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Prospect Hoglander scores Sweden's goal of the year & Canucks biz update |
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Let's start here today, with some good news:
For the second straight season, Vancouver Canucks forward prospect Nils Hoglander has won the Swedish Hockey League's "Goal of the Year" award:
Playing in a relatively limited role on Rogle, 19-year-old Hoglander finished up with 9-7-16 in 41 SHL games this season. The SHL regular season was completed, but the playoffs were postponed, then cancelled on March 15. Rogle finished third in the standings with a record of 25-17-7-3 for 92 points.
For North American fans, Hoglander's talent was on display at the 2020 World Junior Championship, where the Swedes won bronze. Playing on Sweden's top line, Hoglander finished third in tournament scoring with 11 points in seven games. His plus-six ranking also tied him for second overall in the tournament.
All indications are that Hoglander is ready to make the jump to North America as soon as there's some clarity on the transfer rules.
Also, two of the Canucks' NCAA prospects earned some serious end-of-season accolades.
Sophomore defenseman Jack Rathbone of Harvard, selected in the fourth round in 2017, and senior forward Marc Michaelis of Minnesota State, recently signed as a free agent, both earned first-team All-American honours.
Rathbone was expected to make a decision on whether or not he's turning pro at the end of his NCAA season. Under the circumstances, he has decided to wait and see how things play out.
Closer to home — and in not-so-cheery news — we learned this week that the Canucks have asked all their full-time employees to take a 20 percent pay cut.
We've seen this strategy used across many business sectors during the coronavirus shutdown and it makes sense. With revenues at a virtual standstill, it's a way for organizations to help keep some money flowing through to their staff members — and keep the lights on, when work still needs to be done.
In The Province, Ben Kuzma has a good chat with Canucks' COO Trent Carroll about the state of the team's business operations.
"There’s still lots to do," Carroll said. "We’re engaging with season-ticket holders and a big one right now is community leadership with 1,000 lunches a day to The Salvation Army. Our 50-50 program just raised $250,000 in the jackpot (split) of $500,000 from Saturday’s replay (Game 5, 2011 Western Conference Final) and it goes to the COVID-19 relief programs.
"People just want to support. Sports have always played this role of a distraction and escape, but this is different. There are no games being played, so we’re trying to maintain a level of fan engagement through new ideas and social media, classic games, an E-Sports tournament, Twitter chats and ZOOM calls."
Tyler Myers is next up on the Zoom list, with a call scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
Carroll is also an assistant coach for his son's bantam team, which offers a nice segue into my latest Forbes story — about the challenges facing the massive youth sports industry during this shutdown.
I spoke to an Atom coach in Toronto about the emotional turmoil her kids went through when their playoffs were suddenly halted — and how she has used tech tools like Zoom calls, Google forms and TeamSnap scheduling to help keep her group connected — and active — even though they can't get on the ice together. TeamSnap CEO Dave DuPont also explained to me how his organizations massive user base has provided them with a knowledge base that they can share with youth sports groups, many of which are volunteer-run and operate on shoestring budgets, in hopes that they'll be able to get back up and running quickly and efficiently when it is safe to do so.
To close out today, I just noticed that Sportsnet 650 has been conducting daily quizzes of athletes and sports media personalities on how they're keeping themselves entertained during quarantine times.
Here are the latest two. If you click on the tweets, you can see the full thread, which now runs back a few weeks.
I'm going to shamelessly steal their gimmick. Here are my answers:
1. Favourite quarantine activity: Running. I'm out of the house so rarely that when I go for a run, I want to stay out forever. And the weather has been fantastic!
2. Book you are reading: "Reinvention" by Arlene Dickinson from Dragon's Den
3. Favourite snack: caramel & sea salt dark chocolate
4. Favourite classic game: I was thrilled to stumble on the 2016 World Championship gold-medal game from Moscow on TSN on the weekend. Great to re-live that gold-medal win for Canada and all my memories from that tournament in Russia that was stacked with talent across the board. In retrospect, I guess it's not so surprising that Canada's checking line of Ryan O'Reilly, Mark Scheifele and Mark Stone was effective in shutting down Finland's top offensive line of Aleksander Barkov, Patrik Laine and Jussi Jokinen. The Finnish lineup was deep, too. Sebastian Aho was tucked onto Finland's third line, and Mikko Rantanen was on the fourth line.
5. Most rewatchable movie: I tend to re-watch specific movies at Christmastime, so the one that comes to mind for me is "Love, Actually." (I also really like "Bad Santa.") I rewatched "Showgirls" last night, which is just as absurdly campy as I remembered. And I've got "Bohemian Rhapsody" sitting on the PVR, ready for a re-watch when I need an emotional lift.
I look forward to reading your lists!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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