Jamie Drysdale Progression Philadelphia Flyers

Warning: Write off Jamie Drysdale at your own risk

Telling you right now, don’t be so quick to write off Jamie Drysdale.

The temptation is palpable, and you couldn’t be blamed for succumbing. Even without the prior traumas of the Flyers written all over this kid, from Shayne Gostisbehere to Nolan Patrick, he must feel like the very worst of worlds.

How many times have you read “doesn’t play any defense and he’s hurt all the time.”? Or “Jamie Drysdale can’t be trusted with big minutes”, and “he can’t be trusted to tear every ligament in his body after a single summer workout.”?

You certainly wouldn’t be wrong for pointing to the recent injury history and shuddering in horror. Two consecutive years of injury plagued seasons make it feel as if the kid is just doomed to be injured forever.

Even if you look past the injuries, this kid is hardly lighting up J-Fresh cards with beautiful blue colors and looking like a total stud in the making. His relative impact on expected goals leaves a lot to be desired. The analytically inclined fan is naturally inclined to look at his early results, and just immediately assume that we’re looking at a bust.

But here’s the thing: that is far from uncommon for NHL players coming into the league as young prospects.

Here’s a look at the WAR values of 4 players drafted between the years 2018 and 2020. 3 of the 4 players were selected with a top 4 pick, and the 4th went 9th overall while being valued higher than that by most public evaluators.

Before I say anything, go ahead and see if you notice the trend for yourself.

Do you notice anything peculiar about the timelines on the right hand side? They all tell a similar story. Do they not?

Marco Rossi and Quinton Byfield were both selected in the 2020 draft and both didn’t breakout until this very season. Before this season, by this collection of metrics, they were among the worst players in the NHL. And then it clicked. Now, they’re imposing their talents on the league. The very same talents that got them drafted with such a prestigious selection are being used to exploit NHL players.

Rasmus Dahlin was selected 2 years before Rossi and Byfield. He’s about a year and change older than both of them. Sure enough, he didn’t break out according to this collection of metrics until the season before last. It’s practically the same timeline, despite Dahlin being one of the only arguments for a “generational defensive prospect” since Victor Hedman in 2008.

Why didn’t Jamie Drysdale follow the suit of Byfield and Rossi? Why didn’t he break out this season, as that timeline suggested he should have? Alexis Lafreneire followed that timeline by ascending this very season. Why is it just Jamie running behind schedule?

For insight, we can look to 2019 4th overall pick Bowen Byram. Byram, much like Drysdale, has been haunted by injuries. In truth, I find Byram’s injury history to be more concerning because his have been repeated concussions suffered over several years.

And yet, I’m not particularly concerned about Byram.

Before the injuries, it WAS starting to click for Byram. You see it in his 21-22 results on that pretty little graph, but you also saw it in the 2022 playoffs. In the 2022 Stanley Cup, Byram had usurped Devon Toews as their number 2 defenseman.

If he had taken another step in 22-23 instead of falling off the map entirely? He would have followed the same timeline as Dahlin or Rossi or Byfield, and he would be a star defenseman in this league. I don’t think that outcome is off the table, yet. If I had to guess? Byram will reclaim his former glory.

He will become the player that he was supposed to be when he was drafted 4th overall by the Colorado Avalanche, and the Buffalo Sabres will benefit from the fruits of Colorado’s labor and their own patience. And it wouldn’t shock me at all if it happened fast. It usually does. Development is gradual, and then sudden.

That brings us to Drysdale. He’s dealt with a lot of injuries in these last 2 seasons, and it has coincided with the timeline in which he should have broken out using many of his peers as examples. It should have been now. Why wasn’t it? Will it just never happen?

Was this all a horrific breakdown in scouting?

As it turns out, there’s a damn good reason that this wasn’t the breakout year Drysdale might have hoped for. He spent the entire season with a sports hernia. Every single game. He suffered the injury in game 1, and he didn’t get the surgery to repair it until after game 82.

Jamie Drysdale said this in an interview with Adam Kimelman that partly inspired this writing.

“I’ve technically been in the League for four years, but I always say I’ve only played about a year and a half,” Drysdale said during the Flyers Community Caravan at Ocean City Sports and Civic Center on Wednesday. “Just playing a full year, showing what I can do, what I know I can do, I think that’s kind of went under wraps the last couple years to be honest with you.”

He’s looking forward to showing what he can do because it’s went under wraps as he’s spent the last couple of years injured.

It dawned on me that many Flyers fans don’t know what it is that’s been kept under wraps. They don’t really know Jamie Drysdale. When the Anaheim Ducks drafted him, loyal Ducks fans flocked in droves to do exhaustive research into the kid they drafted.

Flyers fans were busy researching Tyson Foerster. They were utterly unaware that the kid who was taken 6th overall would wear their colors in less than 3 years.

Many don’t know who really was drafted in 2020 with the 6th overall selection. They don’t know why the Ducks selected him, and what they saw in that kid.

They just know he was a high draft pick, and they know what they saw with the Flyers. What they saw with the Flyers was a kid who could skate.

But Jamie Drysdale when he’s unencumbered by injury is far more than a “kid who can skate.”

For one thing, it’s worth pointing out just how freakishly good his skating is.

Drysdale is, at this very moment, one of the NHL’s elite skaters. There are fewer than 5 blueliners in the NHL who have similar mobility to him, and I’m being very generous by saying 5. He has everything you could ever dream of in a skater. His edgework is immaculate and his agility is elite. When he changes direction, he explodes into that new trajectory.

He can start on the inside of a player, as he did here, and still beat them wide with one push off of his edges. This was something he did while there was a tear of the muscle in the pelvic area, which is essentially what a sports hernia is.

A sports hernia should prevent something like you just watched from even being possible.

But because Drysdale has outlier core strength and mobility, even when that core is a shell of itself, it’s still well above the average player. He is a 99th percentile athlete in the NHL, and that was visible from the moment he was drafted. The things that he can do as a skater are different, and have very few parallels in this league.

Given context, knowing the full extent of the suffering Drysdale endured, the clip below went from impressive to wholly absurd.

For one thing, the mistake becomes a lot more justifiable when you understand that his brain is currently processing the fact that he’s in tremendous pain. This is in overtime of an NHL game. The injury he’s playing through has to feel as bad as it had all season.

Of course he got read like a book. The pass was so labored. Everything was so labored. That should have been a breakaway. It should have been game over. And everyone would have understood. Or at least they may have… if only they knew.

But it wasn’t a breakaway. Drysdale managed to swallow the pain and chase down the escaping player before he could break away, and he disrupted the play from behind before he could get a shot off.

Not only is it miraculous that he actually skated well enough to keep up with Joel Eriksson Ek, a terrific skater in his own right. He somehow managed to endure the pain long enough to keep his stick disciplined and make a highly precise play at full speed.

This play against Vegas was in the very first period of his very first game. If he was healthy for this play, he wouldn’t have stayed healthy for long. But this is the kind of thing he can do at the NHL level. He can skate through an NHL team’s entire structure.

In this play, he beats F1 by cutting around the net and gaining a step of separation that he’d never relinquish. He uses a quick cut to leave F2 in the dust. He gains the blueline and delays in front of the 3 remaining forecheckers and gets a shot on goal through one of their triangles.

Drysdale then intercepts an opposing clearing attempt and gets a second shot on goal.

Vegas was playing a 1-1-3 (or the most passive 1-2-2 ever, I suppose?) in order to prevent controlled entries by 1 player. That is the entire purpose of that trap-like neutral zone structure.

And yet Drysdale did the very thing they were specifically trying to prevent. He sliced through that trap as if it was assembled with wet paper because Vegas doesn’t employ a guy who can skate with this kid when his muscles are attached to the bone.

Apparently, the only thing Vegas CAN’T trade for is someone who can skate with Jamie Drysdale.

But it’s not all about the skating. It’s never been all about the skating.

I could make a point about his passing by showing you some good passes he made in the NHL, but passing is one of those things where the aggregate is more important than the individual.

So, here’s the aggregate of what Jamie Drysdale did as a passer (and more) when he was being drafted. This is data tracked by Mitch Brown of Elite Prospects during the 2020 NHL season.

Yes, you read that right. He was in the 100th percentile for expected assists generated per 60. To put numbers to it? Drysdale created 0.67 expected primary assists per 60. The average number for a draft eligible defenseman in a data set that ranges from 2017 to 2022? 0.2. He more than tripled the average draft eligible defenseman in the value of his OZ passing.

If you adjust for era in the dataset, because defensemen becoming so active in the OZ is something that’s still in the process of evolving? The average draft eligible defenseman in that 5 year span created 0.27 expected primary assists per hour of ice time, and Drysdale created 0.826.

He was nearly 4x your average draft-eligible defenseman as a playmaker.

In the words of the Elite Prospects 2020 Draft Guide:

“Something seems to click when Drysdale enters the offensive zone. Deference turns into horrifying precision. Drysdale is a deceptive operator from the offensive blueline, baiting forwards with false signals through his shoulders and transferring his weight in the opposite direction to attack the newly vacated space.”

Every word I’m typing here is for the purpose of telling you who Jamie Drysdale was in the summer of 2020 when he heard his name called 6th overall. But I realize that something like that has limited value. What if none of it was real? What if he went into the NHL and it was all terrible? Well, this is who Drysdale was in the summer of 2022 after his first (and only) full season in the NHL.

This is data tracked by Corey Sznajder of the All Three Zones project tracking microstats for NHL players.

Well? So much for it not translating to the NHL.

For a rookie defenseman, Drysdale was already beginning to excel in transition to a greater degree than he even did as a junior. He was one of the league’s premiere generators of controlled entries from the back-end, an honor typically reserved for those like Cale Makar or Roman Josi.

This was a step up from his junior days. Likewise, his entry defense went from below average in juniors to excellent as a rookie in the NHL.

Drysdale wasn’t merely translating his game to the NHL. He was making improvements to his game at the NHL level.

He was notably proficient at moving the puck out of the defensive zone, no matter how much opposing teams dialed up the pressure on the forecheck. Like most rookies, Drysdale wasn’t burdened with a ton of volume. But his efficiency stats tell a tale, especially for someone who had never played pro hockey.

He was notably efficient at retrieving pucks without being disrupted by opposing forechecks, which is a trait he shares with Cam York. But unlike York today, a rookie Drysdale also was above average at making a pass that resulted in a controlled exit after the retrieval instead of rimming pucks up the boards or off of the glass.

That is hardly a shot at York. I’m just making the point that Drysdale’s early NHL showing was filled with promising signs that a game-controlling defenseman could be getting ready to blossom.

In the interview I mentioned with Kimelman, Joel Farabee said it best:

“Obviously when we got him, he was probably only about 50 percent, 60 percent, he was playing through a bunch of stuff, so it’s been really nice just to see him skating in the summer,” Flyers forward Joel Farabee said Wednesday. “He’s obviously a great skater. … But when he’s really playing at 100 percent, he controls the game.

“It’s something that our [defense] corps has needed for a long time, a guy who can control the play like he does. So, we’re super pumped to have him whether it’s 5-on-5, power play, you name it, he’s going to be playing, so it’s really special and he’s a great player.”

The entire point of all of this is that Drysdale has always been a player who’s known for two things. His skating, which is readily apparent for all to see. But in nearly equal measure? His hockey sense.

That part of his game wasn’t as visible when he was in Orange and Black. That calculating, deceptive operator who’s a step ahead of his opponents was concealed by injury. And why wouldn’t it have been?

Have you tried making snap decisions and operating at peak alertness while you’re experiencing searing agony? It’s not fun. The pain creates a mental fog. Injuries don’t just limit you physically, they handicap you mentally as much of your brain is consumed by nonstop signals of pain coming through from your body.

It isn’t just with sports. In any walk of life, this is an issue. I can’t write as efficiently as I would like to when I’m dealing with any kind of physical discomfort. Words come harder and focus is more fleeting. Sentences become a pain in the ass to structure, and every phrase demands another split second of consideration before I type it. It saps higher-end thinking and dulls the instincts.

So is anyone surprised that Drysdale missed a few defensive zone coverages assignments because his brain was too busy processing the fact that there was a muscle tear in his pelvic area to lend processing power to the frenetic sport of hockey? I’m sure as hell not.

A player isn’t eternally defined by what he used to be in juniors, but it’s relevant how a player was thought of when he was drafted.

That’s especially true when he was only drafted 4 years ago, and 2 of those years have been spent injured and either on the shelf or utterly crippled. It’s especially relevant when that player’s draft+1 season featured 12 points in 17 combined AHL games between the regular season and playoffs.

It’s even more relevant when that player was already showing a strong micro-stat profile in his D+2 season spent in the NHL when he was largely 19 years old and also scored 32 points. That seems pretty good.

And that’s been the story of Jamie Drysdale up to the point of the injuries. We talk about him being rushed to the NHL. And maybe he was, but he was already beginning to find his footing in the NHL as young as he was. It was just all put on hold by injuries.

Am I supposed to forget this all happened because he had two years where he was constantly plagued by injury? Is everything that came prior now moot because he happened to suffer a sports hernia, which is common among hockey players?

Is he now doomed to injury forever because he suffered a torn labrum in his shoulder, which is also common among hockey players? Should I notify Cole Caufield that it’s all over, and it’s time to retire? Of course not.

Need I inform Tyson Foerster that his rookie season never happened because, actually, his torn labrum rendered him dead back in his D+1 season?

If you’re determined to write off Jamie Drysdale, then by all means. I’m not here to tell anyone what to do. And I can’t tell the future, at least not with 100% accuracy.

Perhaps you’ll end up being right in the end. But don’t make the mistake of assuming this story is over.

Just as sure as you may be correct, you might end up with some opinions that look funny in the light as the truth outs and Drysdale proves to be everything that he was always supposed to be.

Me, personally? I hesitate to bet against players who have this kind of talent. I hesitate even more when these players decide to play through injuries like this because they’re desperate not to miss extra NHL reps which they know to be critical to development.

Drysdale would have been well within his rights to simply get the surgery and come back healthy in a few months. Hell, maybe it would have been better for his perceptions. He left a sour taste in people’s mouths as he attempted to play through a debilitating injury. But he didn’t do that.

He endured a massive amount of pain and suffering in order to get the NHL experience that he missed out on with an injury he couldn’t medically play through the year before. He’s watched as everyone around him has rewritten his story into that of a project and a raw, stupid kid that the Flyers just saw something in… in spite of all evidence. He helped construct that narrative by playing when he was a shell of himself, and he did it willingly.

Because seeing NHL games, he felt, was more important to his development than spending a few months without excruciating pain. And more important than preserving a few shreds of his reputation.

There is nothing on this earth, nothing whatsoever, that Danny Briere loves doing more than hedging his bets… except maybe lying. He loves hedging his bets as much as he hates closing, which is to say a mythical amount.

But when he was asked if he viewed Drysdale as a high-end talent, he didn’t hesitate to say: “absolutely. We view him as a top-pair defenseman for many years.”

This is the same general manager who, while having said many glowing things of Michkov, has routinely tried to tamp down expectations just a little. Especially in the short term.

In fairness to Danny and the Flyers, he isn’t just pulling quotes from thin air.

This is what Craig Button had to say: “Erie Otters blueliner Jamie Drysdale moves up one spot to No. 4. Drysdale has all the makings of a No. 1 defenceman in the NHL and that gets the nod over a top-line left winger – which Saginaw forward Cole Perfetti (No. 5) will undoubtedly be.”

Bob McKenzie and his scouts surveyed said the following: “The No. 4 slot on TSN’s final list belongs to Erie Otter right defenceman Jamie Drysdale. Eight of 10 scouts ranked him in that position, giving him the nod as the consensus top blueliner available in this year’s draft. Drysdale was No. 4 on TSN’s mid-season list. … Drysdale is an elite skater, incredibly agile, with outstanding hockey sense and offensive instincts. At 5-foot-11, he’s not a big pro-style blueliner, but he’s shown to be a capable defender who uses his smarts, body positioning, gap control and stick deployment  to his advantage.

‘He’s going to be a top-pair offensive NHL d-man who can run a power play,’ a scout said.”

Briere wouldn’t say something that the whole organization wasn’t entirely convinced of. And I hope I did a suitable job of depicting for you what has them so convinced.

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