Part of the reason I chose to spend early Sunday morning writing a summary of the 9 Red Wings World Junior Championship participants‘ tournaments is because due criticism is coming toward some of them, and, as Red Wings fans are wont to panic when the prospect experts criticize the Red Wings, well…
Sometimes you have to “get out ahead of the story.”
The Athletic’s Corey Pronman, their prospect guru, wrote a fine article in which he praises the World Junior Championship’s “standouts” and discusses the “disappointments,” and, as you might expect, his final prospect is a disappointing Swedish defenseman:
Simon Edvinsson, LHD, Detroit: Edvinsson was one of the standouts of the December tournament, but it’s fair to say he didn’t have the week he expected. Part of that was due to being injured in the pre-tournament game and getting food poisoning mid-week, but even with that in mind he didn’t do a ton to help Sweden win games. He’s a great player coming off a great season, and there aren’t very many players in hockey with his combination of size, skating and skill, but he coughed up a lot of pucks this week when the games got quicker and it was hard to say he looked NHL-ready.
Continued; no, Edvinsson did not look NHL-ready. Edvinsson struggled mightily at times, and, regardless of whether that was due to the exhibition game injury and/or food poisoning and/or the planet Mercury being in retrograde…
He wasn’t good enough for the Swedes to win, and there’s no doubt about that. As I said in my own article, there is no doubt that this tournament casts doubt as to whether Edvinsson will step right into the NHL out of training camp…
But we have to see how a more comfortable Edvinsson plays in the prospect tournament, training camp and the exhibition season before presuming that he will be banished to Grand Rapids forever and ever.
