All your Swedes are belong to us.
Ranked #220 by MCKEEN'S HOCKEY
Ranked #146 by RECRUIT SCOUTING
He's an OA and this is EP's write on him from last year -
Linus Sjödin - Stats, Contract, Salary & More
Eliteprospects.com hockey player profile of Linus Sjödin, 2002-10-02 Ängelholm, SWE Sweden. Most recently in the undefined with Rögle BK. Complete player biography and stats.
www.eliteprospects.com
Ranked #220 by MCKEEN'S HOCKEY
Ranked #146 by RECRUIT SCOUTING
He's an OA and this is EP's write on him from last year -
Sjödin’s handling skills keep you watching. In fact, we probably caught a few extra games of him simply due to the pure entertainment factor. The forward more than earned the 6-grade hands we gave him. He has the dangling part of the game down. Not only does he possess the hand speed -- they are lightning quick -- and the creativity, but he prepares his moves well. Sjödin brings the puck at his hip as defenders rush him and waits for the precise moment where they commit to a pokecheck to toe-drag or use his skate blade to bounce the puck around them. His internal sense of time and abilities to read defenders and thread the puck in between stick and skates is significantly above-average in this draft. He can also act with pace; manipulate and dangle on his first touch of the puck.
That being said, if you read some of the other profiles in this draft guide, you probably know we are going next. Apart from the dangles, Sjödin doesn’t show many NHL projectable elements. Similarly to William Strömgren, he is more interested in making defenders look foolish than advancing the offence in repeatable ways and that style of play will catch up to him at higher levels. “Is Sjödin only a dangler?” David St-Louis asked. “He turns the feet of defenders, makes shoulder fakes to misdirect the opposition into thinking that he is turning or passing and then moves around defenders, but once he gets in the offensive zone, he barely makes any productive plays.”
Maybe if Sjödin was a year younger, not an October 2002 birthday, but a September 2003 one, we would have excused some of his deficiencies, thinking he would have more runway to fix those attributes. Or maybe not. Sjödin’s game processing, his passing decisions and the slowness of some of his plays raise a lot of questions. His skating also received a below-average grade.