Quote:
Originally Posted by 1qqaaz
Don't know if I can agree. Baertschi was, to date, the hardest working prospect I've ever seen. He spent an insane amount of time working on his skills/conditioning after the practices.
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Yep, he fooled a lot of people with his effort on conditioning and after-practice skills.
In actual games, laziest floater that would make James Neal blush. If it wasn't for Charlie Simmer doing colour for as long as he did on Flames' broadcasts, maybe I wouldn't have noticed either, but I mentioned this on the forums back then - how little he moved his feet. Just glide, float, glide glide.. skate.. glide glide glide. Definitely skilled, but completely wasted.
I am not even talking about the concussion issues - he lost every puck battle, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt for being apprehensive about that. He just floated all the fricken time. I noticed it once, and I would start focusing on him for entire shifts at a time, and was astonished at how little work he put into everything. Completely floated almost all the time - unless he had a good scoring chance.
Burke was 100% right for blasting him.
However, yep, he definitely loved working hard on his skills after practice, and riding a bike. Fooled me too, and fooled Button who talked about how he would ride the bike rather than play video games.
Valimaki has a really good shot at making a career for himself here. There is a long list of defencemen who really improved under Sutter, and I hope he takes the path of Regehr, Leopold, etc., than Baertschi.