Monday's FTB: More democracy is always good

This innocuous story turned up yesterday:

Simon Després gör comeback i ECHL som 35-åring

Den tidigare SHL-backen Simon Després återvänder till nordamerikansk hockey efter sju år. 35-åringen har skrivit på för Fort Wayne Komets i ECHL.

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Simon Després has had a very interesting career. Starting in Laval as a child, he moved to New Brunswick for Junior hockey with the Sea Dogs, and was drafted 30th overall by the Penguins where he debuted in 2011-2012. He did the split between NHL and AHL thing for three years before he was traded to the Ducks at the deadline in his first full NHL season. Then something happened in 2016-2017 when he only played in one hockey game.

Actually what happened was in the prior season where he was hit by Tyson Barrie directly in the head. Principle point of contact. DoPS called it Charging and Interference and Barrie got 3 games. Després got a different life to the one he'd thought he was going to lead. He came back to playing, and a few months later Gabriel Landeskog cross-checked Després directly into the back of his head (as stated in the DoPs video) and he got three games off.

Després tried to play again for the Ducks, but had concussion symptoms the next year in preseason. He stepped away from the game, and the Ducks issued a fairly alarming statement calling it a sensitive issue. No one would have been surprised if he retired, but he went to the KHL the next year, and played for Canada in the 2018 Spengler Cup. I remember his story, likely from that Spengler Cup

He tried one more time to come back to the AHL, signing a PTO with the Laval Rocket, but it didn't work out, and he embarked on an incredible tour of Europe. I've never seen anything like it. He went to the DEL, joined Oskarshamn (the team shown above), and played there for one year, but surely must have made an impression if they're writing about him now. From there it was back to Germany, then Austria, the Nottingham Panthers of the EIHL, a quick tour of a men's semi-pro league in Quebec, and then back to Scotland and then last season, he capped it off with 14 games for the Melbourne Ice in Australia.

Now he's trying the ECHL at 35. You have to hope this has been in many ways good for him even if it's not the life he'd wanted. I hope his concussions don't trouble him, but I fear they likely do.

This is a risky game, but 6 games lost by two players seems like a low price for an NHL career.

In other news, Team Canada won something!

And the star of next summer's draft discourse looked happy:

Okay, for the sake of argument, let's just assume Landon DuPont ends up still as the top draft pick next year. Who is going to take him? In other words, who is going to come last-ish, still have their own pick and win the lottery? It's never too early to guess.

Oh! I can make you vote...

In case you miss the T25 vote interface and want at it again, here you go! Rank by draft order, so whoever comes last and actually picks first, second, third ... you are bored and hit Done.

If you pick the Leafs to draft first overall, you have to post your method of getting that to happen in the comments.

I will publish the results of this tomorrow because then there'll be something to talk about.

The Leafs made some news:

I do not know what that title means. Player development, but not prospects? I guess. O'Sullivan has been with the team for three years as a Development Coach, so this is a promotion to run the department he used to work in without having an AGM run things as in the past.

And that's Monday sorted.