Perhaps no player on the current Hawk roster is more puzzling than 26 year old Czech defender Michal Kempny, who still has under 80 games in North America.
Some nights he looks like a young Brian Campbell. Others, he looks like Sami Lepisto. And most nights, he looks like some guy up in the press box. Because that’s where he is.
Clearly, Joel Quenneville (and probably Ulf Samuelsson) feels Michal Kempny’s penchant for overcommitting and getting way out of position at key points can’t be trusted. Kempny was playing regularly—and very well, including an outstanding game in Minnesota earlier this year—until he got caught way up ice on an opponent’s game-winning goal a few nights later.
And it was off to the press box for the next several games, until Jan Rutta and Cody Franson went down with injury, forcing Kempny back into the lineup last night, where he was a team-leading plus 3, and scored a goal on an absolute rocket of a slap shot from beyond the right circle, over the left shoulder of a helpless Connor Hellebuyck.
That is the tease of Kempny: he does things physically that most other players can’t. He has an absolute cannon of a shot. At 6’, 195 pounds, he can flatten people with checks. And his skating allows him to get to pucks that other players can only dream about,
He also makes the occasional egregiously dumb play that costs the team.
So you’re left with three choices
And those are: play him and absorb the mistakes until he learns through repetition not to make them, trade him, or sit him in the press box.
My personal opinion is, for a team like the Hawks, options 1 and 2 are the only sensible choices.
Here’s why: if you can optimize Kempny through coaching and TOI, you have a left-side puck moving defenseman in the mold of a Campbell or Johnny Oduya in their primes. Kempny has that kind of physical ability. Those are the kinds of players who you can win a lot of games with—and games that matter.
To the contrary, you’re only going to get so much from a guy like Franson, who is limited in some ways and makes the most of his talent through experience and thinking the game. While Jordan Oesterle shows some mobility and smarts, to my eye, he’s sort of a Tanner Kero on the blueline: “a guy” you can plug in who won’t hurt you depending on who he’s defending, but not a guy who’s going to beat the best players in the game through sheer physical talent.
You play Kempny, or you deal him.
Because if the Hawks are shopping him, as I heard might be the case yesterday, then if I’m the GM of, say, a rebuilding team and I can afford to give him 18-20 minutes a night and absorb some mistakes, I know I have an asset worth developing.
Sitting him, other than giving him a painful and perhaps demoralizing reminder not to make those mistakes, is probably not the best way to develop him.
As our skills coach Bob Rose said on a recent RinkCast: “I don’t know how you don’t play a guy like Kempny with the physical ability he has. He’s like a wild horse out there, but you have to work with him on that and play him to do it.”
And yeah, even if you buy the argument (like I do) that the way to develop Kempny’s physical skill is to play him, who sits so he can play? Then you’re taking valuable developmental minutes away from say, Gustav Forsling or Connor Murphy.
That is, unless you get back into the playoff picture and decide to start giving Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook the occasional maintenance night off.
It’s not an easy puzzle to solve.
But the somewhat commonly expressed “Kempny sucks” narrative really misses an important and obvious point. That kind of physical ability is uncommon—you have to extract value from it somehow, and the press box is not the place to do it.
All for now.
Follow: @jaeckel