NHL draft - Ojibway defender rated high

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Big, tough, solid, stay-at-home defenders are prized commodities in pro hockey these days - every club in the National Hockey League admits they find quality blue-liners in perennially short supply.

That's what makes 17-year-old Curve Lake Ojibway Lucas Nehrling such a popular guy these days. The NHL's annual selection draft was scheduled for Pittsburgh on June 20. That was after deadline for this month. In a phone interview with the six-foot-four, 212-pounder just before he headed to Pennsylvania, Nehrling told Windspeaker that he had been contacted by several big-league teams in the weeks leading up to the draft.

"Let's see there was Phoenix, Washington, Dallas, New Jersey, Florida and Anaheim, I've talked to," he said.

Agent Scott Norton of Chicago will represent the young professional hockey prospect after the draft. The money offered to draft choices varies according to how early they are selected. Nehrling is projected to go anywhere from the third to the fifth round in the NHL selection draft and he will almost certainly return for another season of Junior hockey.

That means he'll get to play for new Sting coach and former NHL agitator Mark Hunter. The team is owned by the Ciccarelli brothers; Dino Ciccarelli, of course, is another legendary professional 'character player.'

This is the second straight spring that has seen the Marmora, Ont. (near Belleville) resident sitting in a rink in June waiting to hear his name called. This time last year he was a minor Midget who was waiting to see if he had impressed any of the scouts who work for the Major Junior "A" Ontario Hockey League's clubs. As it turned out, he had. The Sarnia Sting made him their fifth round choice - not bad for a kid for who failed to score a goal in 25 games for the Quinte AAA Midgets.

But then again, goal scoring isn't Nehrling's specialty; he concentrates on keeping the puck out of his own net.

Sting officials were pretty sure they had something when they selected him and they add that, as they expected, the youngster blossomed at the Junior level. A tough, durable competitor, he played in 63 of the Sting's 66 regular season encounters, scoring three times and setting up another dozen. Although his game is defense, Sting officials point out that he has a knack for scoring in big moments: two of his goals were game winners.

Nehrling took a regular turn on the blueline for Sarnia in the OHL playoffs this spring until they were sidelined by the Kitchener Rangers in a seven game series in the second round. The rookie says the pace of the playoffs was amazing and really helped his development as a pro prospect.

"Everything was just bang, bang, bang. It was incredible," he recalled.

Still eligible for another year of Midget hockey, Nehrling says he was nervous for most of the year and didn't really show everything he's got. His relatively low 74 penalty minutes, for example, betrays a certain tentativeness that he says will be gone when the 1997-98 campaign begins in the fall.