IIHF.com’s Chris Jurewicz posted a profile of Red Wings prospect Simon Edvinsson this morning. Edvinsson is currently in Edmonton, Alberta, playing for Team Sweden at the World Junior Championship:
Simon Edvinsson remembers his first trip to Detroit. Walking through Little Caesars Arena for a Swedish defenceman is somewhat akin to visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“Yeah, it was pretty cool when I went there for the first time,” says Edvinsson. “You see all of those players on the wall. It was pretty cool to see. Of course, we were rebuilding and now we are going forward. I feel like the team is playing a lot better and it’s new energy every day. It’s going to be fun.”
Edvinsson is the next Swedish defenceman who Red Wings fans will come to love, perhaps right up there with the great Nicklas Lidstrom and Niklas Kronwall. It’s never easy to be compared to legends but Edvinsson – a key member of Sweden’s team at the 2022 IIHF World Junior Championship in Edmonton – has all the right tools for stardom.
He’s 199 cm / 6-foot-6, 95 kg / 209 pounds and is noticed for high-end skill and skating. He is a product of Frolunda Gothenburg in Sweden, the same program that developed Rasmus Dahlin. He had four points in seven games in helping lead Sweden to the gold medal at he 2021 IIHF Ice Hockey U18 World Championship and had one goal and two assists through two games at the Covid-cut-short 2022 IIHF World Junior Championship in December.
This week, Edvinsson returns to Edmonton with one thing on his mind – bringing a gold medal to Sweden. For all of that country’s hockey dominance and strength over the years, gold medals at the World Juniors have been hard to come by, with just two in the country’s history at the event (2012 and 1981).
