Lekkerimaki's drive, adaptability impressing Canucks: 'We have a lot of belief in him'

PENTICTON, B.C. — Injured goalie Thatcher Demko wasn’t the only Vancouver Canuck close to playing when his team’s playoff run ended in Game 7 of the second round last May.

Swedish teenager Jonathan Lekkerimaki, who had been skating with the extra “black aces” for only a few days during that playoff series, suddenly became a candidate to parachute into the National Hockey League post-season when blood clots forced 40-goal winger Brock Boeser out of the Canucks’ lineup on the eve of the deciding game against the Edmonton Oilers.

“If we go into Dallas, can he help?” Canucks assistant general manager Ryan Johnson said Friday of the internal discussions about Lekkerimaki that occurred in May. “I mean, Brock Boeser's injured and we have this right-shot winger right here. Who knows where things would have gone had we continued on.”

Neither Demko nor Lekkerimaki played Game 7 when the Oilers eliminated Vancouver before moving on to Dallas and beating the Stars in the Western Conference Final.

Demko subsequently either aggravated the knee injury he suffered in Vancouver’s playoff-opener or sustained a new one over the summer, and the Vezina Trophy runner-up is not expected to be fully fit for next week’s training camp here.

Lekkerimaki, however, is even stronger after turning 20 in July following his exceptional 19-year-old season. The 15th-overall pick from the 2022 NHL Draft begins his push for an NHL lineup spot this weekend as one of the headliners in the Canucks’ annual Young Stars tournament.

The goal-scoring winger played all of six American Hockey League games on the smaller North American ice after coming over from Sweden near the end of last season. 

But Canucks president Jim Rutherford told Sportsnet in June: “We have Lekkerimaki coming, which based on his year this year, if he comes in and has a good camp, he'll make a case to be on the team right away.”

And then Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin signed NHL wingers Jake DeBrusk, Danton Heinen, Kiefer Sherwood and Daniel Sprong in free agency, giving the Canucks their deepest and potentially most-balanced pool of forwards since the 2010 Stanley Cup Final.

So, despite his impressive talent and development curve, Lekkerimaki is still a long shot to make the NHL roster in October. But everyone around the Canucks expects him to make it eventually, and possibly soon.

“I think there is a good opportunity,” Lekkerimaki said here Friday morning after Canuck prospects skated ahead of that night’s game against the Oilers’ prospects. “Hopefully, I’ll do my best every day. Play my game, do my best, be humble out there and just work hard. I think I'm just better overall, stronger with the puck (than a year ago). Hopefully I play a little more physical than before.”

Reminded about the quartet of wingers the Canucks added in free agency, Lekkerimaki said: “I saw that. I don’t know (if it changes anything). I think the organization has a good plan for me.”

So far, the plan is working.

After a difficult draft-plus-one season in 2022-23, Lekkerimaki dramatically elevated his play last year. 

He went from scoring three times in 29 games in Sweden’s second division to sniping 19 goals in 46 games for Orebro in the top league last season.

Lekkerimaki also scored seven times in seven games at the world junior championship and was named the Swedish Hockey League’s rookie of the year. Stronger and more confident, he looked like an entirely different player in his draft-plus-two season.

“Something we talked about extensively after the draft process was how exhausting everything was on him — the draft, world junior camps, suddenly playing in the SHL,” Johnson explained. “We intentionally just backed off for a year to let him get caught up mentally.

“And not to our surprise, once having a full offseason to just take a breath, (we saw) the success that he had in Sweden and the growth in his game, the details in his game, and all those things. The major cherry on top was being able to get him over here and get him into games in Abbotsford.”

Lekkerimaki’s six games for the minor-league Abbotsford Canucks impressed the organization as much as his 46 games for Orebro. It wasn’t the player’s AHL scoring totals (one goal and one assist) that excited management, but how quickly he began to adapt to the North American game and how badly he wanted to play it.

Invited to Sweden’s camp for the senior world championships, Lekkerimaki squeezed in a trip to Vancouver to play those six AHL games. And when he wasn’t chosen for Sweden’s bronze-medal-winning team at the worlds in Czechia, Lekkerimaki returned to B.C. to be around the Canucks during the playoffs.

“So now when Jonathan comes here — and same thing with Petey (Canuck defence prospect Elias Pettersson) — they know the staff, they know their teammates,” Johnson said. “That takes so much off the table for them as far as getting comfortable in this environment and getting ready for next week (and main camp).

“We saw in Abbotsford his ability to acclimate and, after all of one practice, go into an AHL game. And we were playing in Colorado — an extremely tough environment, physical. And I see him go through the middle of the ice just screaming for the puck, like, 'Get me the puck.' It would have been easy to say, 'You know what, I'm new, I'm just going to kind of drift in.' 

“One of the things that I really appreciated was his attention to detail. His wall plays, his puck battles, he took those personally. The league is ramped up, the pace is ramped up. There's special qualities in people that allow them to do that, and he has that. We're excited, obviously.”

If Lekkerimaki is equally excited, it’s difficult to tell. At this point, he doesn’t reveal too much in his second language.

“I think it was good to get the experience in the AHL and play some games, have some practices,” he said Friday. “To play on the smaller ice, there’s not much time (with the puck). Very different than Sweden. There’s a lot of little things. I think it was good last season, and coming in for this season I have a bit more confidence. Overall, it was a very good season.”

The Canucks believe he’ll have a lot of others.

“Sometimes the best development and support you can do for a player is just to back off a little,” Johnson said. “That was a great lesson for us during Jonathan's first year. Just let him be. Let him be a person. We knew we just needed to let him take his time. We believed in the skill set; that’s why he was drafted where he was. And we feel that it has paid off to this point.

“The players will make their own bed as far as what they're ready for and when. But we have a lot of belief in him.”