Quote:
Originally Posted by Five-hole
I had a good talk with an Oilers fan friend yesterday about organizational DNA. We were both lamenting how, no matter how much certain personnel might change, there are things about organizations that seem to persist. With the Oilers it's what we all make fun of -- terrible depth, over-focus on star offensive talent, and weak D and goaltending.
With the Flames, it's this ridiculous pride about "doing things a better way", which in a very real sense can be translated into "not being the Oilers". We have this focus on team identify and defence and being a complete player and never tanking. This all makes sense.
... except that how it often manifests in practice is never drafting star talent and never letting skill flourish and develop. We constantly force all our pegs into square holes regardless of what shape they are and as a result you get consistency ... but it's boring, and consistently mediocre.
The fans and media in this city play a part in this too. This is not a good hockey team and everyone knows it but we cling to this pride that we're not the Oilers and that we're not going to tank.
I'm genuinely concerned that we're going to force the genuinely star-shaped Parekh into this same medicore, "consistent" square hole. This is the best prospect we've had since Tkachuk and we need to be building the organization around him, not forcing him to become the same lifeless square peg we expect all our players to become.
InB4 the "you're overreacting" crowd chimes in, as if we don't have 30 years of evidence that this is just the most recent, Exhibit A to.
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Interesting discussion. Personally I get the vibe that fans/media/organization have a bit of a tendency to overvalue/revere guys who are more defined by being hard working, blue collar, "plays the game the right way", "well rounded", underdogs. I imagine this comes from the hard hat wearing 2004 team which had elite talent (Iginla, Kipper) but was more greatly defined (IMO) by it's hard working, rough and tumble, grindy style.
This is obviously not always the case, Gaudreau being an obvious outlier amongst several others, but year over year I feel like you see almost a prioritization of celebrating the engine room guys rather than a coveting of elite elite talent.
Some examples of this that spring to mind off the top of my head in some level or another are guys like Lance Bouma, Justin Kirkland, Ryan Lomberg, Josh Jooris, Corey Sarich, Curtis Glencross.
That's obviously not to say that they view a Lomberg and a Parekh as interchangeable pieces. But when you look at what this team has previously coveted as their "organizational DNA" as you say, it is a stark contrast between the graceful, confident, silky, riverboat gambling style of Parekh versus the scrappy, hard working, blue collar, "complete" player that frequently gets celebrated here.
Going to be really interesting to see how Parekh fits into this organization long term.