September is the most optimistic time of year in the NHL.
Most everyone likes their team and their chances. Most everyone had a great summer working out.
Meanwhile, the results on the ice, the wins and losses that drive this business, are still more than two weeks away from influencing the conversation.
Advertisem*nt
It’s a heady time of year and even in this upbeat environment, after three days of hard work and scrimmages, the mounting excitement and expectations that face Elias Pettersson going into his second NHL season have metastasized into something approaching a frenzy.
If we’re not quite at Petey-mania yet, you can at least see it from here.
From the Captain America memes (which Pettersson himself described as unfair to Dan Murphy on Sunday) to the long lines of autograph seekers, Pettersson’s presence at camp dominated the coverage and the proceedings.
His performance even overshadowed the ongoing Brock Boeser contract stalemate.
And then the Alien capped it all off with a Forsberg deke in the shootout that ended the final scrimmage of camp and only accelerated the hype train.
Even before Pettersson picked up the puck at centre ice and skated toward the net, the crowd was buzzing. And then Pettersson delivered:
VINTAGE @_EPettersson 😱 pic.twitter.com/ALWFWECIgc
— Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) September 15, 2019
“I’m just trying to do my best out there,” Pettersson said of his performance at camp. “This summer, I’ve been trying to prepare myself as good as possible, and whatever I do, I’m doing 100 percent. That’s what I’m trying to do always.”
Pettersson’s 100 percent resulted in a sequence of dominant images over the weekend. He crushed the bag skate on Friday and then authored a tremendous effort on the opening goal of the first scrimmage on Saturday. On Sunday, he scored on a lovely Forsberg deke in the shootout, but he also delivered a perfectly weighted aerial pass to Micheal Ferland to set up a breakaway on the game-tying goal.
Even across a league awash with unbridled optimism at this time of year, Pettersson’s preternatural display of hockey skill this weekend stands out.
Advertisem*nt
The better scrimmage
Travis Green skated his club extremely hard all weekend, but with Sunday’s focus on systems — the players worked on their forecheck and neutral zone forecheck a bit in the on-ice sessions — the early group was far less fatigued on Day 3 than it was on Day 2.
“The second day was really hard,” Canucks forward Jay Beagle said. “Today was more systems and the scrimmage was better because of that.”
With fresher players competing, the Day 3 scrimmage was a fine show for the thousands of Canucks fans who attended. Green even called an audible when the scrimmage ended in a 2-2 tie, deciding to treat the fans to a five-minute period of 3-on-3 action and a shootout.
“That was just thinking on the fly a little bit,” Green said. “Tie game, let’s keep playing. Lot of people in the building, I think it’s exciting.”
It was a good call from the Vancouver head coach and set up an entertaining finale.
The in-game trade
Not since Mike Cammalleri was pulled from the bench in Montreal has hockey seen an in-game trade as unconventional as the one Green pulled off on Sunday, when he left the blue team bench after the first half of the scrimmage — with the blue team leading 2-0 — and switched to the white team bench to lead the comeback.
“I had money on white!” Green joked.
“No, I had to make a quick decision to decide who I thought was going to win, so I jumped benches. Wish I could do that in the regular season!”
No lineup update
No Canucks are traveling Sunday ahead of Monday’s split-squad game against the Calgary Flames.
Both the side that will host the Flames in Victoria on Monday night and the side that will concurrently travel to play the Flames at the Scotiabank Saddledome will hold morning skates at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria on Monday morning.
As such, the Canucks wouldn’t reveal their lineup for either contest, and I’d expect we’ll have to closely watch line rushes at both morning skates to get a sense of which players are playing in which games.
Advertisem*nt
“There will be a lot of bodies playing in the games, so 60 guys have to dress,” Green said of selecting his lineup for the split-squad game on Monday and Tuesday night’s preseason game at Rogers Arena. “There will be some guys that play back-to-back games, a lot of guys have to dress and so a lot of guys will get game action, which is nice for them.”
Green also wouldn’t reveal anything about the coaching staff he’s planning to send to Calgary. He did advise the media, however, that he would “mix it up” rather than sending the Utica Comets staff to run the bench in Calgary.
Look at this graph
The Boy Genius, aka The Athletic’s Harman Dayal, showed Bo Horvat a bar graph featuring information on what tends to happen when the linemates of a high-end defensive centre improve.
In fact, Dayal was having some great conversations with a variety of Canucks all weekend. The features that Dayal is going to write with the insight gleaned from chatting through and even looking over graphs with actual NHL players are going to be mind-blowing.
Horvat seemed genuinely curious, too.
Brogan Rafferty impresses but could still use some better SEO
Brogan Rafferty has a fascinating personal story.
The Quinnipiac product, signed late last season to an entry-level deal, is legally blind in his right eye.
With his contacts on, he can see pretty well.
When he put his hand over his “good” eye after Sunday’s on-ice session, an on-ice session in which he once again impressed observers — including Canucks brass — with a composed, all-around performance, Rafferty told me that while he could still see me, he couldn’t quite make out the letters on my media pass.
Rafferty’s lack of vision in his right eye hasn’t stopped him from excelling at the college level, or earning an NHL contract, or making his NHL debut, which he did with the Canucks late last season.
Advertisem*nt
It also hasn’t stopped Rafferty from putting together a stellar performance throughout camp, one that’s left the Canucks officially and unofficially impressed.
“The problem is when I say something like that is I’m also leaving someone out and this is all off the top of my mind,” Green said after naming Carson Focht and Ethan Keppen on Saturday, when asked to list some players who’d stood out at camp so far, “but Brogan Rafferty looked good in the game today. Composed.”
Asked the same question Sunday, Green was a bit cagier, but only slightly.
“I thought a couple of the young D played well,” the Canucks bench boss said. “I hate saying one or two names, I could probably say six names. Some of the young D stood out to me.”
Fellow defensive prospect Josh Teves had a strong performance on Sunday as well, but Rafferty has clearly upped his stock with a stellar weekend in Victoria.
“For him to single out me, it’s flattering, but I can’t let it get to my head,” Rafferty said Sunday. “Just continue what I’m doing and if he likes what I’m doing, then that’s good.”
Rafferty cited his brief cup of coffee last season with helping him get up to speed quickly this weekend.
“Getting those NHL games helped my confidence a lot,” he said. “Going to a few camps, seeing the staff over and over, it helped me get comfortable, which is a big deal going into my first NHL training camp. Having that confidence is priceless.”
The confidence appears to be paying off, though there’s still a lot of road to run. Rafferty is already 24 years old, and the vast majority of NCAA players with a similar build and production profile haven’t managed to make it to the NHL. There are exceptions, players such as Nate Prosser and Matt Gilroy, but the Canucks clearly see separators in Rafferty that suggest to them that he can beat the odds.
Advertisem*nt
If there’s one area that Rafferty still hopes to improve, it’s his shooting, his “offensive killer instinct” as he put it.
He’d also like to improve his overall digital footprint.
Rafferty has told the story a lot, but he shares the same first and last name and the same age with one of the Craigslist killers who terrorized Ohio earlier this decade.
In the past, when you’d type his name into Google, Google’s predictions would fill out the query with words like “murderer” and “trial”. It seems that Rafferty’s hockey success has changed that equation somewhat, although “Craigslist” remains when I tested it out in incognito mode on Sunday afternoon:
“I’m still working to try and make it so that when you look my name up it won’t say like ‘Craigslist’ or ‘court case’ after it,” Rafferty said. “I’d like it to just say ‘hockey.’”
If he keeps performing the way he did this weekend, it’s only a matter of time.
The reveal
Jake Virtanen discussed training camp and his second-half struggles last season with the media Sunday. In so doing, he revealed that a previously undisclosed upper-body injury, it seems, was a collarbone injury.
The exchange was hilarious and went like this:
Virtanen: Just with the injury with my collarbone, actually, I forget what it was even…”
(Widespread laughter from the media pool, Jake and even Canucks PR)
Reporter: Upper body!
Virtanen: “Yeah, (laughing) whatever it was. I think I made a big step last year and I’m going to do that again this year as well.”
Best insight
The Canucks have a relatively large leadership group. It consists of veteran players such as Chris Tanev, Brandon Sutter, Alex Edler, Bo Horvat and Jay Beagle — players who have been around, had success and have worked with stellar players throughout their careers.
Often those stellar players helped mold the current Canucks leadership group into the NHL veterans they’ve become.
Advertisem*nt
“I just try to think about how it was when I was a young guy, what the older guys did for me, how much they helped and how important that was,” Edler says of his approach working with Vancouver’s young core. “I’m just trying to do the same for the young guys now, if they need me.”
With Pettersson putting on a show all weekend, I decided I’d ask Vancouver’s leadership group about working with Pettersson and the likes of Quinn Hughes. How does it work for a team that’s transitioning to a young core of elite players?
“Our young guys are all great people, good heads on their shoulders, and special players too,” Tanev said. “They’ve all been in positions where they’re top players on their teams … I like to try and have guys over for dinner, just chat. They’re all such great kids though that it’s not too much work. They know how to play, and they know how to prepare.”
Tanev, in particular, has been paired with Hughes on occasion at training camp and has spent a lot of the weekend working with him — in drills on the ice, and socially off of it.
“It’s fun to be able to go hang out with Quinn,” Tanev said. “It’s just like, ‘Let’s just go to watch football today,’ hang out and chat, talk hockey and talk about what we can do on the ice, how we can work together. It’s fun.”
Beagle and Sutter, meanwhile, praised how little mentorship Pettersson requires. How he has a sixth sense about doing the right things.
“The thing with him is, he thinks the game so well, he knows the game so well and he knows what he needs to do, on and off the ice,” Beagle said. “He’s a guy that people say, ‘As a leader, what do you do with Petey?’
“Nothing. There’s nothing you need to do.”
“He showed it from Day 1 last year, too,” said Sutter, suggesting that he hasn’t seen much of a change from Pettersson between last year’s training camp and this one. “A lot of young guys, skilled guys, when they’re young come in and think it’s going to be easy. But he pitched right in.
Advertisem*nt
“You watch him, first week of last season and he’s in the corner battling guys, blocking shots. Not a lot of 19-year-olds do that. For a guy that’s as high-skill as he is, you don’t see that a lot.”
When asked about the system of working with young, elite players, Horvat recalled the primary lesson that he took from the Sedin twins and Alex Edler when he was a young man in the league – a lesson that’s especially valuable during the bag skates of training camp weekend.
“I think work ethic is the biggest thing that I learned from the twins and Eddie,” Horvat said. “They were always the players that were in the best shape at camp. I learned that quickly, if you want to be the best, you have to beat the best. They always came to camp in great shape and were unbelievable and I try to do that every single year.”
Horvat also suggested that Pettersson is noticeably more comfortable this year — in his opinion.
“I think he’s matured, he’s a lot more comfortable and he’s still dancing out there on the ice,” Horvat said. “I think he’s in better shape, he knew what to expect and that’s made him that much better.”
Pettersson seems to agree with Horvat’s overall assessment: He’s better prepared and he’s learned from last year. If those lessons apply to all facets of his preparation off the ice and his work on it, that could be a scary proposition for the rest of the league.
“This year, I knew what was coming,” Pettersson said. “I know the guys on the team, the coaching staff and all that. So I knew what was going to happen, where I didn’t know last year.”
(Photo of Elias Pettersson: John Russell / NHLI via Getty Images)
