Some Taylor Hall boosters won’t give Adam Larsson the time of day, but we’ll leave the last word to Ken Daneyko, the take-no-prisoners defenceman who played 20 National League seasons and knows what constitutes a tough kid who’s always got his stick in the opposing player’s ribs.

Edmonton product Daneyko comes from a long line of Jersey defencemen (he and Scott Stevens are the biggest examples) who played hard in those battles around the boards.

“Adam’s not your typical Swede … he’s more in the Ulf Samuelsson mould than the Nick Lidstrom mould,” laughed Daneyko, a Devils TV commentator who has his No. 3 hanging from the rafters in New Jersey.

“Is Adam going to run guys through the wall? Not on a regular basis. But will he play stiff and a little dirty in the corners? Yeah, he will,” said Daneyko, who played exactly the same way through more than 1,200 games with the Devils. That’s been part of the Devils' DNA for years, but Daneyko says it’s gone with the changing tide of today’s puck-moving defencemen.

“We’re losing it. I wish we had more of it,” he said, again with a chuckle.

A large piece of Danyeko misses the old days when playing defence meant heavy labour, stickwork and a fist at somebody’s head to move a guy. “Even 10 years after we all left, there was more of that (hardscrabble D). We were still tough to play against in our zone. But there’s a natural progression around the league (to puck-moving defencemen, checking with a good stick). We’ve got away from that, but I understand why (they're playing more uptempo).”

You still need players the opponent's curse, however.

Daneyko doesn’t think Oilers fans will truly understand the value of Larsson, who was tutored by Stevens in battle drills when Stevens was an assistant coach, until the Oilers make the post-season and are playing the same opponent five, six, seven times in a row in a playoff round.

“I think they’ll appreciate him more then. You can’t win with 15 flash-and-dash guys,” said Daneyko. “You guys (media) know that better than anybody with the Oilers having all this talent (before).”

“Everybody talks about Pittsburgh’s speed last year, but they won the Stanley Cup because they were relentless in their own zone.”

Short shifts

• When St. Louis Blues head coach Ken Hitchcock was asked about giving teams three points for a regulation win rather than two, he told the Boston Globe’s Kevin Dupont, “You mean, let’s play the game to win it, and not play the last five minutes just to get a point?’ ... I like when you are playing all out all the way, but I gotta tell you as a coach, there are five minutes left in the game, and it’s tied, I’m not necessarily thinking about winning it. I want at least a point. A lot of coaches think like that. We have to think like that. Because to get zero points in a tie game with so little time left is devastating. I want that one point at least, I gotta have it, that’s how you get in the playoffs.”*

• How about a Curtis Lazar for Griffin Reinhart trade? Ottawa feels their winger Lazar is spinning his wheels (he’s completely lost his offensive instincts) and Edmonton has defenceman Reinhart in the minors. Both are former first-round draft picks and former Edmonton Oil Kings captains.

•Is it too early to say San Jose Sharks defenceman Brent Burns can win the scoring title? He’s got 44 points, four back of leader Connor McDavid. No NHL defenceman gets more shots through to the goalie than Burns, say scouts. Last defenceman to win the scoring race, of course, was Bobby Orr in 1974-75. He won it twice.

• Joe Thornton hasn’t beaten an NHL goalie since last April, which is hard to fathom. He’s got 379 career goals in the 1,400 games he has played, but his only two this season are empty-netters. His last empty-net goal was Nov. 5 in Washington. Mind you, he’s had 43 shots in 42 games. Thornton is closing in on 1,000 career assists, but he and Hall of Famer Adam Oates are a lot alike. Pass first, second and third, always on the tape. But shooting optional.

• I agree with Elliotte Friedman that Carolina is the perfect trading partner for Colorado. Hurricanes are very deep on the blue-line (last three first-round picks Jake Bean, Noah Hanifin and Hayden Fleury) and the Avs have forwards (Gabriel Landeskog, Matt Duchene) to dangle. If you ask pro scouts, unheralded Jacob Slavin is best Carolina defenceman on their roster today, not Justin Faulk or Hanifin. If I’m Colorado, I’d want either centre Nicolas Roy or fellow Canadian world junior team forward Julien Gauthier in any deal for Landeskog or Duchene, too.

• Is it just me or was Jake Allen better last year in St. Louis when he was pushed by Brian Elliott? Now the cage is all his, and he’s had a very average season with the Blues. Sometimes a Nos. 1 and 1a in net works better.

• Alex Ovechkin is the best left-winger in NHL history with apologies to Bobby Hull, Luc Robitaille and Brendan Shanahan, all Hall of Famers. Just when you think Ovechkin’s having a pedestrian season, he’s got 21 goals — only Sidney Crosby and Jeff Carter have more. Ovie’s taken 4,391 career shots over 880 games, five a game, and at 546 goals, he’s got Michel Goulet (548), Ron Francis (549) and Johnny Bucyk (556) squarely in his sights. Guy Lafleur (560), Mike Modano (561), Mats Sundin and Joe Nieuwendyk (564) are reachable this year, too, which would put him 22nd all-time, and he turned 31 just four months ago.

• Zdeno Chara has a no-trade clause in his contract, so the Boston Bruins would have to twist his arm to agree to a trade, but the big guy’s 39 years old and has one year left at $4 million. He’d be a good pickup at that price for next season, but he probably doesn’t want to go anywhere. He has kids and a wife who love Boston, and he turned down L.A. when he was a free-agent before. But what if the Dallas Stars offered six-foot-eight defenceman Jamie Oleksiak and the rights to winger Valeri Nichushkin, who is in Russia and left because he doesn’t like how head coach Lindy Ruff was playing him?

• Bruins head coach Claude Julien may take the fall for his team's struggles at season’s end, with one year on his deal, but after 10 years in Boston, maybe he needs a change of scenery. He's trying to get juice out of a dry orange. He’s won a Stanley Cup, he got the Bruins to the finals another time. He’d be No. 1 on Vegas general manager George McPhee’s list.

• Teams have started calling Vancouver Canucks GM Jim Benning about Alex Burrows, who turns 36 in April. Probably Western Conference teams, who know what the set-to-be unrestricted free agent winger can bring to the table. He’s the only NHLer to ever play at least 100 games each in the ECHL, AHL and NHL. He started with the Greenville Grrrowl (“three R’s,” laughed Burrows), then the Baton Rouge Kingfish and Columbia Inferno in the third-tier ECHL circuit, and played for AHL's Manitoba Moose. Very classy gesture by the Oilers to salute the Canucks’ winger for his 800 NHL games last week.

• It was an exhaustive effort by nhl.com to compile the list of the 100 greatest players with good stories and video for the Centennial of the NHL, but sorry, it seems hollow if they’re not going to rank the players, too. That’s what hockey fans like to see so they can debate over the choices. It’s like Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 100 songs of all-time.

• The Minnesota Wild must be salivating over the world junior — four outstanding forwards in Russian captain and left-winger Kirill Kaprizov, Swedish captain and centre Joel Eriksson-Ek, USA captain and centre Luke Kunin, and big winger Jordan Greenway. Kaprizov has 30 points in 37 games and 62 penalty minutes for Ufa in the KHL, outstanding for a 19-year-old. Kunin has 49 points in 50 games in first two years at the University of Wisconsin. The six-foot-five, 225-pound Greenway has 42 points in 55 games at Boston U. Eriksson-Ek played nine games for Wild this year (five points) but is back in Sweden with Farjestads.

jmatheson@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @NHLbyMatty