The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton offers three storylines to watch during training camp, and here’s one of his points of emphasis:
Upward Mobility Amongst Young Returning Forwards: In his pre-training camp press availability, Steve Yzerman spoke about his excitement for some of Detroit’s young players to push for greater roles in the coming season.
“Some of our younger players—we mentioned Joe Veleno, Michael Rasmussen—they want a bigger role, they want more ice time, they want to play on some of these special teams, they want to take face-offs in the last minute of a game. So there’s competition there,” Yzerman said.
For the purposes of this conversation, I’d like to focus on the Red Wing forwards who are both young and returners to the NHL roster. Youngsters trying to claim full-time roles for the first time (e.g. Marco Kasper and Carter Mazur) and players arriving to Detroit from elsewhere (e.g. Daniel Sprong and Klim Kostin) have their own unique challenges.
However, a step forward for Detroit in the standings will almost certainly have to coincide with growth from the Red Wings class of young but established forwards. Here, I’m thinking of the two Yzerman cited (Veleno and Rasmussen) as well as Lucas Raymond and Jonatan Berggren.
Yzerman was explicit in his expectation for Veleno and Rasmussen’s growth—pushing for more minutes in higher leverage positions.
Meanwhile, Raymond has already claimed a top six, top power play role, but his challenge will rest in bouncing back from a disappointing season. Berggren has dabbled in those top-of-the-lineup spots, but he hasn’t solidified his place there. In 2023-24, the young Swede will seek to leverage his mature and diverse offensive toolkit into becoming a fixture atop Detroit’s line-up.
Continued; the balance of young players with added veterans is something I’m certainly going to watch this upcoming season, starting tomorrow.
