Burnside: How did Roman Josi become face of the Predators and a Hart Trophy hopeful?
The Nashville Predators are one of the surprise teams of this NHL season. Barring an unforeseen collapse, they are going to the playoffs and they are going to be a handful.
One of the fascinating narratives in recent days has been the role Predators captain Roman Josi has played in this renaissance in Nashville, where the team seemed to have lost its way after an appearance in the 2017 Stanley Cup final.
Not only has Josi seemingly surpassed Cale Makar down the stretch as the favorite to win the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenseman, but there has been ongoing discussion on a variety of platforms about Josi’s worthiness as a Hart Trophy candidate.
It’s a fascinating topic. Josi just had a 12-game point streak come to an end. It was his second point streak of at least 10 games this season. As of Friday morning Josi was 10th in NHL scoring with 81 points and had a realistic shot at reaching the magical 100-point plateau. If he reaches triple digits, Josi will be the first defenseman to do so since Hall of Famer Brian Leetch notched 102 in 1991-92.
But to understand how all this has come to pass in Nashville, we start not with the 31-year-old Josi but with the 22nd overall pick in the 1994 NHL draft, a man named Jeff Kealty.
Kealty was a promising defenseman coming out of Boston University who was drafted by Quebec but ended up signing with the Predators’ organization. Among his teammates at BU were current NHL executives and/or coaches and/or former NHLers Chris Drury, John Hynes, Mike Grier and Jay Pandolfo.
Kealty played one full season for the Predators’ farm team in Milwaukee – then in the old International Hockey League – but in the team’s first game during the 1999-2000 season he suffered a head injury and never played again.
After dealing with concussion issues, Kealty went to work for the Predators as a scout. He’s never left the organization.
Kealty now holds the title of assistant general manager and director of scouting and, while his duties have expanded over the years, the Boston-area native still gets that prickle of anticipation when he walks into an arena on a scouting trip, whether he’s walking in to catch a USHL or college game or perhaps walking into a rink in Leksand or Mora, Sweden, which is where a 17-year-old Roman Josi played for an undermanned Swiss team at the 2007 World Junior Championship.
Kealty laughs at how most players view the idea of scouting when they are playing. Oh, you watch hockey. Maybe take some notes. Cool job. And maybe Kealty thought the same as he was contemplating his role in the game after he hung up the blades for good. But he learned quickly that scouting or more specifically scouting properly is complex and layered and there is nothing sure about any of it.
The job is so much more nuanced than most people, even players, think it is, because one of the first lessons of scouting is that you’re constantly comparing things that can’t really be compared. Like trying to weigh teenagers playing major or Tier II junior against collegiate kids or kids playing in professional men’s leagues all over Europe. All these players are at different points of their evolution and you must, as a scout, discern not just what they are now, but what they will become.
“There’s not a whole ton of common denominators to it,” Kealty said.
And, oh yeah, if you screw up at the job, your team sucks. That’s the reality.
Kealty has often said to his long-time boss, Nashville GM David Poile, that scouting, especially at the amateur level, is more arts and literature and less maths and sciences. And it’s a job you can’t do half-heartedly. You can’t fake it.
“You find out quickly how much love it or how much you don’t love it,” Kealty said. “You either have to do it right or you don’t do it, and you’ve got to understand that.”
Luckily for Kealty and the Predators, as it turns out, not only did Kealty love it but he loved to do it the right way. In 2007, the year before was Josi’s drafted, Kealty became the team’s head of amateur scouting and then later that year became director of player personnel while continuing to lead the team’s amateur scouting group.
The 2008 draft held in Ottawa would be Kealty’s first at the helm of the Predators’ table. It would become one of the most important drafts in team history because of the skinny Swiss defender the Predators had been keeping their eye on since long before he became draft eligible.
Josi had played on the Swiss U18 team and was just 17 when he appeared on the Preds’ scouting radar at the World Junior Championship in 2007. Switzerland has taken large steps in becoming a competitive international hockey entity, but at that time they were still a hockey nation that struggled to compete with the more established countries. In part, that’s why Josi stuck out.
“Even back then he loved to have that puck on his stick. And his skating has always been elite,” Kealty said.
He can’t help but think that Josi’s ability to control the puck for long periods of time now against the world’s best players stems from the fact that perhaps he didn’t have as many skilled teammates at those high-profile international events as players on more complete teams did.
“He just didn’t have the supporting cast on those teams,” Kealty said. “It was almost like it was Roman Josi against the Swedes, Roman Josi against the Finns.”
The other thing that stood out for Kealty and the Preds’ European scouts was that Josi seemed to thrive in situations where his team was overmatched. Frequently, the opposite happens for young players.
“Roman was different in that sense. There was no fear at all, no intimidation, he played his game, he wanted the puck,” Kealty said.
In Josi’s draft year, 2007-08, the Preds began watching in earnest starting at the Ivan Hlinka Tournament in late summer. They looked closely at the 2008 World Junior Championship when Josi shone against the likes of Steven Stamkos and Alex Pietrangelo, both of whom would be selected at or near the top of the 2008 draft.
“He had the puck on his stick the whole game,” Kealty said. “You could see the talent. He had the fire. That was something that really stuck out.”
They also kept tabs on him as he played full time in the Swiss elite league with one of the top clubs, Bern.
As the draft in Ottawa approached, the Preds had him penciled in as a first-rounder on their draft board. But as it turned out, other NHL teams did not share Nashville’s enthusiasm for the Swiss defenseman. The Predators had two first-round picks and went with Colin Wilson seventh overall and then a goaltender, Chet Pickard, 18th overall.
When the Predators’ draft team got back to their meeting room after the first round was complete, Josi was the top player left on their board, “by far,” Kealty said.
They began talking about how they could get themselves in position to nab him. Nashville had the 45th pick and they started going through teams that might have been willing to move back in a deal with the Preds. It seems counterintuitive now, but there was still a, “Well, he’s a Swiss defenseman” bias that teams may have had that scared teams off. Even Poile raised an eyebrow on that second day of the draft when it came time to make the deal with Arizona that would move the Preds up and land them Josi – as in, “Are you really sure this is the kid you want?”
“Back then I think it worked in our favor,” the fact the Swiss were still considered a lesser hockey nation, Kealty said.
It was, in a sense, Kealty’s draft, and he confirmed to Poile that, yes, this was the player they wanted and wanted badly.
“It was kind of a gut feeling but that all goes back to the scouting,” Kealty said.
The draft team held their collective breaths as the first picks of the second round were made, hoping not to hear Josi’s name. Florida took goaltender Jacob Markstrom with the first pick of the second round. Los Angeles took defenseman Slava Voynov. The Blues had back-to-back picks, one of which was used to take netminder Jake Allen. Anaheim, the New Islanders and Columbus all made picks, and then it was time for Arizona, which had the 38th pick and were willing to swap with Nashville, which also threw in a third-round pick.
Poile chuckles at the retelling of the Josi story, because at every draft every NHL GM has a similar conversation with their scouting staff about moving up to get “their” guy.
While those conversations are commonplace, results like Josi are rare and, because of their rarity, become magnified in their importance. They are the stories that get told around scouting meetings as a reminder of what the job is about and what is possible if everything falls together.
“You have to have those stories,” Poile said, because just as often the stories are of another team snapping up a player you’ve had your eye on for a day and a half or of moving up in the draft only to find out the player you coveted turns out to be much less than scouts had imagined.
“This time it worked out really well, and kudos to Jeff and the scouts for putting the player in the right position to be drafted,” Poile said.
If you had to redraw the 2008 draft, how high does Josi rank? Stamkos went No. 1, Drew Doughty No. 2, Pietrangelo at No. 4 and Erik Karlsson at 15th. You could make an argument that Josi would be in the top three in a redraft any day of the week.
“When you see something like that work out, to see the player that he is,” Kealty said. “He is dynamic, he’s every word you could think of and now really he’s the face of our franchise and maybe the best defenseman on the planet. It’s pretty cool to watch.
“I love to tell that story because I think that in this job, a job that I’ve done for a long time now, that’s what you do it for.”
A few days after the draft, Poile and Kealty were standing at the back of a meeting room at the team’s development camp, and the GM asked his top scout where the much-talked-about Josi was. Kealty pointed to a teenager wearing jean shorts and a backwards baseball cap.
Now, when Kealty is in town, he brings his kids down to the locker room and they always stop for a quick chat with the Predators’ captain and former Norris Trophy winner.
Does Poile think about those days in Ottawa in June of 2008 and the conversations with Kealty and how this all turned out?
Poile chuckles again.
“Every night.”