Was his edginess just too much for an NHL desperately trying to curtail some of the violence by handing out lengthy suspensions to anybody who plays the game like young Steve Downie? (Steve Downie Meltdown! Steve Downie cheap shot!) When he was drafted in the first round by the Flyers in 2005, he was a natural hockey talent, but with a storied past. His unhinged style of over-aggressive play and brawls on the ice make him a superstar in the short-attention, time-wasting world of internet cinema. In fact, Downie's antics are a huge draw on the web. (The genesis of the fight was reportedly Alliu's refusal to participate in a team hazing ritual which required him to stand in the showers naked.) The video still exists on You Tube for all the world to see over. The coach of the team, longtime hockey lineage Moe Mantha, was fined and eventually canned for allegedly encouraging the type of behavior on his team. It was one of the blackest eyes for Junior Hockey, if only for the fact that the practice was videotaped, and the whole violent, unbridled chuck-and-duck was played and replayed on Canadian television stations across the country with fear-mongering sensationalism: Is this the type of young person we should call a hero and a champion…?. It's that same edge that just 16 months later caused him to go after his teammate, then 16-year-old, highly regarded rookie center Akim Aliu, who ended up with three busted teeth and a flattened ego…and ended up getting Downie suspended and shipped off to Peterborough. It's the edge that got him shipped off to the Windsor Spitfires as a chippy 16 year-old prospect. It's the edge that gives him the extra one or two feet of room on the ice to whip the puck around, it's what creeps in the back of his opponent's minds when they sense his presence. Downie's had it since the first time he laced up his skates as a Pee Wee and pushed a chair around on the ice, up in the woodsy enclave of Newmarket, Ontario. This is a hockey edge, which is somewhat amorphous and undefined you have it or you don't. And this edge is not the characterization we as everyday 9-to-5 human beings equate to those with exotic piercings or an affinity for skydiving. "He plays with an edge," so many hockey wonks will echo time-and-time again when asked to describe the type of player he is. Guess who's the prototypical Flyers player?ĭownie comes with a bad rep, some say wholly deserved. Then there's Downie: a menace, a pest, a shit-disturber, the type of hockey player that overcompensates for some of his short-comings talent-wise with freewheeling intensity - some would say, too much intensity the kind of intensity that can sometimes devolve into scary, selfish irresponsibility if it funnels out the wrong tube. There's Briere, sleek, polished, big shooter, enormous skill-level, but plays a scorer's finesse game. One's the typical non-Flyers type player and one is the prototypical Flyers player," he said. One hockey writer said he found it ironic that the Flyers signed Briere then brought 20 year-old Downie up to the show the same year. Briere's hair still wet, wire-rimmed glasses on, button-downed shirt tucked in a little too much inside his jeans, answering all the questions with a confident, almost academic cadence. There's Daniel Briere, the high-priced center the Flyers nabbed from the Buffalo Sabres this past off-season, part of a multi-million dollar 8-year contract that in the hopes of getting a playmaker, the Flyers made him one of the highest paid players in the league this year. The rest of the hockey newspaper mob is loafing around with their digital recorders, poking them in the faces of various Flyers as they wait patiently for each player to come out in various states of almost-dressed to jab the recorder in their face and get a meaningless quote about the upcoming Toronto series. It's one of those pool boogers, all white, and it quickly shoots back up his left nostril with a little sniff and a wipe. Standing in shower flops and black lycra shorts outside the locker room of the Flyers practice facility in Voorhees, he says he'll only be a few more minutes.
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