A quick mixtape on the most bizarre player in hockey: Stars prospect, Antonio Stranges

He's just a boy, standing in front of a prospect pipeline, asking Dallas to love him.

“Captivation, frustration, and awe: three emotions that London Knights forward Antonio Stranges inspires, sometimes on the same shift.”

That was Elite Prospect’s 2020 Draft Guide. Not only has no one ever said it better since, but it still holds true four years later.

The 22-year old left winger had a fascinating season in Texas following his OHL tenure with the London Knights. This year he played 55 games, notching 23 points for a thirty-point pace.

It’s not a eye-popping stat line, but for such a young player, it was mostly solid, especially given his limited minutes, his quality of teammates, and goal total (11, which was tied for eight on the team). Nonetheless, that combination of captivation, frustration, and awe was clearly felt by the AHL coaching staff too, who healthy scratched him on more than one occasion. However, given how some diehards talk about Stranges, you might not know this.

Clarification: Aside from a bizarre Twitter exchange I had last summer, I think the people rooting for him more or less recognize this. I’m not writing about Stranges today to dispel a myth. “Stranges fans are delusional!” Somebody, being facetious, asked for this. In response, I decided to write something that wasn’t. If this place is good for anything, it’s good for writing the stories nobody asked for.

The funny thing is, Stranges has always been part of the conversation in exactly the way it is for Stars fans going back to the 2020 NHL Draft itself. It’s not like he had a big draft year. He scored 40 points in 61 games, behind six players who would all get drafted before him. Those players ranged between dependable (Connor McMichael) to divisive (Ryan Merkley). Except for Merkley, they all — Liam Foudy, Jonathan Gruden, Luke Evangelista, and Eric Regula being the others — ended up signing NHL contracts. In other words, his production should have had the opposite effect of prompting intrigue. For perspective, Ty Dellandrea had almost 20 more points his draft year in the same league on a far crappier team.

In spite of that, both Corey Pronman and Scott Wheeler had Stranges in their top 100 (Stranges, of course, ended up going in round 4 at 123rd overall). Both had Stranges over the best defensemen not in the NHL in Alexander Nikishin (Carolina) and…if you can believe it, Brock Faber. (This is not to put them ‘on blast’ or whatever. They’ve forgotten more about prospects than I’ll ever know.}

Today’s mixtape (copyright, Dimitri Filipovic 2022?) is unfortunately pretty short, clocking in at just one minute and 11 seconds. I thought I had more clips organized, but alas. He wasn’t a player that played a lot of minutes, and admittedly I focused more on other prospects with potential NHL futures more as the Texas Stars season unfolded. Nonetheless, until I went back and watched some clips, I had forgotten how flat out fun he is to watch.

Antonio Stranges Mixtape

How his skills can translate positively

I’ll start with something slightly condescending but not intended to be: he tries. Stranges is looking to jailbreak every shift. It’s the kind of approach that makes players sometimes look more talented than they are: if he does something amazing — as he does on several shifts above — it’s easy to think that might one day be the standard. But that he’s always trying to do something amazing makes his game paradoxically predictable for opponents. But hey — it’s the thought that counts. And you have to admire his aggressiveness.

I also think there’s something to be said for being genuinely unorthodox. Think of southpaws in boxing: even bad ones can get away with being effective due to the orthodox fighter having to re-program their positioning and distance management. Stranges’ unorthodox skating approach, with his gross overuse of the C-Step, sometimes works to his advantage as a result. In some of the above clips you see defenders appear to almost freeze up, as if to say “TF are you doing man?!” Deception is a big part of modern hockey at the highest levels, so while I would never call Strange deceptive — he’s like a soldier in an era of swordsmen wielding a warhammer instead — his overall style achieves a similar effect.

However, baked into his big maneuver is a very real advantage too, which is being able to scan the play, be in position for a stronger pass, and protecting the puck.

If being good at hockey means playing more of it, then Stranges fits that atypical profile. I do think other traits of his can translate, like his ability to shoot. He has a quality wrister, and handles the puck well enough to go high in tight quarters with backhands or low with various slips. His ‘net speed’ — his skating is so aloof that I consider it inaccurate to simply call him “fast” so ‘net speed’ feels fitting — is also fairly projectable.

And that brings us to the big but…

How his skills can translate negatively

What’s frustrating about Stranges is that all of his positive traits are also negative traits. For example, take his skating. Yes, he’s fast, and nobody uses the C-Step like him. But he doesn’t have a powerful stride, nor does he have a true separation gear the way you’d expect out of a quick and nimble player. In fact, it’s precisely his obsession with C-Stepping that causes erratic shifts. If you notice, Stranges’ teammates are rarely being used (contrast this with Lian Bichsel, who isn’t a forward, but seems to use his teammates much more often). His unorthodoxy doesn’t just affect opponents, but it affects his teammates as well. This also comes down to not having a sense of pace, and anticipation.

Beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to think of a player as unorthodox as Stranges who is actively successful. Sure, you have your equipment weirdos like Ryan O’Reilly and Phil Kessel, but nobody with a true, blue physical style that you would call unorthodox. I asked this question on Twitter, and a lot of people mentioned awkward skaters, but none of these players skate awkwardly intentionally. Stranges chooses to skate this way. So yes, an unorthodox style might pay dividends at the lower levels, but what professional has leveraged style into substance?

His puck handling reminds me of Denis Gurianov too. I always said if someone had just focused day, night and dusk on his puck handling, and IF he was able to integrate that education into his game, he would have been a beast. Stranges has a similar issue. His poor puck control means he can be easily stripped by opponents, and because he often overhandles the puck, he ends up overstaying (or understaying) his welcome in the offensive zone.

I’m also just not sure how interconnected his game is to a modern NHL system. Despite his four-direction skating, he tends to work in single lanes on the rush, isn’t particularly strong on the boards, and underwhelms as a puck retriever. Forwards can be freelancers at the NHL level, but to be trusted by coaches, you need your own gravity, and Stranges is always one extra dangle or unnecessary stride from floating away altogether.

Prediction

One of the biggest discussions in MMA back when the sport was nothing but chat forums and Sherdog instead of bad seats at over $700 a ticket, was Melvin Guillard. He was a fighter with ostensibly all the tools. He was quick, powerful, and with good mechanics — what could be missing? Fans always acted confused whenever he’d lose, even as the losses accumulated. “If only he did X, or added Y to his game.” But fans came away with those impressions because the human brain is better at analyzing what’s in front of it rather than what’s not. Guillard could punch fast; but could he time them? He could land a KO shot; but could he set them up? Talent is something we tend to assess after the fact. It was precisely as much Guillard’s lack of talent as his actual talent that made him struggle. And that’s because “talent” is a process. Not a skill that can be readily xerox’ed.

Stranges exists within that hyperspace. We see the speed and the shooting, but we don’t see the blown route and the off-puck movement. Those two magic words — “if only” — pull so much weight, it’s easy to forget exactly how much weight must be pulled. In the same way that his quickness and his shot are talents, his vision and forechecking are talents he lacks. Distinguishing physical from cognitive talents seems silly when both need to be harnessed simultaneously at the highest levels.

But I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of all this criticism.

One of the reasons why I decided to do this — beyond writing it due to unpopular demand — is that I think talking about Stranges highlights a broader point I want to make: we so often get lost in evaluating prospects on a spectrum of Ready Or Not that it’s easy to forget what those judgments can look like when we’re evaluating them on their own terms, eccentricities and all. Yes, prospects are drafted to add value to an NHL roster, and in many ways, it’s a zero-sum game: if they can make the cut, they were good picks; if they don’t make the cut, they were bad picks. But all hockey is instructive. Not just NHL-level hockey.

In my humble opinion, Stranges doesn’t have an NHL future. But who the hell cares? Hockey should be fun, and Stranges happens to be fun to watch.