Max Domi’s NHL Career Shows It's Hard to Find the Right Role

There is something funny about looking back at Max Domi's draft report. The scouts weren't really wrong. They saw the quickness. They saw the puck skills. They saw the vision and the playmaking. They even understood that Domi was strong and competitive despite being undersized. The problem wasn't that they misidentified the player. The problem was figuring out what to do with him once he became that player.

Domi has played more than a decade of NHL hockey, with some success.

Domi has now played 11 NHL seasons across seven teams, and the remarkable thing is how consistently he has produced. He's been on at least a 40-point pace in eight of those seasons and has never fallen below a 36-point total. He scored 72 points with Montreal in 2018-19. And, according to this retrospective, he's 10th in the NHL in five-on-five primary-assist rate since entering the league.

That, in fact, is pretty remarkable. But Domi has always had another side to his game. He's generally been an inconsistent goal scorer. His defensive consistency has been an issue. He has sometimes taken too many penalties. And those things make it harder for a coach to find a role for a player in a lineup.

That may be the real story of Domi's career. Hockey teams don't just need players who can do things well. They need players whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other in a way that gives a coach a reason to use them. Domi has spent much of his career trying to find that place.

His scouting report in 2012 compared him to Martin St. Louis. But he never got there.

The irony is that the original scouting report compared him to St. Louis because he was also undersized, skilled and competitive. But eventually he became something more than a collection of strengths. He became a player with an unmistakable identity. Domi never quite got there.

And maybe that's why he has been so interesting—and so frustrating—to watch. He’s been good enough to play 800-plus NHL games and potentially reach 1,000. His passing ability has been good enough to put him in company with players most fans would immediately recognize. For a while, he had a good stretch playing on Auston Matthews’ wing.

Yet he has moved from team to team, a reminder that being good at one of the hardest things in hockey isn't always enough. Sometimes the hardest part of an NHL career isn't becoming a good player. It's becoming a player a team knows exactly how to use.