Nik? said:
Well, personally, I'm not all that big on saying anyone got rushed regardless. There's no real way to know how to properly develop a player and without being able to try both ways there's no way to know if one approach would have worked where another failed. If the common wisdom on how to best develop a player was a universal then Joe Thornton was developed in the worst possible way by going immediately to the NHL and then getting stuck on the 4th line. He ended up being a pretty good player.
Good point. It seems pretty common for people to jump to that as an excuse as to why player x or player y didn't work out. I would venture a guess that there are a tonne of factors that go in to whether or not a player succeeds, one of which may be appearing in the NHL before they can handle it physically or mentally.
Nik? said:
As is though for the sake of argument let's say Schenn was rushed and that it did hurt his development. That was a Cliff Fletcher decision. There seems to be this growing trend to try and present the JFJ/Fletcher tenure as being representative of the Leafs forever and ever but as you and I have noted the Quinn years weren't anything like that. If we're going to talk about what Burke's doing we can't just compare him to JFJ.
I think it's a common misconception because of where the top end talent has come from over the last 20 to 25 years. Most of the stars on the Leafs teams since the late 80's were obtained through trade or free agent signing, i.e. Sundin, Gilmour, Andreychuk, Mogilny, Roberts, Curtis Joesph, Ed Belfour, but that doesn't mean that the Leafs weren't flushing out their roster with players that they had drafted.
If you look at the 80's the Leafs did draft some pretty good players. Vaive, Clark, Damphousse, Iafrate, Richardson, Courtnall come to mind, but they just couldn't seem to get over the hump, and they would inevitably make a bad deal, like the Kurvers deal or the Courtnall deal.
In the end, it seems to be mismanagement through a couple of bad deals that puts this team behind the eight ball. In hindsight, it really makes you realize what a fairly decent job Quinn did to maintain the competence level of the Leafs for as long as he did. Having Sundin probably helped a little though.