from Ben Shpigel of the New York Times,

Every so often, Scott Scissons is asked to make a speech. He tends to begin the same way, with a moment of levity: Five players were chosen ahead of him in the 1990 draft, he says, but no one in the crowd has likely heard of them.

Those five players — Owen Nolan, Petr Nedved, Keith Primeau, Mike Ricci and Jaromir Jagr — have combined to score 1,989 regular-season goals in the N.H.L. Scissons, a center taken by the Islanders right after the Penguins selected Jagr, had none.

Everyone laughs, and so does Scissons, and then he gets to his point.

“The reality is,” Scissons says, “life can go one of a couple ways.”

His way involved making his debut for the Islanders at 19, sustaining a series of debilitating injuries that forced him to retire at 23, then returning home to Saskatchewan to attain a different sort of professional satisfaction: working in the family business, selling and servicing mobile homes.

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