Red Wings prospect Elmer Soderblom is 21 years of age, and we tend to think of him as particularly experienced because big Elmer (6’8,” 249 pounds) has played parts of three seasons with Frolunda HC of the SHL, but last season was Soderblom’s first year exclusively spent at the SHL level.
Soderblom’s somewhat limited professional experience means that he’s probably going to need a stint in Grand Rapids before he comes up to the Red Wings at some point soon, for the sake of acclimating Soderblom to the rigors of North American hockey.
He’s never played on the smaller rink (NHL rinks are 200’x85,’ and international rinks are 200’x100′), he’s never played at NHL pace, and he hasn’t really battled with players who are just as big and strong as he is.
After Lucas Raymond’s performance last season, he’s certainly proven that anything is possible in the prospect development department, but Soderblom will probably require a little bit of patience from Red Wings fans.
The need for patience with Big Elmer is the focus of an article by Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff this morning:
When it comes to tapping into Soderblom’s potential, it might be wise for everyone to tap the brakes. History shows that Soderblom doesn’t take steps up the hockey ladder in one giant leap. He tends to be more about making baby steps into every level of the game.
“He’s kind of got a profile that is a bit all over,” explained NHL prospect expert Byron Bader of HockeyProspecting.com. “He’s kind of up and down, which is not very common.”
The evidence is backing up this assessment. At the U16 level in Sweden, Soderblom’s goal production jumped from two in his first season to 23 in his second year. Moving to U18, he went from zero goals to 15 in consecutive campaigns. At the U20 level, Soderblom’s season-by-season goal output was 0-9-29. Finally, in the senior SHL, Sweden’s top level, Soderblom’s three-season goal output was 0-3-21.
“He switches leagues and he really drops down and the production goes way down,” Bader said. “And then in the second season that he’s in that league, it shoots back up.”
“Normally you see nice, steady growth. You like to see a nice, constant growth, where he’s sort of up and down when he moves leagues.”
Continued; Duff and Bader’s arguments are pretty to-the-point here: Soderblom’s got skills, but his production tends to fall off a cliff when he graduates from one league to the next one up the chain, and then he has a really strong sophomore season.
I’m not particularly concerned about Soderblom’s ability to keep up at the AHL level, but the scheduling grind of having to play in 73 regular season games instead of 55 and ride the bus for six hours at a time to end up playing in back-to-back and three-games-in-three-nights stints in a hard league, where players are more than willing to put you through the boards to put food on the table for their families…
That’s hard. It’s a grind that Soderblom will have to embrace, and a grind that’s sent more than a few of the Red Wings’ European prospects back home.
I believe that Soderblom will have the mental fortitude to acclimate to the rougher, tougher brand of North American hockey because he’ll have a core of Swedish/European compatriots to support him on the Griffins.
How so? Albert Johansson and Eemil Viro, both defensemen, are “turning North American pro” this year, Lulea’s Pontus Andreasson and star sophomore Jonatan Berggren will be knocking on the door of the Red Wings’ roster as forwards, and Victor Brattstrom came over from Europe last season to play goal. He’ll be joined by Olympic MVP Jussi Olkinuora.
Including Soderblom, that’s a 7-man colony of European players in Grand Rapids, and, in the cases of Berggren and Brattstrom, the pair have already endured full seasons at the AHL level.
They possess the knowledge with which to inform the Wings’ four European rookies not named Simon Edvinsson sort out the on-ice and off-ice demands of playing North American hockey.
The Red Wings’ player development staff is far more hands-on as well. Daniel Cleary will make himself available to every prospect, I’m fairly certain that Nicklas Lidstrom and Nik Kronwall will make maiden voyages to Grand Rapids this season, given the Swedish/Finnish colony in GR, and we live in a more connected world in terms of having the ability to connect with relatives and other loved ones across the ocean.
Put bluntly, in terms of a support system, these aren’t the days of Hat Trick Dick Axelsson sitting alone on a bus and deciding to go back home to Sweden at Christmas because he couldn’t hack the North American game back in the 2009-2010 season.
As long as the Wings’ European rookies keep their heads on straight and take the demands of acclimating to the on-ice and off-ice grind that is a heavy AHL schedule, they should be okay. That goes for Big Elmer, too.
