Quick Hits: Shanahan Is Full Of Crap

I'm sure that most of these are going to start like this, but I was reading tonight's Provies when something caught my eye. It was this quote, from Brendan Shanahan, new overlord of the Toronto Maple Leafs:

I think it’s a complete cop-out that you can’t learn or be taught how to score at the NHL level. I hear coaches say all the time that you can teach defence, but you can’t teach offence. I don’t buy that. I’m an example of the opposite.

I bolded the important bit. This stuck out to me because I have this running theory (you know the one if you've read anything I've written about any Canucks prospect ever) that guys that turn into NHL scorers, in general, dominate their junior leagues. Shanahan scored nearly 1400 NHL points, so to hear him say "I had to be taught how to score" with the implication that he didn't know how to before hand is a bit curious. So I went to HockeyDB and looked at how a draft-year Brendan Shanahan performed in the OHL relative to his fellow 17 year olds. Here's how he did:

That is a list of every 17-year old forward who played at least 20 OHL games in Shanahan's draft year. As you can see, he wrecked them. He's on an entirely different level from the rest of those guys. So it's not as if Shanahan was a talentless hack coming in to the NHL. He dominated the OHL, so he dominated the NHL. For him to say that he had to be taught how to be a scorer is a crock of shit. He was always just way more talented than everyone else. The power was in you all along, Brendan!