with players, like Kadri, who weren’t afraid a “mistake” would earn them a one-way ticket to the minors.