The World Junior Summer Showcase kicks into high gear on Saturday, July 29th, when Team USA Blue takes on Sweden at 1 PM EDT, and Team USA White takes on Finland at 4 PM, with both games taking place at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Michigan (tickets are $10 per person per game, or $30 per person for a whole-week pass).
The four-team matrix will also play games on Monday, July 31st, Wednesday, August 2nd and Friday, August 4th. Wednesday is actually the “Big Day” at USA Hockey Arena, because that’s when Finland plays Sweden, and Team USA White plays Team USA Blue.
As such, the last two days’ worth of practices have served as the lead-up to the games which will help determine the course of the three participating countries as they begin to determine the shape of their 2024 World Junior Championship teams.
Yesterday and today’s practices were different in both form and function: on Thursday, the Swedes and Finns gave their players a slightly gentler introduction to the structures of play which their national teams will employ over the next week, while the Americans’ two teams, which mostly consist of players who’ve taken part in the Under-17 and Under-18 National Team Development Program, snapped to a familiar and intensely disciplined form under University of Denver coach David Carle.
Today, to put things succinctly, the Swedes and Finns caught up over the course of their hour-long practices, and Team USA used home-ice advantage to an educational purpose, skating for an hour and fifteen minutes (which tended to become 90 minutes in total) instead of the usual hour.
Two of the Red Wings’ three participants at the WJSS play for Sweden in Axel Sandin Pellikka and Anton Johansson, and the Swedish team worked quite hard at stepping up the pace and intensity of their practices while simply getting down to the business of developing team structure.
2-on-0 rushes which warmed up the goaltenders gave way to 2-on-1 rushes, with half of the team wearing Tre Kronor yellow and the other half wearing blue, and situational drills in which dump-in retrievals were conducted. Then the team practiced breakouts, neutral zone transitions, and finally, time of possession in the offensive zone (with screened/tipped shots emphasized as players layered into drills) via even-strength and special teams play.
Eventually, the shapes of the four lines were hinted at (though it’s bloody hard to keep track of who’s who on a team that wears no names or numbers on the backs of their jerseys, only little number decals on their helmets) as the players worked on their bench play, with 4 distinct units engaging in half-ice and full-ice play, with power play/penalty-killing drills wrapping up the hour’s worth of instruction.
The Finns just do things differently, and while their coaching staff was also establishing team structure, systems of play and four-line combinations.
The Finns started their practice by cranking up intensity via skating in small-area games (read: utilizing half the rink as the entire playing surface, with 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 play between nets set up between the half boards on one side of the ice). These kinds of tight-quarters games require physical contact, and that facilitates more competitive hockey.
From there, with several Swedish players and coaches watching, and, on occasion, some U.S. players taking seats in the stands, the Finns worked on dump-in retrievals, holding the blueline in the offensive zone when pucks were rimmed around, and, ultimately, they worked on a lot of 5-on-4 play as they employed bench changes and what began to look like established lines (again, hard to determine when the Finns don’t have jersey numbers on their backs, either)…
In my notes, I just put it this way:
Very Finnish. Complicated, ugly, emphasis on breakouts, retrievals, end-to-end coverage. NZ [neutral zone] play of course.
The Finns do things differently. They were building the same kind of team structure that Sweden was, while trying to amp up the intensity of play leading into what will be “morning skates” tomorrow…
But the Swedish team engaged in some very familiar NHL-level drills for their two “yellow” and “blue” groups before bringing the groups together (and exchanging some jerseys to sort out their lines), while the Finns went with “white group” and “blue group” receiving instructions from different coaches from the get-go. There was more of a delineation between a “top six” and “bottom six” in that regard.
Team USA White and Team USA Blue do things coach Carle’s way, and again:
You’d think that, given the familiarity that so many Team USA players have with the system of play that the Under-17, Under-18 and World Junior teams play, that they’d pace themselves on Friday, given that there are eight more days to go (four of them “game days”) at the World Junior Summer Showcase.
Instead, to the surprise of those of us in the press area, the both U.S. teams were given an extra half-an-hour’s worth of ice time (or nearly so) in order for the Americans to make sure that everything was exact in terms of attention to detail.
From the get-go, the Americans were working on battling for possession of the puck down low in the offensive/defensive zone, with noticeable hacking and whacking taking place during their battle drills.
The intensity maintained a break-neck pace (or nearly so) as the Americans worked on changes in possession over the course of full ice, outlet passing, neutral zone transitions, and sustaining possession in the offensive zone and/or stifling play in the defensive zone.
Line changes were thrown in quite early in the drills, so lots of bodies were coming and going off the ice while drills were taking place, adding a layered complexity to what were already advanced sets of drills.
The Americans did a lot of work on the power play and penalty-kill as well, and I wasn’t the only person to notice the literal stating of, “GO, GO, GO!” encouragement from the coaching staff when the pace might be anything less than full-flight.
The Americans do their drills hard, they do their drills fast, and they do their drills correctly, or they’re not-so-subtly reminded that “good enough” is not good enough.
I was surprised to see the number of players that blocked shots with their bodies when getting in shooting lanes–during practice, getting cheers from the bench as the players shook off stingers–and the physical play wasn’t quite at game level, because nobody was hitting to hurt anyone else, but that level of “finishing checks” was only just being held back by a hair’s breadth.
The lines were a little easier to discern given that the Americans have names on the backs of their jerseys, along with a little “STOP!” patch to remind players that checks from behind are not recommended…
But I spent most of Team USA White’s session watching Trey Augustine, and I spent most of Team USA Blue’s session waiting for interviews from Team USA White.
Sometimes that’s the price you pay for being part of the media, and I know that The Athletic’s Max Bultman (who is a really nice gentleman) and the NHL Network’s EJ Hradek (who is a really nice gentleman as well!) left the “mixed zone” to watch the shapes of the USA Blue team’s lines take shape.
Ultimately, both the White and Blue teams’ ice time ended with a small area game, and Team USA Blue’s “blue” jersey team thought it had won, but had a goal denied on a technicality, so the “white” jersey team won, much to the other side’s consternation.
Individually, what I witnessed from the Red Wings’ three prospects boils down to the following:
Axel Sandin Pellikka: ASP continued to strike me as a player whose heads-up, stick-on-the-ice play and almost constant situational awareness make the 5’11,” 182-pound defenseman an offensive asset whenever he’s on the ice. Sandin Pellikka has a full cupboard’s worth of shots available in terms of his snap, slap, wrist and one-timed shots, he’s a superb passer, and he is a “GO, GO, GO!” player when it comes to advancing in the rush, sometimes to his detriment.
His defense…Is a work in progress at times. Despite his Brian Rafalski-like level of understanding the game, he really pinches at all costs, and sometimes those costs come back to bite him in the form of rushes going the other way and/or turnovers because he’s forcing offense all the dang time.
I wrote a couple of times in my notes (and I may have written yesterday) that he needs to embrace that Henrik Zetterberg axiom that a “shift where nothing happens can be a good shift,” and that high-event hockey is wonderful, but high-event hockey when the puck ends up in your net or the scoring chance ends up stopped by your goaltender because you’ve abandoned your defensive position too soon…Well, those are bad “events.”
Long story long, ASP is undoubtedly going to possess an elite head for the game, he’s got an elite set of shots, he’s an elite passer, and even though he’s “smaller” and needs to work on his upper-body strength, he holds his own because he’s a superb skater. The problem is that he needs to balance his illustrious offensive game with a sounder, simpler, saner defensive game.
Anton Johansson: Big Anton is a different sort of animal. At 6’4″ and 194 pounds, he’s lanky, all arms and legs and torso, and he can look awkward while he’s doing his thing, he uses his stick superbly well, and he’s more than willing to kick pucks or elbow pucks or do whatever he has to to get some part of his big body on the puck or on the man that’s trying to beat him. Whereas ASP does the Rafalski defense–where he skates into the player and tries to tie up a stick like a sort of “soccer tackle”–Johansson is more able to use his stick to separate man from puck, he’s more willing to sacrifice an offensive chance to get back and block a shot or a pass, and he’s got a bit of a more mature sense of when to go and when to “stay home.”
I wouldn’t put Anton on the level of the unrelated Red Wings super-defensive prospect of the same last name, one Albert Johansson, master of all things subtle, but Anton has the building blocks necessary to really fill out his frame and become a big, mobile, physical defenseman with a fantastic stick and a real sharp head on his shoulders.
It’s very evident that he comes from a hockey family (as I said yesterday, his dad is Leksands IF’s GM, his older brother Simon plays defense for the Iowa Wild, and his younger brother Victor is working his way up the ranks with Leksand’s Under-18 team’s blueline), because he’s “headsy” in a different kind of way. ASP is cerebral and anticipatory in all things offensive; Anton has the kind of, “He’s going to be a pro somewhere” head on his shoulders that Antti Tuomisto utilized to parlay a season back in Finland into a contract with the Wings last spring.
Trey Augustine: I saw some very good things from Trey on Friday, and I watched some limitations pop up as well for the 6’1,” 183-pound goaltender.
There’s no doubt that Augustine can be elite in his spareness: he’s particularly square to shooters, that high-held-glove-low-held-blocker combination works, especially when he’s gobbling up pucks with his glove and batting blocker shots into the corners, his pads are sharp as they lay flat on top of his skates, his butterfly is wide and upright in terms of his torso, and his stick jabs pucks away and makes smart, short passes.
His anticipation is very good for a player who’s out of his stance half the time, and he may not be as big as the guys who try to screen him, but he does a very good job of getting his head around butts and shoulders and heads obstructing his field of view.
He also skitters when he skates across the crease, instead of skating in one stride, so it’s skitter skitter skitter, get into the right position, skitter skitter skitter, three more little strides to the left, skitter skitter skitter, kick the toe out a little bit, and that stop-and-start nature of his footwork can prohibit some explosiveness when he really needs to flare out a leg or a toe.
That’s where his wingspan (or the lack thereof, as compared to the 6’4″ or 6’6″ goaltender) eliminates some of his margin for error, and when he’s off, pucks squeeze through his blocker arm or under his glove, pucks find the far side post, and rebounds get jabbed through, though he is very good at stopping the first tipped shot.
It’s not like Augustine is anything less than South Lyon’s best NHL prospect ever, a professional goalie in the making who is going to get paid to play hockey for a very long time.
It’s just that he’s 18 and needs to refine his game so that there are no sharp edges, so that everything is a little more effortless, and so that his “smoothness” is what translates to another save out of thirty, because it’s making that one or two extra saves in 30 or 40 or 50 shots (and making it look easy) that separate the NHL guys from the fine minor pros.
I also took a venture into the Red Wings-related category–literally–on Friday, as I spoke with Red Wings prospect defenseman Shai Buium’s younger brother, defenseman Zeev Buium of USA Blue.
Zeev is 17 going on 18 (he is a December birthday), but he’s already played for both the U.S. Under-17 and Under-18 program for a total of two years, which means that he’s college-bound–and the 6,’ 177-pound defenseman from California is going to the University of Denver to play alongside his brother (Shai is 20, and will be a junior this season) for a year or two.
Zeev isn’t as big as Shai, who is fully-developed at 6’3″ and 220 pounds, but he plays quite similarly to Shai! They are both fast-skating, puck possession defenders who keeps his hands tight but uses his stick well to break up rushes against, and he’s got a good set of snap, slap and wrist shots, he’s a smart passer, and he’s heads-up solid.
Over the course of two whole viewings, I’ve seen some boobles, bumbles and mistakes happen, too, and Zeev is most definitely all of 17, despite his two years’ worth of familiarity with USA Hockey’s best NTDP (National Team Development Program) teams.
He’s going to need at least a couple years’ worth of seasoning at Denver to develop into a slightly smaller version of his “big” bigger brother, in terms of both filling out physically and smoothing out the wrinkles in his game.
It was cool to speak to him, alongside Max Bultman and University of Michigan sports-covering maestro Connor Eargood, as Zeev revealed that his mom moved from California to Michigan to serve as a “billet mom” while Zeev was with the NTDP. Our interview was brief and I threw some softball questions at him, but he was very accommodating speaking with three strangers.
Okay, that’s it for Friday’s installment. I’m hoping that tomorrow’s games have box scores, so we can get more context as to who did what and how well the players did in terms of accomplishing their relative tasks.
In any case, these games do come with a caveat (as always): this is a summer tournament, and while it will no doubt play an important role in determining what shapes the countries’ World Junior Championship teams take, the players’ play with their respective rights-holders this fall will also matter significantly.
In other words, we’re going to have to watch ASP with Skelleftea, Anton Johansson with Leksands IF, and Trey Augustine as he establishes himself as a freshman at Michigan State to find out who fits in where come December in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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