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The Morning Skate, Oct. 4: Murph on Cheech and Shorty, plus what's a young defenceman worth?

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Stopped by the rink yesterday for a chat. More on that in a moment.

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First, a good discovery: Troy Stecher and Ben Hutton as a defence pair. That’s a great thing. It’s fair to assume Chris Tanev and Alex Edler will face the heavy matchups to start, with Stecher and Hutton playing against the next-best.

Really, this is an excellent development.

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The Canucks still have no true first line, but at least they’ll be more interesting.

Now, on to why I was at the rink:

It’s the debut of the Morning Skate sports media Q&A. Our first guest: Sportsnet’s Dan Murphy.

Dan Murphy’s hand keeps showing up at ProvinceSports.com
Dan Murphy’s hand keeps showing up at ProvinceSports.com Photo by Gerry Kahrmann /PNG

Alright, Dan Murphy, tell me about your job. What do you do. People think you just go on TV?

I am basically a babysitter for John Shorthouse and John Garrett. On the road, I try to watch their food intake, and beer intake, but it’s impossible. John Garrett is like a four year old child: it’s chicken fingers and ketchup, or pizza and ketchup, or white bread and ham cheese is “healthy.” That would one part of my job, but the other part of it, it’s been close to two decades now, host the Canucks television broadcast. It’s evolved over the years. It’s a little more fun now, where I get to host intermission panels where I get to break down a lot more stuff, interviewing a player for 50 seconds. It’s been a fun job over the years. Until recently, the team had always been quite good. My first year was the year they lost in six to Detroit (2002) and then from then on, there’s only been a couple seasons where they’ve missed the playoffs until recently.

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Sportsnet’s John Garrett
Sportsnet’s John Garrett Photo by Gerry Kahrmann /PROVINCE

I’ve had a pretty good run and it’s been fun.

Most people say “oh why are they asking those questions” — what’s the challenge for you and Irf (Gaffar) when, as you said, you’ve got only fifty seconds and the player’s sweating, he’s only just come off the ice?

First off, you have to pick a player. It’s a game driven interview. So if someone’s made a terrible mistake late in the period and you’ve asked for him, chances are you’re not getting him and they’ll give you someone else. So it’s not going to be any sort of confrontational interview. The majority of the time you’re not getting anything substantial out of those, but the odd time you might get a decent answer if something’s happened — like a fight or a hit — where you get an answer from a player and sometimes you have some fun too. I don’t think it was last season, the season before, in Washington, Kuznetsov spoke about drinking whisky and smoking a cigar. I understand how those aren’t must-watch but once in a while, you can get something from a certain player. Usually post-game is a better time to talk to them but once in a while you do get something, so I understand why they’re kept around.

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You’re here every day (at the rink) it feels like. Give me a quick rundown of how you prep works, what are you doing when you’re not on air?

Many times in the morning, you’ll have to do some sort of news update for Sportsnet 360. And then a lot of other times, it’s the news of the day. There’s not often a lot unless it’s something like Horvat signs, we’ll report then, or a day like today where there might be news on Archibald or Virtanen or of course the Pouliot trade, the network would like a story.

But a lot of days, it’s about seeing if you can single out a player, walk in and talk to him, see if you can get a little story that you can tell on the broadcast, something that you might not otherwise get by reading the paper or not talking to him personally. Those are the kind of little nuggets you try to get in games for stories.

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That’s it, just try to further your relationship with players.

What’s the hardest part about your job?

Travel, probably. Listen, they make it as easy as possible to travel: nice hotels, charter flights, but being away from family — I think you average 13 days away every month — so regardless of how good those hotels are or how nice the plane is, arriving at different cities at 2, 3 in the morning, arriving at home at the same time, can get tiresome after a while.

Sportsnet’s John Shorthouse
Sportsnet’s John Shorthouse Photo by Gerry Kahrmann /PROVINCE

But I still like it. I think the job would be impossible if you didn’t like it, or who you travel with. Shorthouse and Garrett, we have just a fantastic time. Along with our producer Greg Shannon, we have a really tight-knit group on the road.

What the best part about your job?

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It’s hockey. *chuckles* There’s no physical labour? I get to watch a sport that everybody loves. I get to talk about something that a lot of people are interested in, it’s kind of like not real life. I think that’s basically it. It still is fun coming to work and that’s an important thing.

When you sit back and look at the path that you took, what was the toughest thing?

I got lucky. Right out of BCIT, I took a part-time job at Sports Page, so right right away I was in with (Don) Taylor, Barry Macdonald, which was an unbelievable work environment with those guys, Paul Carson, Sean McCormick came through. We had a blast there.

I guess the only thing is I went for four years there, I went from kind of like a production assistant to an associate producer to a writer to a producer and never got a chance to go on the air. So early in my career it looked like I was going to be a producer.

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I’ve told this story before: I got hired by the Golf Channel to produce Golf Central and I was getting paperwork and my immigration lawyer was getting everything set up to move down to Orlando and in the summer of ’99 I got hired by Sportsnet to be a reporter. Sometimes I wonder what the path would have been had I gone down to Orlando, maybe I’d have got on air, I’m not sure. Where would that have taken me? That would have been neat to find out. At that time, Scott Van Pelt (now at ESPN) was one of their anchors.

There’s been no hardships, but that’s been the one fork in the road that could have happened. A couple times over the years, I’ve been asked to move to Toronto to do a similar job to what I’m doing here but my wife has a great job out here and I’ve got a lot of family out here so I’m not sure where my career would have gone had I gone to Toronto but certainly I’m happy with the way things have worked out?

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Last one: is ketchup on pizza John Garrett’s greatest crime against food?

Oh boy. I would probably say yes. There are just so many shocking things with his eating habits. But the thing is, he’s got no home game. Like at home, I think his wife forces him to eat well, he’s not ordering beers two at a time, so I think for the most part at home he’s ok, but on the road, it’s difficult to go out and have a good meal with John because using cutlery isn’t one of his favourite things and he seriously thinks that going for a healthy lunch, if he’s going for healthy, is Subway on Italian — not white — ham and cheese, extra mayo, extra cheese, and no veggies. None.

Let’s get skating.

The Home Team

And so, here are your 2017-18 Vancouver Canucks…at least to start.

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Bonus marks to Cole Cassels for making the first team picture of the year. (He’s injured and can’t be demoted to the AHL yet.)

— Derek Dorsett is determined to make an impact, writes Kuzma.

Here’s an underrated aspect of his game: his penalty killing. The Canucks don’t have many guys with experience there; it’ll keep him in the lineup.

As it stands, the most likely other candidates to kill penalties are Eriksson and Sutter, both quite good, and Markus Granlund. There’s been talk of Alex Burmistrov, but he’s got to be in the lineup. You’d like to have six guys who can fill that role.

Bo Horvat killed a lot of penalties last year but he wasn’t very good at it.

This is going to be a project to watch.

Derrick Pouliot was sent to the Vancouver Canucks on Tuesday for Andrey Pedan and a draft pick by the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Derrick Pouliot was sent to the Vancouver Canucks on Tuesday for Andrey Pedan and a draft pick by the Pittsburgh Penguins. Photo by Paul Bereswill /Getty Images

— To re-iterate: defencemen peak in their early 20s and the begin a slow decline through 30, after which most fall off a performance cliff.

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That’s from Hockey Graphs. Want to dig into the numbers? Here you go.

Suffice it to say: you know what a defenceman is going to be by the time they’re 22 or 23.

This is a truth which covers all sports and pretty any position.

Botchford notes that Pouliot has had huge problems on defence, but has proven to have an offensive edge.

My only worry: he’s already 23, and if you go by historic trends, he’ll never produce at the same rate again. Offence won’t carry him forward enough, he needs to find a way to up his defensive game.

Pedan tusseling with Jordan Nolan.
Pedan tusseling with Jordan Nolan. Photo by Jeff Vinnick /PNG

— Benning, despite suggesting defencemen take longer to develop, told reporters “…we made the decision because we believe in Derrick’s talent level, his skill level. We think the way he skates, the way he can carry the puck up ice and jump up in the play, he’s an offensive defencemen. We believe his style of game is going to fit the way Travis wants to coach.”

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It got Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre thinking of the likes of Christian Ehrhoff, Jyrki Lumme and Paul Reinhart. The first and the last are more challenging comparisons in my book, as Ehrhoff had a good rep coming with him from San Jose — remember the Canucks were able to add him because of a Sharks cap crunch — while Reinhart was at the tail end of a fine career, mostly spent with the Flames, when he joined the Canucks in 1988.

Lumme is a good one, though. Pat Quinn traded for the Finn at age 23, after he’d played just 75 games in two seasons on the very deep Canadiens blue line. He’s now one of the finest rearguards in Canucks history. If Pouliot can turn himself in to Jyrki Lumme, the Canucks will be laughing.

Olli Juolevi, still just 19, is off to Finland for the year.
Olli Juolevi, still just 19, is off to Finland for the year. Photo by RICHARD LAM /Postmedia News Files

— One other point in favour of the trade? Pouliot has been in the NHL for a while. Pedan, for whatever reason, hasn’t. Tyler Dellow found that if you can’t crack an NHL lineup as a defenceman by the age of 21, it generally doesn’t go well.

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He explained:

I have a bit of a running joke with some friends that the folk wisdom of “it takes longer for defencemen to develop” is entirely a result of hockey people who’ve drafted a bad defenceman wanting to push off the day of reckoning for a while. If you can convince the world that you don’t know if he’s a bad defenceman until he’s 25, you can buy yourself seven years to do something that distracts from the fact that you’ve drafted a bad defenceman.

More seriously, I think that there’s a strong tendency to treat players as prospects long past the point at which they can reasonably be considered prospects and to fail to acknowledge that the ceiling on what a defenceman might be falls quickly. I took a look at defencemen who played a least 40 games in the AHL in their age 21 season between 2005-06 and 2011-12. I wanted to avoid guys who were sent down to get ice time during the 2012-13 lockout while also having some sense of what guys turned into. This produced a group of 195 defencemen.

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19 panned out, he found.

— Utica is beastly. They may even be Calder Cup contenders.

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So about that game last night

Who signed these pitchers?

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In the end the Yankees won. The Twins had a good year but in the end were punching well above their weight.

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Give Kaep a Job

Seriously, this is absurd.

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Who is Brandon Weedon?

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Weedon is a stop-gap measure who will probably be released back in to the wild by next week at the latest. That’s why you don’t sign him.

But there’s a whole other case for the Titans to sign him, as laid out by The Tennesseean here.

Around the NHL

Hockey’s back, tonight. Let’s take a bit of a run around the league.

— Nice touch here in Chicago:

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— Seattle’s a long way from getting an NHL rink.

— Ryan Lambert, almost always ready with a true gem:

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— Note: Jim Benning was nominally in charge of Boston’s drafts between 2007 and 2013 (the GM usually gets final call on the first round pick)

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— JV18, take note:

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— Golden Knights players have been making themselves visible to their new community since Sunday’s horror in Las Vegas.

— Two things here about PK’s dad:

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— We all get old, reminder number 1,206

Caps Challenge

Yordy Reyna is another key Cap who will miss the trip to New York.

As Steve Ewen notes, all five of the Peruvian’s goals have been match-winners. He’s a big game player and he’ll be missed this weekend.

Still RBNY are stumbling. They had a tough road loss in Toronto last weekend, which came on the heels of an ugly 3-3 draw with D.C. United. Of course the Caps lost at home to D.C. earlier this year, so they best no laugh about that woeful result for New York.

A point in the final three games clinches a top-four spot for the Caps. A win in the final three clinches top-two, and quite possibly the title.

Last Lap

— It’s moments like this where I do miss coaching high school rugby.

— Wrote about a nine year old Nintendo wiz yesterday.

— Baseball attendance is sliding.

— The NBA is ripping off the NHL.

— How’s this for a pitch invasion?

— Haven’t often watched much golf, but when I was a kid I always got a kick out of Chi Chi:

— This one is as much about Prince as it is about Tom Petty, but here’s another classic:

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It’s Hump Day. You made it. See you tomorrow!

pjohnston@postmedia.com

twitter.com/risingaction

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