Fabian Brunnstrom and Other Players Greatly Hyped before Becoming Nhlers

[The Panther]

I think injuries played a large part in his career. He had some good seasons after his rookie year but the games played were often low in the season.

Juneau is often mis-remembered as a one-season wonder, but in fact (as you imply) he had three great offensive seasons to start his career. His 2nd full season might actually have been his best -- 85 points in just 74 games (pacing for 96). So, a pace of 6 fewer points than his rookie year on a club that scored 43 fewer goals. And then in the work-stoppage year, he still put up a point-per-game despite being traded (which was comparable to most of the best scorers in the League that season).

He's more Barry Pederson than Jacques Richard, anyway....

 

[The Panther]

Pat Price

This is what Peter Gzowski wrote about Price from early in the 1980-81 season (Price was with the young Oilers at the time):

"Number 26: Pat Price. One of the most highly regarded juniors ever to come out of the west — he was a star at 14 — Price signed a contract for more than a million dollars when he turned pro in 1974. For a while, he lived high, driving a Ferrari and picking up a lot of tabs. He was a disappointment, even to himself. He wrecked the Ferrari and was sent to the minor leagues. When the Oilers joined the NHL, Sather, in another of his reclamation projects, plucked him away from the New York Islanders, with whom he was seeing limited ice time. For all the cowboy boots and western music, he is a serious young man (he, too, is still only twenty-five), who studies the game painstakingly and is already talking about someday going into coaching."

 

[Johnny Engine]

Juneau is often mis-remembered as a one-season wonder, but in fact (as you imply) he had three great offensive seasons to start his career. His 2nd full season might actually have been his best -- 85 points in just 74 games (pacing for 96). So, a pace of 6 fewer points than his rookie year on a club that scored 43 fewer goals. And then in the work-stoppage year, he still put up a point-per-game despite being traded (which was comparable to most of the best scorers in the League that season).

He's more Barry Pederson than Jacques Richard, anyway....

The thing I remember about Juneau in the 1995ish range is takes about how, he's a very good playmaker, but he's probably not ever going to score 30 goals again, because that was Adam Oates's doing. And that's fair enough, he never did. And then he eventually stopped getting so many assists, but he was pushing 30 by then, so that's really not all that weird.
I think once you start adjusting for bits of context to Juneau's career (an Oates-related goal-scoring spike, the 1992-93 scoring explosion for top players, the lockout), his career curve from age 25 onward starts looking very normal - a point per game playmaker who drifts down to a 60-point pace by 28, and usually a 40-point pace in the first half of his 30s while providing good defensive play and then done by 36 - what's more normal than that? And it'd look even more normal if one granted him a few ramp-up seasons in his early 20s. He spent those years in college, and I'm not sure he even qualifies as a particularly late bloomer - he had been drafted 5 years before his big season (at 20, mind you), and was absolutely ripping up the ECAC circuit to the tune of 70 points in 30 games for several seasons, and given his 16 points in 14 games for the Bruins after graduating, there's no reason to think he wouldn't have had at least one earlier season as a fairly high scoring forward.

Before looking at him a little closer, I had been thinking of him as a rich man's Travis Green, but I'm not even sure that holds - I've said before that I really don't understand what higher-order skills Green was good at, despite being intimately familiar with him as a Maple Leaf. Usually, like with Juneau, you can see flashes of smarts or soft hands that only come out on the power play, once they've settled into their third line years (Tyler Ennis is another guy who you could say that about for the Leafs). Nothing like that for Green that I can remember.

 

[hypereconomist]

Mentioned Dopita earlier, if I recall correctly his wife gave up a good job to come over to North America with him and was really unhappy in their short time here. Being traded (to another country) probably didn't help the situation.

Shipachyov was a tough situation. His family just moved to Vegas and then the concert shooting happened. Then he's asked to play in AHL Chicago to get adjusted. He didn't seem thrilled with the idea of leaving his family indefinitely.

On top of the family issues, such as the lack of translator for his family, Shipachyov was an offense-first playmaker that Gallant shoved onto the 4th line with zero pp time. He did fine in his first three games and deserved more adjustment time in the NHL. His skill was NHL-caliber, but he didn't fit Gallant's style and GMGM did that wierd "if you're not playing for Vegas, you're not playing in the NHL" power move.

I don't think Shipachyov deserves to be mentioned in this thread, considering the circumstances.



Cervenka isn't deserving of this thread either. He suffered a blood clot in training camp that kept him out of the first month, which derailed what was already a shortened season. He was soft, but the hockey sense, hands, and overall skill was evident. He deserved another season to show what he could do.

 

[MS]

This is what Peter Gzowski wrote about Price from early in the 1980-81 season (Price was with the young Oilers at the time):

"Number 26: Pat Price. One of the most highly regarded juniors ever to come out of the west — he was a star at 14 — Price signed a contract for more than a million dollars when he turned pro in 1974. For a while, he lived high, driving a Ferrari and picking up a lot of tabs. He was a disappointment, even to himself. He wrecked the Ferrari and was sent to the minor leagues. When the Oilers joined the NHL, Sather, in another of his reclamation projects, plucked him away from the New York Islanders, with whom he was seeing limited ice time. For all the cowboy boots and western music, he is a serious young man (he, too, is still only twenty-five), who studies the game painstakingly and is already talking about someday going into coaching."

Price is slightly before my time (old enough to have a couple of his hockey cards, not old enough to actually remember him playing) and he’s always been a guy who caught my eye as having an underwhelming career relative to his size/toughness/skill/draft position so I’ve assumed he must have kind of been his era’s Jack Johnson.

The thing I remember about Juneau in the 1995ish range is takes about how, he's a very good playmaker, but he's probably not ever going to score 30 goals again, because that was Adam Oates's doing. And that's fair enough, he never did. And then he eventually stopped getting so many assists, but he was pushing 30 by then, so that's really not all that weird.
I think once you start adjusting for bits of context to Juneau's career (an Oates-related goal-scoring spike, the 1992-93 scoring explosion for top players, the lockout), his career curve from age 25 onward starts looking very normal - a point per game playmaker who drifts down to a 60-point pace by 28, and usually a 40-point pace in the first half of his 30s while providing good defensive play and then done by 36 - what's more normal than that? And it'd look even more normal if one granted him a few ramp-up seasons in his early 20s. He spent those years in college, and I'm not sure he even qualifies as a particularly late bloomer - he had been drafted 5 years before his big season (at 20, mind you), and was absolutely ripping up the ECAC circuit to the tune of 70 points in 30 games for several seasons, and given his 16 points in 14 games for the Bruins after graduating, there's no reason to think he wouldn't have had at least one earlier season as a fairly high scoring forward.

Before looking at him a little closer, I had been thinking of him as a rich man's Travis Green, but I'm not even sure that holds - I've said before that I really don't understand what higher-order skills Green was good at, despite being intimately familiar with him as a Maple Leaf. Usually, like with Juneau, you can see flashes of smarts or soft hands that only come out on the power play, once they've settled into their third line years (Tyler Ennis is another guy who you could say that about for the Leafs). Nothing like that for Green that I can remember.

Travis Green was basically a 35 point 3rd liner for his whole career outside of two years where he had extremely inflated offensive numbers from getting 1C minutes next to prime Ziggy Palffy.