MONTREAL — Maybe the significance of the assignment was lost on Jesperi Kotkaniemi, or maybe his standards are just higher than ours.
When we asked him what his best game of the pre-season has been so far, he didn’t point to the one he had just played on Wednesday night, the 5-3 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs in which he matched up against Auston Matthews, John Tavares and Nazem Kadri and came out looking like an established NHL player. Kotkaniemi preferred his three-post performance against an AHL-heavy Ottawa Senators roster last Saturday.
The thing is, that impressive performance wasn’t the one that convinced Canadiens coach Claude Julien that Kotkaniemi is ready to start the regular season on his roster. This one was — and with good reason.
The kid played a total of 12:15 at even strength against the Leafs and finished the game with an assist and a plus next to his name. And in 4:07 against Matthews, 3:33 against Tavares and 1:39 against Kadri, he and his linemates controlled more than 50 per cent of the shot attempts.
“I’m not sure if he has any specific weakness,” said Julien.
“He’s not showing any,” he added.
Maybe there’s some work to do for Kotkaniemi in the faceoff circle — he won just four of 13 in this one — but that’s grasping at straws to find a deficiency.
His strengths jump out at you. The way he protects the puck, his speed through the neutral zone, his positioning on the breakout, his awareness without the puck, his creativity, his vision, his hockey sense, his hands, his quick feet — it’s all impressive.
And then there’s the way he passes the puck. On one shift Kotkaniemi hit linemate Jonathan Drouin in stride with a 90-foot pass across the ice that sifted by Leafs defender Igor Ozhiganov and landed right on Drouin’s tape. Then the play came back out to the neutral zone and he filled the left wing while Drouin cut to the middle with the puck and the two played a give-and-go that finished an inch away from beating Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen on the glove side.
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In the second period Kotkaniemi caught a pass at the Leafs blue line, danced his way to the middle and blindly backhanded a pass to Canadiens defenceman Victor Mete down low. Mete handed it off to Brendan Gallagher for a goal. And that was the moment you could see reporters on press row all nodding their heads in agreement that Kotkaniemi will be in the lineup when the puck drops on Montreal’s first meaningful game in Toronto next Wednesday.
We thought we might have to wait until the weekend for confirmation, but…
“In Kotkaniemi’s case, right now it’s pretty hard not to see him on our roster the way he’s played, the way he’s handled himself and all of that stuff,” said Julien. “I’m the coach, and we have management, and we’ll all sit together and make that decision obviously after Saturday’s game. But he’s showing us a lot of good things and it’s pretty hard not to see him with our group.”
Beyond that, who knows?
The biggest question the six-foot-two, 185-pound Kotkaniemi faces is whether or not he can stand up to the physicality of real NHL hockey.
But if Julien was concerned about it early on in camp, he doesn’t appear to be at this stage.
“All he’s showing is that he’s an 18-year-old youngster who still has time to get bigger and stronger. But even in that aspect, I find he’s handling himself well,” said the coach. “There are players who have much more trouble than he does in physical situations. So all I see is a player who, with experience and time, is going to become more and more of a better player.”
Even if Kotkaniemi doesn’t agree, that’s what has happened with each passing day he’s spent with the Canadiens. He looked lost in his first game at the Rookie Showcase in Laval. Then in his second game he showed signs he was worthy of being picked third overall at the NHL Draft back in June. Then there were flashes of brilliance in the team’s intra-squad scrimmage at the Bell Centre. He opened up a lot of eyes with a beautiful goal and impressive pre-season debut last Monday against the New Jersey Devils. He showed well against the Washington Capitals in Quebec City. And he was — dare we say — brilliant against the Senators and even better against a shell version of the Leafs on Monday in Toronto.
But with everyone wanting to see how Kotkaniemi would look against the consensus-best centre line in hockey, he rose to the challenge in a way few could have expected.
“You can tell what kind of player he is,” said Gallagher. “He obviously had tough matchups regardless of who he was on the ice against tonight. He didn’t look out of place.”
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