Sielski: Bure inspired Flyers' Gostisbehere

Growing up in Margate, Fla., Shayne Gostisbehere found himself with few NHL players to model and admire. Ice doesn't last long, even indoors, amid the sultry South Florida heat. Still, the great Russian forward Pavel Bure was playing for the Florida Panthers at the time, and his speed and scoring ability enchanted Gostisbehere. Bure led the NHL in goals in 1999-2000, with 58, and in 2000-01, with 59, doing so despite being just 5-foot-10 and 189 pounds. For his travel team, Gostisbehere wore No. 10 on his jersey - Bure's number, to honor him.

"I loved that guy," Gostisbehere said Monday.

That infatuation with Bure foreshadowed the player Gostisbehere has become this season for the Flyers. With 34 points in 40 games as a wispy 5-11, 186-pound rookie, with six goals on the power play and four in overtime, on a 15-game point streak, Gostisbehere has brought a skilled forward's scoring touch to the Flyers . . . as a defenseman. And if the praise of his play sometimes seems excessive, understand something: In the broader contexts of the Flyers' past and of recent NHL history, it's not.

On the one hand, Gostisbehere has the promise to develop into an entirely new kind of Flyers player: a dominant, homegrown defenseman. They selected him in the third round of the 2012 draft, and should his career continue as this season suggests it might, he would surpass the accomplishments and achievements of every other defenseman the franchise had drafted before him. The best defensemen over the Flyers' 50 years of existence were all acquired in trades: Mark Howe, from the Hartford Whalers; Eric Desjardins, from the Montreal Canadiens; Chris Pronger, from the Anaheim Ducks.

On the other hand, Gostisbehere fits seamlessly into a league-wide trend: the increased reliance on defensemen to produce offense. As a percentage of total scoring, defensemen's contributions have remained fairly stable over time, according to the statistical tracking website QuantHockey.com, but there has been an uptick lately. During the 2014-15 NHL season, defensemen accounted for 16.4 percent of all goals scored - the highest such percentage since 1928-29.

"Now, teams just check so tightly that you need your D to be involved," Flyers defenseman Andrew MacDonald said. "In Ghost's case, it's just a credit to his offensive instincts, knowing when to jump up, reading plays. His ability to do that is great. It's not just offensively. It's defensively, too, three-on-twos, whose guy is taken. Those types of things, you can't teach that."

What's interesting about this development and Gostisbehere's potential is that only one defenseman, the Detroit Red Wings' Niklas Lidstrom in 2005-06, has reached 80 points in a season in the last 20 years. More, no defenseman has had at least 100 points in a season since the Rangers' Brian Leetch in 1991-92. It would seem counterintuitive: Defensemen are scoring more, but they don't put up the sort of gaudy individual offensive numbers that they once did. (From 1969 through 1994, for instance, five defensemen had at least 100 points in a season.)

The explanation is fairly complex. Since the 2005-06 season - immediately after a lockout compelled the NHL to change some rules to encourage more offense - overall scoring has dropped 12.1 percent. The league's talent pool has been global, and deepening, for years now, and that talent is distributed more evenly among teams than it was in earlier eras of the sport. "Everybody can skate and handle the puck nowadays," Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill said in a 2011 interview, when he was still an executive with the Red Wings. "It's the ability to contain guys" that's the difference.

To that end, teams have become more system-oriented in their styles of play to eliminate the risk of having a defenseman carry the puck too far into an opponent's zone and end up out of position. Gone are the days when a coach would allow, say, Bobby Orr or Leetch to embark on an end-to-end rush and demand that the team's forwards retreat to cover his back. Gostisbehere certainly doesn't have that freedom. He has to choose wisely the chances he takes, lest he leave the Flyers vulnerable to a counterattack.

"D-men jumping in the play is a huge part of the game today," Flyers coach Dave Hakstol said. "You can look across the league. Shayne's done a good job of that, but the biggest point we have to make here is he fits into the team concept. This is a team game. One guy's not out there doing it on his own, doing it by himself."

Even within the structure of Hakstol's system, Gostisbehere ranks fourth among defensemen this season in points per game (.850). That he has done this as a rookie, on a team that is 25th in the league in goals per game, underscores the brilliance of what he has done, and what he might yet do. He doesn't have to be the Pavel Bure of defensemen, delivering the same production as the player he once idolized. He just has be close enough, and he will be something the Flyers have never seen before.