Nazem Kadri Isn’t Wayne Gretzky

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Canadian hockey fans, many of whom are sports fans of a particularly obsessive variety, get more excited by young talent than Jack Nicholson. Most of the time it’s equally creepy too.

With the way sports fandom is intertwined with online activity, for the prospectophile, there’s a bonanza of information available about any team’s new highly touted player with the mid-90s birthdate. You can go to YouTube and find grainy highlight videos, you can follow a nineteen year old on Twitter while he tweets mostly at pretty girls, and you can argue about his upsides on your favourite message board—where you apparently get bonus points for coming up with the most over the top player comparison (he’s just like Jagr!).

This is a dull process, but it’s also routine for hundreds of thousands of hockey fans. So it’s not surprising that so many seem to forget that these young professional athletes are mostly absurdly talented goofballs, and not any kind of appropriate vessel for ones hopes and dreams.

The emotional investment sports fans make in the future of the teams they root for is universal, of course, but there are unique features to the way Canadian hockey fans engage in it. That’s been especially apparent lately.

In Toronto, it’s all about the man they call “the dream,” Nazem Kadri, a second year pro having a breakout campaign for a team poised to end an eight year playoff drought later this month. He’s the chosen one this season, and has been compared to Doug Gilmour in the papers (because that’s not at all nauseating) and Wayne Gretzky (really?) by Don Cherry, who also kissed Kadri on air.

The thing about Nazem Kadri is that he’s riding some completely insane “percentages” this season. In other words he’s a good player who looks like a potentially legendary one thanks to puck luck.

Because goals in hockey, though a product of skill, are mostly random events, on-ice scoring percentage at the NHL level is extraordinarily stable. Basically 95% of players will have an on-ice shooting percentage between 7-8.5% over a large sample—this season Nazem Kadri’s on-ice shooting percentage is over 15%.

Again, that’s not all luck. The highest sustained rate in the NHL is closer to 11%, after all, and that belongs to Sidney Crosby. So a reasonable conclusion would be that either Kadri has been extraordinarily fortunate this season and his point per game totals are the result of smoke and mirrors, or he’s significantly better than Sidney Crosby. This argument shouldn’t last too long.

Oh but it will. The Globe and Mail’s Leafs beat-writer James Mirtle pointed out the likelihood that Kadri’s production was unsustainable this past week. The Globe and Mail comment section on the article is a sight to behold. A whole whack of comments have been removed—likely because they were too racist, or intolerant—but even among those that remain there’s some golden nuggets.  Like this comment from Whazzup1 who thinks “time will tell” whether or not Wayne Gretzky is a fair comparison for Kadri.

You’re shitting me, right? Meanwhile DickTurpin1 is sure that James Mirtle and the Globe and Mail has an agenda, why else would someone write anything negative ever about the 23 year old man who is his shining star?

Nazem Kadri is already a useful top-nine forward, even if he’s not the super-duper star he’s appeared to be in a shortened season. His ability to draw penalties—with his patented shoulder shimmy to make damn sure the referee sees he was hooked, the single best embellishing move in the league at the moment—is special, and so is his passing. But the media really needs to cool it on the unhinged Gretzky and Gilmour comparisons.

They’re getting way ahead of themselves since what Kadri really is—just like Zack Kassian in Vancouver or even Taylor Hall in Edmonton—is a gifted kid struggling to figure out how to be successful as a professional athlete. This is the perspective that might be worth keeping in mind occasionally.

Follow Thomas Drance on Twitter: @ThomasDrance

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