We have van Riemsdyk now, but it will take time for these draft picks to make their mark. Draft day can't help like it used to...

It was a quiet weekend for the Leafs (two solid young defensemen added to the prospect stable), until the deal for James van Riemsdyk.  I'll have more to say on that move once I have thought it through a bit more.  For now, I'll simply say that as interesting a move as it is, it's not a shock.  It almost happened a year ago.  (I should add, for what little it's worth, that two of the things I suggested in my post Thursday night would occur have indeed already happened- the Leafs drafted a defenseman in the first round and Schenn was dealt. Nonetheless, the weekend was mostly about the draft and the kids the Leafs selected in the first two rounds.

Nowadays, with the 18 year-old draft, it’s common to expect most of the youngsters selected on NHL entry draft day to be longer-term “projects”.  That is, while a few elite kids will make the jump to "the show" and have an instant impact, the vast majority will need more time in junior hockey, in Europe or the minors.  In fact, that is usually best for their development (something I wish the Leafs, to this day, had done with their young players much more often, but I’ll save that venting for another day…).

No one is expecting the first two picks chosen by the Leaf brass over the last 24-48 hours to make the big club in the next two seasons. Rielly and Finn will no doubt keep growing and getting “bigger and stronger”, as we hear all the time.  They will show up at Leaf summer camp, attend all the neat orientation stuff and also take part in the main camp in September.  We’ll be told they both look outstanding, have a bright future—and then they will return to their junior teams.  We’ll see the same movie with them next fall, and ultimately they will (hopefully) take their place on the Leaf blueline, after more development time with the Marlies.

It’s all part of the process.  Ultimately, the Leafs may keep them, or trade them, but they are now part of the “asset pool” that will be valuable for the franchise going forward.

This all said, I can’t help but think back to a time when the Leafs were in just as desperate a situation as they are now, but took advantage of a single draft—and a creative off-season—to virtually transform their roster.  (I know it’s a different time and different circumstances, but stay with me…)

Here’s the background.  Under young General Manager Jim Gregory, the Leafs had been re-built significantly from their aging Punch Imlach 1967 Stanley Cup roster.  Long-gone were great players like Armstrong, Bower, Sawchuk, Stanley, Horton, Pronovost, Pulford and younger stars like Mahovlich and Pappin.  By the early '70s (specifically the 1971-’72 team that I’m thinking about), while the club still had oldsters like Normie Ullman and Dave Keon around, youth was taking over.

The defense was young and overall, fairly tough:  Rick Ley, Jim Dorey (later traded) Brad Selwood, Brian Glennie, Mike Pelyk and Jim McKenny were key performers.  The ageless Jacques Plante was in goal, but he shared time with a budding superstar in Bernie Parent. Up front, Darryl Sittler (a first-round pick in the summer of 1970) was just beginning to really emerge, along with other young forwards like rugged Jim Harrison and one of my all-time Maple Leaf favorites, Brian Spencer.

Unfortunately for Leaf fans, just as this promising young squad was finding its form (they lost to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins in 5 games in the playoffs in the spring of ’72, but it was a tough series), they were gutted by the birth of the World Hockey Association.  Then Leaf owner Harold Ballard didn’t believe the fledgling league would survive, and he refused to pay up to keep his young talent.  (The Rangers did, on the other hand, and remained a strong team for years.)  Gone suddenly were Pelyk, Selwood, Ley, Parent and Harrison.  Spencer was lost in the expansion draft to the Islanders. Dorey was traded to the Rangers but he, too, jumped to the WHA.

Consequently, the Leafs were awful in 1972-’73.  They missed the playoffs and weren’t very good- at all.

But Gregory turned misery into assets by making trades to acquire some extra draft choices.  He ended up with three selections in the first 15 picks in the summer of 1973.  He was able to take Lanny McDonald, a strong young winger from Western Canada, then grabbed big Bob Neely from Peterborough and Ian Turnbull, shown in action with the Leafs above right, from the Ottawa Juniors.  (Turnbull had actually played several years with the Montreal Junior Canadiens before that.) Interestingly, I had seen both Turnbull and Neely play a lot in junior, and was happy, as a young Leaf fan at the time, with both picks.  I particularly thought Turnbull was a steal, late in the first round.

Then, that summer, Gregory went one step further:  he signed two Swedish players, Borje Salming and Inge Hammarstrom, to contracts.  The un-drafted Europeans, two guys most of us in the pre-Internet age knew nothing about, brought a unique skill-set to the NHL.

So that’s five players who jumped immediately into the Maple Leaf line-up.  To varying degrees, they all had helped the team throughout the ‘70s, some into the ‘80s. (Under Roger Neilson in 1978, the Leafs made it to the semi-finals but ran up against the best team of that era, the Habs.) 

Salming and McDonald (traded in a bizarre manner by Imlach in his return to the Leafs as GM in the summer of 1979) went on to become Hall-of-Famers. Turnbull, Leaf fans of the time will remember, was a classic enigma—supremely talented offensively, but often seemingly disinterested and lazy, leading to countless unnecessary penalties and miscues.  Neely was miscast by the Leafs as a tough guy because of his size.  With different coaching (and a better work ethic on his part) he could have been a dominant talent, I still feel.  Hammarstrom was under-appreciated because he was finesse and skill in an era when Philadelphia's "Broad Street Bullies" were all the rage.  (Hammarstrom would have fit in beautifully in Montreal, on would think…)

The thing is, McDonald, Turnbull and Neely were all 20 when they were drafted.  Salming and Hammarstrom were pure free-agents and in their early 20s.  It cost the Leafs nothing to acquire those players.  Gregory pretty much knew what he was getting because these guys were way further along their development curve than the 18 year-olds that get drafted nowadays.

Burke didn’t have the same opportunity as Gregory this time around (though apparently we could have had four first-rounders, eh, if he had made those deals he was apparently "offered" about at the deadline…), but he may have to be just as creative as Gregory was as he continues to re-shape his roster, if he hopes to have the kind of success he is looking for.

There is no question van Riemsdyk is a start, but the cost of a young defenseman is one we won't be able to assess for some time.