My blogging partner on Flame for Thought – Iain Godsman, the founding father of the Flaming Circle of Jerks and perpetually its funniest member – sent me a link the other day to a great blog on Yahoo! Sports showing the goofy “glamour shot” photos the NHL has draft picks pose for after they are selected on draft day. Thanks to Iain for spotting it, but even more thanks to Greg Wyshynski, author of the Puck Daddy blog on Yahoo, for bringing such hilarity (much of it unintentional) to public attention.
The standout for goofy photos was a guy who was clearly mugging for comic effect for the cameras – so much so that Greg put him on his top-10 list twice. It was none other than Kirill Kabanov, the third-round pick of the New York Islanders, he of high-first-round skills but don’t-touch-with-a-10-foot-hockey-stick personality issues.
As readers of this blog will know by now, I’m a Kabanov fan – I thought his character issues were being overblown, and that he might be the steal of the draft. I was more than a little disappointed that the Flames passed over this potential diamond in the rough when he was still available when the Flames finally got their first pick early in the third round.
Yes, Kirill got booted off two teams in less than a year, raising all kinds of mysterious red flags about his character. But these goofy photos help flesh out the picture about his personality, and that makes me even more upset that Calgary didn’t snap him up.
What we’ve uncovered here is that rare hockey combination of scary-talented and batshit-crazy. How much fun would that have been for Calgary fans to watch over the next 10 years?
Oh, well – at least he’ll fit in well on Long Island – where batshit-craziness has been standard business practice for years now.