There’s nothing to make you feel the passage of time like the ever-rising birth dates of NHL prospects at the entry draft. A whole bunch of the players selected in this year’s draft were born in 1999. We are one year removed from NHL teams selecting players that were born . I swear I'm not old yet, but the NHL Entry Draft makes me feel ancient every single year.
There were prospects talking about "growing up" watching P.K. Subban, which sounds laughable, except Subban has been in the NHL for 8 years! When he started playing, these prospects were 9 years old! They totally did grow up watching Subban play. Heck, Instagram has been around for about the same length of time that Subban has been in the NHL. These prospects have spent half their lives spending half their lives on social media.
I mean, back in my day, kids had an email address and that’s it. And we liked it! We hiked up the stairs in the snow to the one computer in the house, made sure no one was on the phone, fed coal into the modem, and waited twenty minutes for our email to load, then marveled at the magic of being able to instantly communicate with Nigerian princes and give them our parents' credit card information.
If we were really advanced, we had an AIM or ICQ account. Now kids have Snapchat, Kik, Whatsapp, and Yik Yak. And they also have stupid dance moves that are way more stupid than the stupid dance moves back when I was a kid, like the Macarena.
Like dabbing.
Is dabbing cool anymore? It feels like it officially died when in January, 2016, but apparently that memo never made it to the () kids, who continue to dab at any and every opportunity.
At the very least, we know that memo never made it to Sweden, because the Canucks’ 2017 first round pick, Elias Pettersson, appears to enjoy the occasional dab. In fact, for a little while it was his go-to celebration after scoring a goal.
Pettersson didn't dab after every goal last season, but the dabbing begins with his goal at 2:09 in the above highlight video. It’s quick, not overly-pronounced, but it’s there.
He busts out a bigger dab after his gorgeous goal at 2:18, and it’s a well-deserved dab, because that’s a great goal. His slap shot goal right after that at 2:30 gets a mini-dab, as does his breakaway goal at 2:38.
That’s four dabs on 21 goals, a dab percentage of 19.05%. If he becomes a 30-goal scorer in the NHL, we can expect 5.7 dabs per season. That’s a solid dab rate, clearly elite.
When I praised Jim Benning for selecting Pettersson fifth overall, I wasn’t even taking into account his dabbing. That takes this from a strong pick to possibly the steal of the draft.
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