scribe

Sometimes, all you need to do to make it in the NHL is get your foot in the door. It’s the same with just about any job, but NHL lore is full of stories of guys who took advantage of opportunities and never looked back.

Trading an established player for prospects is always a gamble that rarely draws anything less than scorn or ridicule from fans and media.

Teams don’t do it because they think they can get ahead by doing so, they do it because they’re forced to and they’re trying to cut their losses.

A draft is supposed to be a league’s way of leveling out the playing field.

Call it egalitarian, socialist, counter-evolutionary – even naïve – but as long as leagues award the top pick to the worst team, we have to operate on the assumption that by using such a system, leagues are trying to offer a hand-up to the cellar-dwellers. If that’s the case, why do the Canadian major junior leagues allow prospects and the fat-wallet teams to game the system?

Note: Geoffrion has not been featured in three consecutive Dobber Prospect Reports and this profile is a response to a request in the prospects forum.

On bloodlines alone, Blake Geoffrion seems destined for greatness, but a name only catches people’s eyes and a  might give a player a longer look. No NHL team is going to hand Blake Geoffrion a roster spot just because of his ancestors.

Even when you’re the great grandson of Howie (The Stratford Streak) Morenz, the grandson of Bernie (Boom Boom) Geoffrion, and the son of a former NHLer, Daniel Geoffrion, you still need to put in the work.

Ian Cole is on the cusp of becoming a good fantasy prospect. There’s no doubt that the first-round pick from 2007 is a good hockey prospect and will help the St. Louis Blues, but when combing through the prospect ranks for the upcoming Dobber Prospects Guide, I had the option of picking one of their players for the Prospect Guide. I considered Cole, but didn’t include him, because in the end, I don’t think he will be a good fantasy player.

The Nashville Predators must have a secret lab somewhere where they breed young defence prospects. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the names of all of them, another one takes a big development leap.

This year, that defenceman is Roman Josi, a Swiss-bred rearguard that the Predators took in the second round (38^th overall) in 2008.

I had a bit of a Eureka moment the other day as I was sifting through scouting reports and doing some research for the 2010 DobberHockey Prospects Report. I found a prospect that is not drafted in my league, not on my list of assigned players for the prospects report, and – more importantly -- has some decent upside.

Since I’d rather not use this column to profile players who we’ll be featuring in our upcoming Prospects Report, I was pretty happy to find this little nugget in the Anaheim system. His name is Justin Schultz.

The best left wingers in Los Angeles Kings history are known for scoring goals and racking up the points. Luc Robitaille and Charlie Simmer had stellar careers with the Kinds and they also had Jari Kurri for a few years, but the left side has always been a difficult spot to fill. When they have found a keeper, he’s been a skill guy, not your prototypical left winger (Gary Roberts, Brendan Shanahan). Alexander Frolov is the most recent example of this, but he might not even be around after this summer.