Simon Edvinsson analysis: can awareness and processing speed be cultivated in defencemen?
Edvinsson is a big, mobile defenceman with flashes of brilliance and concerning arrows as a decision-maker.
We see a lot of prospects labelled with the tags “raw” or “high-risk, high-reward” in their draft years. Those two designations have similar meanings: a raw prospect is typically understood to be a player that is earlier in their developmental trackway than most (a “project”) and a high-swing player is one with significant weaknesses accompanying significant strengths. The 2021 NHL Draft should have a lot of those players: many North American prospects have lost partial or even a majority of their seasons or have been forced to move to a league of lesser competition than they otherwise would. Interestingly though, Simon Edvinsson, a Swede and the only defenceman in his tier not to have been born in North America, stands out to me as the most unpolished of the top defencemen in the draft.
Edvinsson’s season has only marginally been affected by COVID-19 from an outside perspective: he’s played more games than he did last year or the year before, bouncing between U20, the pro-level SHL, and the second-tier pro Allsvenskan. Sweden’s U20 league was shut down part way through the year, but Edvinsson was able to transition to the Allsvenskan with only limited playing time disruption. When we talk about high-risk, high-reward prospects, we’re generally looking at players with one or more elite or borderline elite skill, but also one or more glaring weaknesses. If they can build upon their skills, they will succeed; if their career becomes more focused on their weaknesses, they will not. We’re going to take a look at Edvinsson’s strong points, spend time on his area of weaknesses, set out a bit of a development plan for him, and discuss some scenarios where he could succeed and some where he may fail.
The Swede has six points in 14 U20 games, 1 point in 10 SHL matches, and 4 points in 9 Allsvenskan matchups this season. He wasn’t recognized as a particularly exceptional prospect earlier in his junior career, playing the majority of his season against U18 competition rather than the higher-level U20 that we see a lot of top-tier Swedish prospects jump to early. Frolunda is always a strong program, perhaps the strength of their roster last year was what held Edvinsson to only 8 games at that level. Via pick224.com, five of Edvinsson’s six U20 points were secondary assists: two on the powerplay, two at even-strength, and one shorthanded. The sixth point was a shorthanded goal, leaving the defenceman without an even-strength point. With Frolunda’s SHL team, Edvinsson had one point and five shots at even-strength in a little under six minutes per game, going along with a 20% goals-for percentage and a 44% shot-attempt percentage (one of only three Frolunda players to be below 50%). Struggles are normal for 17 year old defencemen in professional leagues, especially ones that practically skipped the U20 level. In late January, Frolunda loaned him to Vasteras IK of the second division, where he’ll probably finish out his season.
For defencemen, success is founded in transition play. Nothing is a brighter green arrow than the ability to consistently break the puck out of the defensive zone; that arrow glows brighter when they can also drive offensive zone entries; and even brighter still when combined with the ability to deny opposing entries. A player that controls the transition game, more often than not, will also control shots, expected goals, and with some good ol’ PDO, goals.
The major driver of Edvinsson’s NHL-perceived value is his combination of size and skating ability. He’s 6’5” and mobile, and it still feels like a lot of people default to “holy shit, he’s Victor Hedman'' when met with that information. Helping his case, Edvinsson is capable of some brilliant flashes of puckcarrying ability that further that comparison a little.
I don’t *think* he actually gets a shot off here, but the confidence and ability to directly attack and step around opposing defenders as a massive blueliner himself is rare.
This next sequence could be *the* clip for anybody looking to sell someone on his game. Escapes the first forechecker, beats F2 to the outer lane, uses his size to absorb the check, and gets the puck across the line for a controlled entry. It’s a demonstration of the practical upside of this kind of size+speed combination in the transition game.
The above clip also features the most promising part of Edvinsson’s transition package: his consistent ability to beat F1. Hockey, along with any sport, is a game of advantages. With every play he makes, a player should be seeking to create some type of advantage for his team.
It’s a concept most obvious in basketball, I would say: when a guard comes off of a well-executed screen, his defender should now be a step or two behind him. That’s an advantage. If that guard drives down the lane, the defending team will be forced to send at least one help defender to take away the layup; this opens up a kickout to the now-unguarded corner, sustaining the advantage. That player could pop the corner three, capitalizing on the advantage, or seek to sustain the advantage further by attacking the closeout: a defending player scrambling to contest a potential three who is already disadvantaged in this one-v-one scenario because his momentum is carrying him towards the attacker. If the attacker chooses to drive towards the defender, the defender will have to stop his forwards momentum and create backwards momentum to defend that action.
Hockey is very similar. Beating a forechecker usually puts him behind you, in a position where he is no longer affecting you nor any of your teammates. This gives your team a numerical advantage moving up ice, five versus four. The best way to sustain that advantage is to continue moving up ice with speed, like a basketball guard driving to the hoop. A slow pace allows the disadvantaged player to catch up and reset his team’s defensive formation. It’s a lot easier to sustain an advantage in basketball, largely because the three point shot makes some of the areas furthest from the hoop among the most statistically dangerous (like the corner). If a shot from outside the circles was considered a positive outcome, we’d probably witness similar in hockey. But it’s not. When a team successfully breaks the puck out of their own zone, enters the offensive zone with control, but then is forced to slow down their pace and “set up” in the offensive zone when the rush dies out, they had an advantage at one point that the opponent eventually managed to negate.
Same clip here. Edvinsson creates the advantage when he beats F1. He looks to sustain it by beating F2 through the outer lane of the neutral zone. F2 manages to make contact, slowing Edvinsson up, and our original F1 is able to retreat back to his defensive position. Advantage is now lost, but Edvinsson was still able to use that original advantage to create a positive outcome: a controlled zone entry.
This is just some broad conceptual hockey talk here, so I’m going to allow myself to stray off topic (whether or not all this advantage stuff is already off topic is a conversation that I’m going to refuse to indulge in because I think it’s fun). If a team really wants to pursue and maximize the advantage of beating F1, that other defenceman should be looking to activate as soon as his partner beats the forechecker. If he sits back and doesn’t make himself an option or at least force a little bit of defensive attention, that five-v-four his partner just created looks an awful lot like a four-v-four. It’s aggressive and a little risky, but it should add offence.
For Edvinsson, beating F1 can really just look effortless at times. The biggest benefit of his size has nothing to do with how he wields it: it’s the confidence going at forecheckers knowing that they can’t knock him over and their unwillingness to physically engage him in those spots.
Edvinsson is an orchestrator of chaos and it goes both ways: he’ll frequently rescue plays from near-disaster and create positive outcomes, but will also follow up good plays with extremely poor ones. I cannot tell you how he made it out of the situation with the puck.
And this one goes from a near ugly turnover and breakaway against to a partial one for!
Not sure if I should call this one created chaos or just pure luck-- Edvinsson goes glass-and-out, the puck starts bouncing, and suddenly he’s set up a two-on-one for his team.
But on the other side of the spectrum, we have weird plays with bad results like this one:
Turnovers are a big issue for Edvinsson in transition. He’ll frequently skate the puck into pressure and doesn’t nearly possess the puck skills required to navigate it with consistency. He appears to be tunnel-visioned bringing the puck through the neutral zone, missing passing options and continuing forwards as the pressure on him boils higher and higher.
He has a forward wide open on the near-boards here for an easy controlled entry. Instead, a turnover.
This time, Edvinsson has all three of his forwards fanned out around him as he leads the breakout (the nearest one to the camera is most promising as a pass option). Instead, he tries to thread two defenders and turns the puck over.
Look at all the options here! But Edvinsson doesn’t pass.
I don’t want to criticize Edvinsson too much for this one because these plays off faceoffs are hard (and he does really well to lose the initial pressure), but you gotta do more than this. It’s a tough spot, a lot of defencemen opt to go hard cross-ice off the boards for the weak-side winger to pick up, but it’s not an ideal play either.
And one more-- leading the break, you can see the two forwards ahead of him delaying waiting for a pass, it doesn’t come.
The Swede also lacks comfort making short-to-mid ranged outlet passes, often missing his target or putting his teammates in some real tough spots. An effective way to gauge a player’s ability as a passer is to evaluate the degree of the difficulty that the receiver is placed in. I wouldn’t want to be taking passes from Edvinsson over a full season; he’s a little lucky that the SHL defenders he went up against weren’t feeling particularly viscious, because some of his feeds this year probably could’ve become pretty nasty suicide passes against more aggressive defences.
Declining this first read to a wide open forward with speed and space in favour of this later pass into traffic is not a good arrow.
He’s got two options here, both in relatively similar positions just on opposite sides of the ice. Edvinsson chooses the player facing tighter defence, leading to an uncontrolled entry.
And these types of passes are not going to earn Edvinsson any favours from his forwards. As I said, he was lucky that the consequences of these passes were never as violent as they could have been. A guy skating forwards while looking back like that needs a wiiiide berth of space to avoid danger, he definitely didn’t have that here.
The reverse to his d-partner is wide open here, don’t want to play the puck up the strong side of the forecheck unless you absolutely have to. Ends in an uncontrolled exit and the opposition gets to tee up another zone entry attempt.
This stuff is really concerning-- it’s why I don’t think I’ll ever be particularly high on Edvinsson myself despite his rare ability to consistently create advantages on the breakout. His greatest strength is skating the puck through the neutral zone. Is that a translatable NHL skill? Not really-- even the best NHLers can do that only infrequently. The practical use of mobility on an NHL breakout is the initial space creation-- that ability to beat F1 that we talked about earlier. I think Edvinsson could be capable of doing that more frequently than your average NHL defender. But capitalizing on that advantage typically requires following that play up with a well-chosen outlet pass. I don’t think Edvinsson will be more capable making that outlet pass than your average NHL defender-- he’s too inconsistent and his issues seem to lie in his hockey sense, a trait that is generally understood to be the most difficult to improve within the development process. Drafting an unintelligent defenceman high in the first round tends to be playing with fire-- perhaps you can upgrade their processor somewhat or at least ingrain some effective strategies to simplify the decision-making process within that team’s system. More on that towards the end of this piece.
As an entry creator, Edvinsson is able to use his mobility to step around defenders at the line and will frequently try to involve his size as he drives to the net. The results are middling: he doesn’t have enough skill on the puck to consistently score from around the net or the vision to find open teammates, and he doesn’t always attack with enough pace to catch defenders off guard and create a true lane all the way to the crease.
We’ll get into some real analysis in just a second, but first we have some Simon Edvinsson entry chaos for ya. What the hell happened here?
And one more-- this isn’t certified Simon Edvinsson chaos because a strange amount of defencemen do this type of thing, but why are we skating the puck through the high slot just to distribute outside?
Real talk now. He has no issues entering the zone here, but containing him to the outside is an easy task for the opposition.
Edvinsson being easily kept to the outside will be a trend here.
When Edvinsson does get enough of a step to try to take the puck to the net, results vary. Occasionally (and I mean very occasionally), he can do something like this:
But more often, his attempts to make those plays end in turnovers.
His game gets more interesting when we look at Edvinsson’s attempts to distribute after his entries. Here’s a beautiful primary assist from him.
But that was the only instance of really impressive playmaking that I’ve seen from Edvinsson. More often, he likes to get his shoulder down, drive the net, and throw the puck in front of the net like this.
This is an area where we start to see some issues with Edvinsson’s hockey sense again. His decision-making seems a little behind at times-- it’s like he’s making his decisions based on input from a second ago. That doesn’t generally go well. I mean, this pass is just clearly no longer an option when he makes it.
This pass comes late too-- he has three forwards filling the slot lane and he doesn’t look to pass until the opponent completely takes away any passing lanes.
I think two of Edvinsson’s largest priorities moving forwards should be addressing his processing speed and spatial awareness to increase his understanding of what’s going on around him on the ice. That’s a really difficult thing to do, but Edvinsson’s greatest weaknesses are mental, not physical tools. I’d also encourage him to increase the pace of his entries-- every attack should be intentional and full-effort, carrying the puck at 80% speed isn’t going to make life any easier once the defence starts to apply pressure. Get the feed moving fast, and perhaps the mind will follow.
Edvinsson’s offensive work is similar to the rest of his game: he demonstrates some really brilliant flashes along with some more concerning trends as well. Most promising, I think, is his confidence activating off the blueline-- it can cause some scary moments, but the aggressiveness and mobility that he flashes in those situations is promising.
I’m a big fan of defencemen that can receive the puck at the top of the offensive zone and keep the play moving. Truly a shame that a guy that handles incoming pressure as well as Edvinsson has some serious concerns elsewhere, because he very much could have gone first overall with a more well-rounded profile.
The Swede can activate off the side boards too, looking to bring the puck into the slot himself.
As well, Edvinsson does well picking his spots to jump up off the blueline without the puck and seek out more dangerous areas.
At this point, Edvinsson’s shot isn’t much of a weapon. He’s scored only five goals in the past two years, with four of those coming at the U18 level. Just from those clips above, I think it’s quite clear that the threat of his shot isn’t really scaring goaltenders. He can create the occasional opportunity with his shot, but it won’t be frequent unless he really adds some weight.
Edvinsson is good at getting into the slot, but he lacks the offensive tools to convert slot opportunities into actual points at an efficient rate. His shot isn’t particularly threatening, his release isn’t quick, and he doesn’t have the playmaking feel to find his teammates around the crease when he’s in traffic himself. The defenceman hasn’t been much of an offensive producer since U18 and it’s because he doesn’t have much of anything in his offensive toolkit to compliment his mobility. He can get to the slot quite effectively, especially for a defenceman, but his efficacy ends there.
Okay, so we have a pretty decent understanding of Edvinsson’s strengths and weaknesses now (I hope). Let’s recap his areas for improvement:
Edvinsson can appear very tunnel-visioned and unaware of his passing options as he carries the puck forwards.
Middling outlet passer, frequently putting his forwards in difficult positions near defenders and missing reads on short-to-mid passes. Seems to be a half-second slow processing the game and doesn’t have a whole lot of spatial awareness. (THESE TWO ARE THE BIG ONES).
Slows up on some of his entries, reducing the pressure on the defence and reducing the influence of his greatest strength on the outcome of the play.
Shot lacks the power or quickness of release to make him a scoring threat of pretty much anywhere on the ice. Adding weight to his frame and his shot should be a priority.
With all that established, we should be able to set out a rough development plan here. I’m still very early in growing my player development knowledge, but my primary principle at this point is simple and something that applies to all facets of life: growth comes from discomfort. Player development, really, is all about placing players in situations where they are uncomfortable and are forced to lean on their weaker points to solve problems. That’s why it’s rarely in a player’s best interest to dominate any level below the NHL: Alexis Lafreniere, for example, probably didn’t grow as much as he could have as he put up 112 points in 52 QMJHL games last season. The challenge in Edvinsson’s specific case is that his most significant weaknesses lie in his decision-making and hockey sense rather than purely physical actions like skating or dynamic posture. Hockey IQ is understood to be more difficult “skill” to develop for a couple reasons:
It’s difficult to analyze what we can’t see. When a player skates, their mechanics are visible to all. We can’t see the cogs moving within anyone’s brain-- we can only guess what they’re thinking based on their actions.
There aren’t a lot of resources out there for this stuff. Anyone can find information on skating mechanics and development; there’s not a lot of that for hockey intelligence. A lot of my favourite resources, including one that I referenced in my Luke Hughes breakdown which you’ll see again right away, come from basketball rather than hockey. For hockey, I do find the work of Jack Han and Hockey Arsenal informative.
In Edvinsson’s case, his hockey sense issues are most visible in his “tunnel-visioned” carries and late/missed reads on his outlet passes in transition. I think the overarching problems lie in Edvinsson’s spatial awareness and his processing speed: his ability to assess his surroundings, and the speed at which he can process visual information, make a decision, and carry out that action. This is where we’re gonna go back to Evan Zaucha’s ‘The Art and Science of “Feel” in Basketball’ (probably the best article I’ve read this year).
Visual processing, as defined by Zaucha, “is the ability for the human eye to decode information from visual stimuli and convert it to understandable and actionable information for the brain.” This is particularly difficult in team sports like basketball and hockey because all nine other skaters on the ice are constantly in movement, changing their positions and actions. Likewise, processing speed “is the rate at which the brain encodes information from exterior stimuli, processes that information, and begins to respond.” The really difficult task here is theorizing ways that a hockey player could improve in these areas-- again, we don’t have a lot of hockey-specific resources and hockey IQ is an area that feels a little bit understudied.
I think the majority of hockey players have played a game where a group of players (allowing the full team to participate is a great way to maximize chaos) each stickhandle their own puck within a faceoff circle with the objective of being the last to maintain possession of their puck while simultaneously attempting to eliminate their teammates by knocking their pucks out of the circle. It’s a drill designed to improve small-area skills: forcing players to navigate crowded ice while other players try to knock the puck away has obvious applications to an actual game of hockey. I remember a drill in practice several years ago that was similar, but more geared towards processing and intelligence than puck skills. Several players, less than a full team but enough to present a risk of collision with a teammate (I’d say anywhere from 4-8), would stickhandle within a faceoff circle. There’s no knocking the puck away from other players; instead, the focus is simply avoiding the other players doing their own thing in the same ice. But there was an extra twist: there were also a few coaches standing within or around the circle who would hold up a particular number of fingers as you passed them. You, the player, would then say that number out loud. The surface purpose of that drill is to ingrain “heads-up hockey”: again, forcing players to navigate crowded ice while being forced to get their heads up to look at a coach has obvious “real hockey” implications. I think this type of drill could potentially be an effective start to trying to develop hockey sense subskills like visual processing and processing speed: a player is forced to identify a visual stimuli (their coach’s finger count), process that information, and then act upon it by speaking that number out loud. And at the same time, several other players are attempting to do the same in the same small area of the ice, forcing players to navigate each other and increasing the mental load on their brains. Growth comes from discomfort: if we can put players in practice situations where they feel that their brain is nearing a level of stimuli and information overload, we should be able to expand their capacity for processing external information if those types of exercises are repeated with enough frequency.
In practice situations, I’d be looking to craft a regular schedule of similar-concept drills for Edvinsson to perform. They should be challenging: everyone should have a point where there are too many influencing stimuli for their brain to reasonably process. If we can find and push that point, we should be able to raise and expand it with enough reps just like any other skill. That approach works to essentially “upgrade” Edvinsson’s processor. Another theoretical approach would be to lower the burden on his brain; create “shortcuts”, if you will, to assist Edvinsson in situations where he might usually be susceptible to missed reads or poor decisions. This is an unideal solution, a bandaid, because simplifying situations means shrinking the outer ranges of outcomes: Edvinsson might be able to reduce his turnovers, but he could also miss stretch passes or other big plays that he otherwise would have spotted. Everything’s a tradeoff. A simple example would be to instruct Edvinsson to make the first open pass available to him on the breakout. Some coaches actually tell all their defencemen to do this; the idea being that the faster you get the puck moving up-ice, even if it’s just a five-foot pass to a winger on the boards, the faster your breakout will gain momentum and avoid a coordinated forecheck. I’m not sure I like it on a full-team level-- freedom and creativity is important and it discourages defencemen from taking ownership of the breakout and involving themselves up-ice-- but as a single-player solution I do think it has applications.
With that mental framework in place, Edvinsson would have made the short pass to the forward in front of him rather than holding the puck and eventually bombing it into heavy pressure in this clip. This is a clear example of where this type of thought process would be beneficial-- I think we can all agree that passing off to that first forward in space would have been a better outcome than the longer pass that Edvinsson makes.
However, if that up-ice forward had managed to break away to open ice rather than skating into pressure like he did, Edvinsson would no longer have the puck and that stretch pass opportunity would have been missed. As I said, it goes both ways. However, taking the simple pass as soon as it is available tends to be a better outcome more frequently than holding the puck on the off-chance that a big play opens up a few seconds down the line.
The next step of that “family” of solutions is to institute “read progressions” for Edvinsson in different scenarios of a game. The Hockey IQ Newsletter had a great piece on this type of idea, proposing a quarterback-style decision-making progression for a defenceman on the breakout. This framework would give Edvisson a checklist of reads to go through one at a time, reducing the mental burden and allowing him to focus on just one mental task at a given moment. It essentially boils down to “make the first pass you see”, but checking down high-to-low gives your defenceman an opportunity to look long for a stretch pass before seeking out the simple, shorter play on the breakout. This is the progression proposed by Hockey Arsenal’s Greg Revak in the linked newsletter:
I like this progression. Skating the puck should be Edvinsson’s first read: maximizing his value means maximizing the use of his best skill. Looking down-ice for the long pass makes sense too-- like a quarterback with the deep threat as his first read, a high-to-low progression allows a passer to hit a big play when it’s open and still check down to more realistic plays more frequently. And the least dangerous play-- a pass to the wall-- is the obvious final checkdown. This is something Edvinsson should be conscious of as he possesses the puck on the breakout: it’s a decision tree, one at a time. If he makes a point of referencing it every time he’s breaking out of his zone, that framework should become unconscious and his speed through that progression will increase.
Part of me likes that Edvinsson is already playing professional hockey-- I think it’s a big challenge for him, forcing him to rely on his passing more in transition against faster forecheckers that can sometimes negate his mobility. This level of competition creates a level of discomfort for him that he would experience far less frequently in the U20 circuit. But at the professional level, teams want to win games. That’s priority #1. Sweden’s junior teams are affiliated with the professional ones (think of a European soccer model), so the purpose of Frolunda’s junior program is to produce players for Frolunda’s SHL team. And the Allsvenskan isn’t an AHL-type affiliate league for the SHL. Swedish hockey has relegation, so Allsvenskan teams are unaffiliated with SHL teams and are fighting their way into the SHL themselves. Once a Swedish player hits professional hockey at either of these levels, the focus of their team is winning. That can be a little problematic for ultra-raw prospects like Edvinsson, because they end up with a short leash from the coach when the best thing for their development is reps, experience, and some extra wiggle room to try things and make mistakes. That’s something he can only get at the junior level. It’s a real tough question whether Edvinsson would be better off in the J20 Nationell or the Allsvenskan right now. Unfortunately, Edvinsson and his coaches didn’t get to make that decision-- COVID-19 did it for them when it cancelled the remainder of Sweden’s junior season. So the Allsvenskan it is, and once a prospect with Edvinsson’s pedigree and size/speed combo cracks professional hockey, it’s unlikely for them to ever drop back to junior. Moving forwards, I consider Edvinsson a professional hockey player, meaning he’ll need to seek out opportunities for development that might be scarcer than at the junior level. We’re looking at this part-season in the Allsvenskan; then Edvinsson will have a shot at making Frolunda’s SHL team to begin next season. If he’s drafted as high as it is looking like he will be, he’ll definitely want to be playing SHL hockey next season to stay on track with the accelerated timeline given to most top 10 selections; the issue though, is that he struggled mightily in his SHL stint this season and Frolunda can usually be counted on to have one of the deepest rosters in Swedish hockey. It won’t be the end of the world if he ends up back in the Allsvenskan, but it will definitely establish him as a full-scale “project” pick and it isn’t a great arrow to have your top prospect already struggling to break into top-level pro hockey at age 18 in a country where many top picks are able to do so.
Let’s wrap things up and discuss some outcomes. I can’t say I’m all that high on Edvinsson; plenty of others are. I suspect that the mainstream hype stems from his strong international performances rather than his skillset or league play. This is how I see it at this point in time. I’d say he’d have to hit about his 75th percentile outcome to be considered a successful pick in the top ten in my opinion, you generally don’t want to be betting on that level of development with your top selections. But hey, if a team’s confident in their development system, go for it.
Edvinsson’s absolute ceiling? A few might say Victor Hedman: big, Swedish, skates fast. That’s not true; Hedman was eons ahead as a prospect at this age. I can’t see Edvinsson being a #1 defenceman even at the top range of his outcomes. If you’re going to bet on a player eventually being able to take a leading offensive role all while countering the opponent’s best players, you choose a defenceman with extremely high hockey IQ; as we’ve established, that’s not Edvinsson. Best case, I think Edvinsson manages to bring his hockey sense up to a passable level to function as a top-four defenceman. His skating will always be a massive strength for him, he should be effective on the breakout, he should be capable of making a decent outlet, and his defensive game could be strong too. That’s a guy that can play twenty minutes a night, drive play through the breakout, and put up positive possession numbers. Valuable player.
More realistically, I project Edvinsson as a #5 defenceman who can do well against the lower-end of the opposing lineup where his mobility is able to shine a little more, but I don’t think he’ll process the game quickly or effectively enough to consistently match the pace of top-six forwards. This is assuming only partial hockey sense improvement-- perhaps Edvinsson will discover some effective strategies to refine his breakout reads like the progression method we went through above. His skating and long pass ability could make him a really effective player in this role even if the IQ doesn’t fully come along.
And as a low-end projection, I can see a scenario where Edvinsson fails to crack the NHL on a full-time basis. The Swede’s greatest strength (skating) and greatest weakness (reads/decision-making) both manifest most in the same area: transition. He doesn’t have a specific area of the game where he can be counted on to be a positive contributor. With Luke Hughes, you’re confident when he has the puck on his stick in transition. With Brandt Clarke, you’re confident when he has the puck on his stick in the offensive zone. Not so much for Edvinsson-- when he possesses the puck on the breakout, you know he might go for a skate and set up a controlled entry, but he might just as likely bomb the puck away into pressure. What will he lean on to establish himself on an NHL blueline? Against NHL forecheckers, I doubt his skating will be enough. And without improvement as a thinker, I don’t think he’ll be able to rely on his transition game as his standout trait. Perhaps he could become a defence-first player-- he’s pretty solid in his own end-- but I don’t think that’s what the team that picks him top ten will be shooting for here.