Dreaming and Waking: Patrick Kaleta’s Role on the Sabres

The following article was originally posted on Hockey Heaven, a hockey, sports and culture site written and edited by Matthew Stewart. For more content like this, be sure to visit www.hockey-heaven.com

“But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, with his martial cloak around him.“

I grew up an hour south of Buffalo, and so many times as a kid, more times than I can count, I partook in a journey up the rocky confines of Interstate-90’s Lake Erie corridor, driving joyfully to Orchard Park or downtown Buffalo for a Bills or Sabres game. Many of those return trips ended in disappointment, but the unbridled happiness of the evening almost always overshadowed that. It was long trips amidst heavy snow fall, driving in the pitch black evenings down unfamiliar roads after the events, listening to the post-game shows jump in and out of reception in the car.

Nearly every time we made that trip we would make a stop at the Angola Thruway Overpass, grab a quick snack or use the restrooms. I would spend 5 or 10 minutes staring out the window at the traffic below, oohing and ahing at the semi-trucks as it seemed they just narrowly made it under the bridge. Throughout the 90’s, I saw a great many Sabres games, first at the old Aud and then some at the HSBC arena. I saw teams filled with a wide array of characters, from Alex Mogilny to Derek Plante to Matt Barnaby to Dominik Hasek.

Hockey became a part of me. We played street hockey whenever the weather was good enough on the old tennis courts that didn’t have nets anymore behind the elementary school. Every possible night I would put the television on in my room, work on homework or a puzzle, and listen to Rick Jeanerret describe the events of the evening.

It is strange now to think back to my adolescence and realize that I am less than a year younger than Patrick Kaleta — that on those very same nights he was likely doing something similar, or, at the very least, was enjoying the game in the same way I was. I occasionally wonder if I was at a game that Pat Kaleta also attended, and I wonder too what it must be like to see the game through his eyes both as a kid, aspiring to one day be those guys on the ice, and being able to achieve that.

We love Pat Kaleta. We love him more than Tim Kennedy — more than many athletes who’ve come from the Buffalo area. We love what Pat Kaleta describes about us, that when he talks to the media he says he’d do anything to win, for this locker room, for these guys. We love that he says that Buffalo was his favorite team growing up and that playing for them and being in Buffalo is his dream. We like that, in part because we like to think of Buffalo as a place that people who have a choice are proud of… so too, we like that in part because very few of us get to fulfill those dreams.

I’m young, still, but getting older. I work at a desk job. I have a wife, we’re buying a house, we have five year plans and ten year plans and life time goals. But it all starts out with dreams. The further away we get from the genesis of those dreams, from our youthful aspirations where anything seemed possible, the less likely it feels we will ever fulfill our ambitions. Above all else, we don’t just love Pat Kaleta because he is a hockey player from Buffalo who happens to play there, we love him because he is, like us, a starry-eyed dreamer who reached those goals. He refused to believe it was impossible. We like to think that it is possible to achieve our dreams in Buffalo, even when the odds are against it.

He has done it in a way that I’m sure many of us imagine that we would achieve our dreams: through hard work and determination, through refusing to take “No,” for an answer. Patrick Kaleta has come to embody a grittiness that we all wish to see in ourselves.

But Patrick Kaleta’s dream may soon be coming to an end.

Part Two: The Sad Reality

Patrick Kaleta’s career-highs would be embarrassing lows for a lot of NHL players. He has never played more than 55 games in a season, never scored more than 15 points, seemingly never been worth anything above replacement level offensively or defensively to a team. What Patrick Kaleta has always brought to the table was spunk and tenacity. You could count on Kaleta getting under the skin of opposing players, perhaps drawing a penalty or at least taking the other team out of the game. You could count on Patrick Kaleta blocking a shot that no one else would dare get in front of. It felt like he did it for us. When he talked to the media, I felt like I wanted him to say all the things I expected an athlete to really say, and it felt like he knew that and tried.

These things, too, are slowly fading. As Kaleta’s body ages and the seasons pass by, so to passes by the ability for him to play the way he plays. It is, for Kaleta, a terrible predicament: In order to preserve his body well enough to be able to play, he needs to adjust the manner in which he plays. But, in order to stay in the NHL, he needs to play with the reckless abandon that got him here.

There is some question, though, as to whether or not we should temper our expectations on Kaleta as a point producing player, and if so, if he even has the sort of value necessary to take up a role in a NHL line-up.

Outside of his 15 point season, Kaleta has never cracked 10 points in a season, and though his 2010-11 campaign has been considered by some to be uncharacteristic, it is almost an exact clone of who he was outside his career year:

You’ll notice, first, that his 08-09 and 10-11 seasons are almost identical. So similar, in fact, that it is a little bit eerie. Much like Ryan Miller, the question needs to be asked: Was 2009-10 a career season for Patrick Kaleta? Was that his high watermark, or something we are supposed to come to expect of him?

And if not, if Patrick Kaleta is actually just a 5 or 6 goal-per-year guy, then that presents a considerable problem for the organization: Can the team really sacrifice a full-time (or, at least 50-or-so games) roster spot to a player who does not actually produce? The argument in favor of Patrick Kaleta seems fairly simple: His role as a pest, as an agitator, as someone who draws the ire of opposing teams is worth things that you don’t see on the score sheet.

This is, though, something that seems to difficult to measure, and most often just an intangible that is a convenient stand by when discussing players who are not particularly good at something or a lot of things, but we like them.*

(*For example, Derek Jeter is not particularly good at defense, but he’s a natural winner. Therefore he is good at defense. Ryan Miller is sometimes far too aggressive, but he has got a Vezina to his name, so he is only as aggressive as he needs to be).

Part Three: Tangibles vs. Intangibles

Hockey is about scoring goals, or creating opportunities for other players to score goals. Goals win games. If Patrick Kaleta directly contributes to a meaningful amount of goals per season, there is yet to be a way to tangibly measure such a thing. This doesn’t mean that he isn’t contributing in this way, just that I can’t seem to figure out how to quantify it. But I love seeing Patrick Kaleta hit, and when he riles up the competition, when he gets a second or third line forward that has no business even acknowledging him running around, it does mean something. I just seem to be totally unable to qualify exactly what that something is.

From other corners of the hockey world, too, Kaleta’s job is in danger. Zack Kassian, a player made out of the spare body parts of Matt Barnaby, Tie Domi and the Hanson brothers in some Canadian lab, should be ready to contend for an NHL position next season, and two seasons at the absolute most. He might be Patrick Kaleta with a bit more of a scoring touch. And isn’t that something we’d love?

In an interview after the season ending Game-7 loss to the Flyers, Kaleta said that he felt he needed to change his style of play in order to promote more health. Not drastically, he cautioned, just slightly — that he needed to do things like block shots differently, or go into plays on the boards at safer angles. While these things might sound good in the interim, it is a weak spot in the already-little armor that protects Kaleta’s NHL position. Once players know that he has to think twice about particular plays, they will surely take liberties with him; cheat a little more toward a particular play, think they can get away with things along the boards and in open ice that they previously might not have been able to get away with. The threat of the semi-truck crashing into the overpass has passed, so to speak. The Angola Locomotive is running short on coal.

Does it have to be this way? How is it conceivable that a 25-year-old hockey player entering only his fourth full NHL season could be beginning a physical decline? Is it something that can be reversed — can our hometown guy stick around for a while longer?

Part Four: Defining Moments

This upcoming season is almost certainly the defining moment in Patrick Kaleta’s career. A repeat of 2010-2011 could be the last note in an abbreviated stay. If he’s able to bring his numbers back to his 10-goal year of 2009-10, though, it may be enough to justify the use of the roster spot. One thing is for certain: doubling ones goal total in a single season is no easy task, no matter how small the number.

Players of Kaleta’s cloth — Rob Ray*, Barnaby, that type, are known more for career defining moments away from the puck. Rob Ray was known for removing the shirt to be harder to grasp, forcing the tie-down rule, for raining fists on opponents with a ridiculous fury. Barnaby was known for his cartoonish facial expressions, his gums always flapping, always goading the opposing team, chirping at them from the bench. What are Kaleta’s defining moments? He hits players hard, he has the reputation for too-often turtling, there was a time in the Boston playoff series two postseasons past where it seemed like he was the only one who wasn’t afraid to be on the ice with the Bruins.

(*Rob Ray and Pat Kaleta are definitely not similar players in their make-up, and I felt it necessary to make clear that I’m not saying that. Ray was an enforcer, through-and-through. Kaleta is a pest. There are very different hockey professions.)

But a great majority of our memories of Kaleta now are those that aren’t just away from the puck, but are off the ice. The most prominent thing I remember about Pat Kaleta from last year — heck, from most years — was that it always seemed like we were waiting for him to get better.

Part Five: Tough Decisions

What we’ve loved about Pat Kaleta may have very little to do with Kaleta himself and instead about where he is from. After all, there is Cal Clutterbuck, there is Dan Carcillo — the amount of players willing to do what Pat Kaleta does is long enough that he does not have to be here. There is an army of career AHLers who would probably stand in front of an actual bus to be where Kaleta is today. He is here, for the most part, because he is our friend, and he is who we see ourselves as because he is one of us.

Whether or not we can afford that to be the case in the long run is a difficult question to answer. It’s hard to say good bye. We struggled mightily with coming to terms with the departing of Tim Kennedy (and some of us haven’t), though in the end it seemed like a shrewd but appropriate business move. Kaleta may very well be heading down the same road.

The overpass in Angola isn’t as exciting to me as it was when I was a kid. Now it’s just an overpass. Things like that lose their luster after a while. We eventually begin to look at the world through grown up glasses. The long nights driving back from the arena are gone. But we never quite lose that pride for where we are from, for who we are, for what the people who represent us mean to us. Though Pat Kaleta isn’t quite the player we want him to be, and maybe he never was, we can’t seem to bring ourselves to stop believing totally, even for just a second, that he won’t at least someday become that guy.

I have a tough time thinking down on Pat Kaleta. He’s one of us. He became who he was through force of will. He never gave up on his dreams because chasing your dreams is what you do, and if he does it, hell, I can do it. I sometimes think we may be better off using that roster spot for a player who might be able to more reliably contribute offense, and I wonder to myself, what would Pat Kaleta the fan think, if the Sabres were a better team without him? What would Pat Kaleta the kid think?