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36 Sports Oakville Beaver SPORTS EDITOR: JON KUIPERIJ Phone 905-845-3824 (ext. 432) Fax 905-337-5571 email sports@oakvillebeaver.com · FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009 The first pick? We'll finally find out tonight T he father and son waited patiently in the hallway of the Alcott Arena in Georgetown for the players from the home team to come out of the dressing room. Members of the visiting team filed past, virtually ignored until one of the team's call-ups walked by with his hockey bag slung over his shoulder. The father nudged his son. "You see that guy," he said. "That guy's going to go first in the NHL draft." John Tavares, then 14, had certainly given people reason to get excited. He made his junior hockey debut at 13 with the tier 2 Milton IceHawks, playing in a league mainly comprised of 17-20 year olds. He not only fit in, he excelled, scoring 11 goals and racking up 23 points in 16 games. But that father, or anyone else for that matter, really had no way of knowing. It's unlikely he had seen any 14-year-olds from Quebec or Western Canada. He certainly hadn't seen any 14-year-old defencemen from Sweden. And he had no idea how Tavares or the thousands of other players in his draft class would develop in the coming years. Tavares hadn't even been drafted into the Ontario Hockey League at that point. In fact, he wasn't eligible for another year -- at least until the OHL changed its rules by granting him exceptional player status and allowing the Oshawa Generals to take him first overall. The fact that four years later Tavares is actually still in position to be the first player chosen in tonight's (Friday's) NHL draft -- it's believed the New York Islanders will select either him or Victor Hedman -- is remarkable. Top OHL picks don't always pan out Anointing a 16-year-old as the next big thing is a dangerous game. Only two players in the last 30 years (Steven Stamkos and Eric Lindros) who were taken first overall in the OHL draft went on to become first overall picks in the NHL draft. And of the 18 players who were at the head of their OHL draft class between 1983 and 2000, three never made the NHL, three more played less than 20 games and three others played less than two seasons. With a 50-50 success rate, talk of the NHL draft may have been premature four years ago. But there was certainly good reason to believe Tavares had star potential. "You could see the talent, and obviously he's improved a lot since then," said former Milton teammate Matt Price, who now plays for Boston College. "He always had a confident edge. When he came up, he played hard and he took it upon himself as a challenge. He never showed signs of being timid or scared on the ice." GREAT EXPECTATIONS: John Tavares, pictured in action from the past Ontario Hockey League season with the London Knights, is expected by many to be the first pick of tonight's National Hockey League entry draft in Montreal. The former St. Thomas Aquinas student is the OHL's all-time leading scorer, a former Canadian junior player of the year, and a twotime world junior champion. CRAIG GLOVER / TORONTO STAR That served Tavares well in his early entry into the OHL. With many observers waiting for the `exceptional' talent to fall flat, he scored 45 goals on his way to the rookie-of-theyear award. He followed that up with a 72-goal season, breaking Wayne Gretzky's OHL record for goals by a 16year-old. That feat prompted The Hockey News to dub Tavares, `The Next Next One'. Rob MacDougall had a front-row seat to the young Tavares' talent and knew he would go far. He just thought it would be in a different sport. Tavares made MacDougall's peewee lacrosse team as a first-year novice and played for the coach through midget. "He was a sponge for learning," MacDougall said. "He would show up for practice with pieces of paper and say, `Here are some plays we should try.' This is when he was nine." That ability to think and create remains with Tavares today. Tavares has excelled outside the world of sports as well. Despite having more demands on his time for appearances and interviews than his teammates, Tavares was the Generals' academic player of the year. Though MacDougall had heard Tavares was a pretty good hockey player, he thought he should pursue lacrosse simply because he couldn't imagine him being better in hockey than lacrosse (Tavares finished seventh in league scoring in Jr. A lacrosse as a 15-year-old). Tavares would eventually give up lacrosse to focus on See Tavares page 38