The Prospect Park: A Sanguinetti Sunday

Star of the Day

There are times when prospects fall victim to the hype of their potential and then there are those who simply exceed the expectations leaving you wondering just how good they will become.

Bobby Sanguinetti is the latter as every single time we think we have figured out just how good he is going to become; Sanguinetti shows us that he is going to become better than that.

The easy part to talk about was Sanguinetti scoring his 26th goal of the season, how it was the game winner in his Brampton Battalion's 3-1 win over the Guelph Storm. It was his third game winner of the season and gave Sanguinetti back his lead in the prospect-scoring race with 65 points (26-39-65).

Sanguinetti earned the game's Second Star for his overall efforts however; it was his defense that we felt stood out today. For a prospect who has been labeled a one way defender, Sanguinetti's defense has been greatly improved over last season.

Sanguinetti has under the tutelage of his coach Stan Butler worked very hard on improving his defensive side and it is showing. After a +2 on Sunday Sanguinetti is now up to a +9 on the season, which is a major improvement over the -16 Sanguinetti, had last season with Owen Sound.

We are seeing that Sanguinetti is doing a better job of reading and understanding the plays as they unfold in front of him. Another difference is how Sanguinetti is allowing the game to come to him instead of trying to guess what the other team is going to do.

However, to us the biggest difference we are seeing is a confidence in both himself and his teammates, which is leading to Sanguinetti not playing as if he has to win every game by himself. That sense of confidence is allowing Sanguinetti to play a relaxed game where he can trust himself to make the right plays. His numbers are backing our beliefs in his improvements up.

Do not get us wrong, the biggest part of Sanguinetti's game is always going to be his offensive skills as in today's NHL we are not seeing many 20 goal scoring defensemen but we will when Sanguinetti develops his NHL game. We believe that Sanguinetti is going to be a 20-25 goal a season scorer with the Rangers as his ability to create his own offense is going to make the rest of the offense that much better.

The Streak of Zorro comes to an end

While we did not expect Tomas Zaborsky's scoring streak to last for the rest of the season as 6 games has been his average streak this season. So of course, Zaborsky's streak did come to an end Sunday afternoon as his Saginaw Spirit dropped a 5-2 decision to the Plymouth Whalers.

We will discount this loss, as the Spirit had to have been on the tired side after playing an evening home game that went into overtime on Saturday night, then having to travel to Plymouth for a 2 PM start time (which meant they had to be at the arena but at least noon).

Zaborsky was 3-7-10 in that 6 game streak but was also a +10 as well. Zaborsky is now 29-35-64 on the season.

Postponed

We were a little disappointed that Sunday's game between Ryan Hillier's Halifax Mooseheads and Antoine Lafleur's Prince Edward Island Rocket was postponed due to what was described as "violent winds" but we would rather see safety take consideration over matchups. They have already rescheduled the game for next Sunday and we will look forward to that matchup.