As Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff notes, Simon Edvinsson made a surprising admission during Sunday’s media availability:
When Simon Edvinsson is seeking someone to blame for his failure to make the Detroit Red Wings out of training camp a year ago, he points to the guy in the mirror.
“I think from last year I came with a bad attitude,” Edvinsson explained. “I didn’t compete.”
Chalk it up as a lesson learned for the 20-year-old defenseman. And if he is in requirement of any reinforcement to remind him of those shortcomings, there’s plenty of leaders inside the walls of the Detroit locker room ready to step up and offer Edvinsson a reminder that he’s needing to stay at the top of his game every day he’s in training camp.
“They’ve been on me,” Edvinsson said, pointing specifically to captain Dylan Larkin and Calder Trophy-winning defenseman Moritz Seider as two Red Wings keeping in his ear about keeping up the intensity.
“I hear that. This year I want to compete with them. I see what they do. I try to learn from that. I want to compete against them. I want to compete against everybody. It’s really good players on the roster of the Red Wings overall.”
Continued; my sense last season was that Edvinsson wanted the transition to the NHL to be an easy thing, and he wanted to not have to worry about playing defense, and instead, use his fantastic skating skills to generate offense instead.
He’s a year older now, with a season of AHL experience under his belt, and he knows that, despite his immense talent, he’s got to improve his defensive game in order to succeed at the NHL level. I fully believe that Edvinsson will do just that in thriving as an NHL’er one day, but in the interim, he does need to continue to improve as a two-way defender.
