If you are still following my personal Twitter (@CarolinaMatt63), I encourage you to also add (@CanesandCoffee) for my in-process site and where I am Twittering most these days. I need to make my schedule work but my hope is to attend practice again today which should lead to some Twitter impressions 9-10pm tonight.
I got my first taste of the Hurricanes prospect camp at the 5:30pm practice on Tuesday night. I am seeing many of these players for the first time, so these are first impressions not analysis type projections or anything to etch in stone.
And that is exactly the fun of the summer prospect camp – being able to look to the future with hope and optimism.
--Noah Hanifin. Other than a random collection of Youtube highlights, this is the first time I have seen Noah Hanifin in person. Let me first meet my requirement of saying “Wow. He is a big kid who can skate really well.… With that out of the way, I fall back to my initial comments on Twitter.
1st impressions: Hanifin has as bit of Jon Pitkanen in him. #Canes
— Canes and Coffee (@CanesandCoffee) July 7, 2015He very much reminds me of Joni Pitkanen. That can be a bit of a tricky one for the Canes community because the spectrum of interpretations ranges from the bad Joni who sometimes was prone to errors from doing too much all the way up to the star Joni who was one of the Canes 2-3 best players in the team’s 2009 playoff run. I very much mean the comparison as a compliment in terms of Joni Pitkanen’s raw skating and skill and also a decent match for Pitkanen’s creative and sometimes non-textbook style of play.
More specifically: *The skating. Joni Pitkanen was a big guy who could skate effortlessly for as long as a shift lasted and as many minutes as needed. Hanifin has that same easiness about his skating. He is flying at times, but it is more the fine-tuned machine style than the obvious hard work.
*Hanifin seems incredibly comfortable with the puck on his stick and generally tries to keep it until he has something to do with it. He is not one to often settle for the simple play of chipping the puck forward if he does not have a great option. Rather, he is more inclined to use some combination of skating and patience to keep the puck and try to open up a passing or skating lane. This was most evident in the time he, in full Pitkanen mode, was forced wide at the blue line and instead of chucking the puck cross corner or behind the net cut wide and carried the puck all the way around the net in the offensive zone. He had another play where he did not have numbers/options at the offensive blue line and instead of pushing the puck deep, he did a U-turn back into the neutral zone to give it a second try. It is this ability (and occasionally fatal flaw) to use his wheels and patience to carry the puck for days and just keep skating that defined Joni Pitkanen. Again, it is only after a single 60-minute practice, but that is the thing that jumped out at me most in watching Noah Hanifin.
--Josh Wesley. He seemingly ranks at least 5th out of the defensemen in camp (Hanifin, Fleury, Slavin, McKeown), and he is still a few years away, but at the same time he looks like he belongs. His skating continues to improve as does his game overall. It was also interesting to note that he was twice the only player who do not finish his turn and go straight to hands on hips, hunched over and gasping for air after his turn during a drill toward the end of a long practice that was about 40 seconds of spring type skating.
--Jaccob Slavin. He was probably the biggest eye-opener for me. I came in with fairly high expectations for him based on what I had read, and he met them. He is big and a pretty smooth skater roughly in the same category as Hanifin and Fleury. What impressed me most about him was the incredibly high percentage of his passes that seemed to be within 4 inches of his target. The Saturday scrimmage and camp will be a better indication of if/when/to what degree he can translate this to game speed against NHL level talent, but at least in drills and prospect scrimmages, he seems to be another entry in the Canes suddenly deep pool of big, skating, puck-moving defensemen.
--Haydn Fleury. I might as well cover all of the top defensemen since that was what I watched most closely Tuesday. Fleury looked improved from what I remember from a favorable first impression last summer. Whereas Hanifin comes across as more of a creative, freelancing playmaker (i.e. Pitkanen), Fleury reminds me more of the big, sound, skating defenseman like Jay Bouwmeester.
When you net out the blue line, I think the Canes have more in both top-end quality and good potential system depth on defense than the organization has had at any time in its history in North Carolina. Justin Faulk is still only 23 years old. In addition to Fleury and Hanifin in the top tier, maybe Slavin in a second tier and players like Wesley and McKeown also progressing, there is still Brett Pesce (in town but out with minor injury) who is probably in same tier as Slavin. Trevor Carrick is also coming off a pretty good AHL season. And then there is Ryan Murphy (who I am still high on as an offensively gifted third pairing defenseman potentially with upside from there) who recently seemed like he was the only defense prospect but is now one of many.
With 30 players on the ice and a focus on the defenseman, my thoughts on the forwards are not nearly as detailed. If I can make practice on Wednesday, I hope to focus a bit more here.
There are a couple exceptions, but overall I would summarize the forward pool as being a bunch of players with good projectable NHL size but modest in raw skill and with a way to go skating and pace-wise to play in the NHL.
--Sergey Tolchinsky. He is a notable exception to the size thing and also the skill and pace. He racked up a decent highlight reel for the week in the scrimmage session alone. Offensively, he thinks and plays the game at an NHL level already. Most encouraging to me was something I also tweeted out during the practice.
Like that Tolchinsky is comfortable playing where it's crowded. #CanesCamp
— Canes and Coffee (@CanesandCoffee) July 7, 2015For an undersized player, this is incredibly important. Scoring in the dirty areas in the NHL is less about size/ability to get to the front of the net and more just a pure willingness and courage to do it. Tyler Johnson was the best scorer through the first half to two-thirds of the playoffs. Undersized players like Danny Briere and Brian Gionta have had phenomenal goal-scoring seasons from scoring in close. It is less about size and more about two things: 1-Willingness/courage/habit to go to the dirty areas with and without the puck consistently; 2-A heads up awareness to avoid getting clobbered in there when you have the puck. Tolchinsky had a dangling highlight reel goal and a few other pretty plays, but most significant to me was a less fancy one. With one of the big defensemen sitting in front of him entering the zone and really nowhere to go he intentionally skated into the gap to the defenseman and then threw the puck behind him to the end wall. He then fought through/around the defenseman, won the race to the puck on the boards and ultimately made a pass to the front of the net on a teammate’s goal. Shorter version: It might take him a little time to adjust to bigger/faster players, but I think that part will come pretty easy.
So with offensive optimism noted, I think he spends some time in Charlotte continuing to round out his game defensively. He shows a willingness to do the work and engage on the backcheck which is a great starting point. He also has a bit of Skinner in him in the sense that he maybe too often tries to defend with a quick stick play that either looks brilliant if he wins the puck or otherwise leaves him out of the play.
I am curious to see which forwards rise to the top over the course of prospects camp. The Canes will likely enter training camp with one if not two forward slots available to be won and no sure thing choices from the AHL group. The Canes also have a strange history of forwards coming from completely off the depth chart to impress in training camp and ultimately win jobs. Josef Vasicek did exactly this as did Erik Cole and Chad LaRose. Regardless of age and experience, if any of the forwards at camp this week can impress as a solid two-way player with the ability to contribute some offensively, they could be the next player to go from nowhere on the depth chart to on the opening day roster.
What say you Canes fans? Are you as thrilled with the abundance of depth in the system on the blue line? Who do you think I missed at forward while focusing on the defensemen on Tuesday? If you had to pick one player not named Noah Hanifin to compete for a 2015-16 NHL roster spot from this group, who would it be?
Twitter=@CanesandCoffee
Go Canes!