Twenty-year-old center will start season in Grand Rapids; young goalies also have big week

Despite missing out on the World Junior Tournament and a chunk of the regular season with mononucleosis last winter, it was pretty hard to miss forward Cory Emmerton at the Detroit Red Wings early July prospects camp at Joe Louis Arena.

The six-foot, 190-pound native of St. Thomas, Ontario was simply the best player in camp right from the start.

Photo by Dave Reginek/DRW

Cory Emmerton, Detroit’s second round pick in the 2006 NHL draft, was very impressive at the Red Wings early July prospect development camp.

“I’ve been very impressed,” Wings assistant general manager Jim Nill said. “He’s come back here and I think he’s a totally refocused guy. He’s in great condition.

“He looks like a man now. After coming to all these camps and playing junior, you can see the steps. He’s taken it to the next level.”

With his wide-stance skating style, playmaking ability and sharing the same hometown, comparisons to a scale-downed version of Joe Thornton are often made. Minus about four inches in height, Nill said the comparisons are legitimate.

“He’s pretty solid at both ends,” Nill said. “He’s a good playmaker because he holds on (to the puck) for so long. He holds onto the puck like Joe Thornton does. He’s not six-foot-four, but he sees the ice like Joe Thornton does.”

Emmerton is flattered by the comparisons, but knows he’s got a ways to go before he can share ice and not just comparisons with Thornton.

The 20-year-old will play his first full season in Grand Rapids (AHL) this year.

“I talked to Ken Holland and he said, ‘It’s up to you how fast you get yourself to the next level,’” Emmerton said. “He talked about how everyone has something that separates themselves from everyone else. As long as you do what you need to do, they’ll play whoever they need to. They want to win.

“Look at Darren Helm. He worked hard in Grand Rapids his first year, got called up, stayed and won a Stanley Cup. It’s what you make of your opportunity.”

Having watched the NHL’s smallest and lightest team just win the Stanley Cup with a puck-possession style brings renewed optimism to players like Emmerton that there’s a place in the league for ‘so-called’ smaller players. And Emmerton feels perfectly suited for the Wings’ style of play.

“That’s pretty much how I’ve been playing the last three of four seasons,” Emmerton said. “They’re (Detroit) not afraid to turn back and find something else. It’s fun to play like that. When you go to (junior) camp, you don’t always get to do that.

“As long as you work hard to get back, they don’t take away much of your creativity and thinking.”

Like all Wings’ prospects, they’ve been clubbed over the head with Nill’s motto of getting bigger and stronger. Since his season ended in mid-April, Emmerton has turned from a rink rat to a gym rat.

“They want men playing for them,” Emmerton said. “You have to get big enough to last a season. For a guy like me, who’s not the biggest guy, you have to be that much stronger and take that kind of punishment.

“They told me also to keep working on your skills and those will come along, but mostly it’s live in the gym.”

If he takes care of building his body, the Wings have no doubts he has NHL skills. On a team that is loaded with talented forwards, Nill feels Emmerton has the ability to one day crack Detroit’s top six.

“He’s got great hockey sense and real deception to his game,” Nill said. “He doesn’t look like he’s fast, but he’s really fast. His hockey sense is as good as anybody’s.

“He’s got top-two line potential. We’ve got high expectations for him. He has to be a big point producer down there and hopefully bring that up here.”

And there’s no doubt where Emmerton hopes to be in a year or two. Each visit to these summer camps is an agonizingly short taste of what he considers his hockey mecca.

“Everything impresses me every time I come here (Detroit),” Emmerton said. “They treat you like gold here. It’s always fun coming here. It’s like a vacation with a little hockey involved.”

Bedard is excited about goalie prospects
Summer is supposed to be a time to relax, but Detroit goaltending coach Jim Bedard has seen the future in the forms of Thomas McCollum and Daniel Larsson at the Red Wings prospects development camp.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had two goaltending prospects as good in the Red Wings rookie camp in my 11 years,” Bedard said. “We always say could these guys be possible Red Wings? These two guys have a chance to be Red Wings.

“I’m pretty happy and it’s real exciting.They’re both coachable kids and they’re dead serious about what they’re doing.”

After taking McCollum with their first pick in June’s NHL entry draft and bringing Larsson over from Sweden to team with Jimmy Howard, the Wings feel they’ve plugged one of the few holes they had in terms of prospects in their system.

Combined with a pair of veterans in Chris Osgood and Ty Conklin at the NHL level, it’s no wonder Bedard is like a kid in the candy store.

“The fact is these guys were good goalies before they got here,” Bedard said of the Wings goaltending youngsters. “We don’t want to change a lot of things about their game, we like what we saw. We just want to make them better at what they are.”

McCollum is destined to return to the Guelph Storm of the OHL while Larsson will get his indoctrination in the North American game at Detroit’s AHL farm team in Grand Rapids.
“I’m just trying to learn really how hard we need to work to make it to the next level,” said McCollum, who is expected be one of the goalies on the U.S. world junior team this December. “We have all their coaches and trainers here guiding us through that process. They’re giving us a taste what it’s like at the next level. It gives us motivation back at home when we’re working out.”

At six-foot-two, 205 pounds, McCollum is the biggest goalie Bedard has ever gotten to work with in Detroit. What’s even more impressive than a natural physique that covers a good chunk of the net is that Bedard sees a young netminder with a very sound technical base on which to build.
“We want to get his feet better and work on a lot of stuff that originates from behind the net,” Bedard said. “Work on challenging and learning more on how to control it.

“I’m so impressed with his composure, moving into the pucks, he’s calm and no panic. His head is not flying around. He keeps everything in front of him and he gets across big on his slide across the top of crease. I’m very impressed that way.”

For Larsson, the challenges are a little greater.

Not only is he adjusting to a new country and culture, the 22-year-old Swede is trying to adapt to a new style of hockey. The NHL game requires a goalie to play far more aggressively and handle the puck more than in Europe.

“The angles and the play around the goal is a lot quicker here,” Larsson said. “They also shoot from everywhere. It’s quite different than the Swedish game. Here they don’t play the puck as much. In Sweden they usually touch the puck two or three times first. It’s quite difficult in the beginning to get used to it.”

However, it’s an adjustment that Larsson feels he’s now ready to make. He’s played the last two seasons in the Swedish Elite League and was named the top goalie in the country last year.
“I had a really good year in Sweden,” said Larsson, who grew up an hour south of the Arctic Circle. “I won the best goalie of the year.

“I’ve been there two years now in the highest league and I felt it’s the right moment to come over here and develop more.

“I had an opportunity come over or stay also, I felt it was a bigger achievement coming over here than staying in Sweden.”

Though the young goalies grew up a world apart, they share a common vision. Both know there’s a great opportunity to reach the NHL with Howard being the only other real prospect in the Wings system.

With the Stanley Cup lingering around Joe Louis Arena and some of the greatest names in hockey history staring down from the walls around the Wings dressing room, McCollum was beaming as he allowed himself that dream.

“You’re definitely in awe,” McCollum said. “There’s so much history with the franchise and the city, it’s definitely hard not to be awestruck by all the great names that have come and played here.

“It’s unbelievable to be in this room (Wings dressing room) that the Stanley Cup champions were sitting in here maybe a month or so ago.”

Grand Rapids Greenhorns
After having to supplement their AHL farm system with veterans last season, a good portion of the Detroit Red Wings team in Grand Rapids is going to be so young they won’t be old enough to go out for a beer with the veterans after a game this winter.

“They are going to be a young team,” Nill said. “We had the big push of the one draft. Hudler, Kopecky, Filppula all came in together and now we’ve got them up here. Then we went another three years where we traded a lot of first, second picks so we had a gap.”

That gap will be filled with some promising prospects in players like Jan Mursak, Cory Emmerton, Justin Abdelkader, Daniel Larsson, Logan Pyett and free-agent signing Francis Pare, who scored 54 goals and 102 points in winning the MVP of the QMJHL last season.

“When you get to the draft it affects you for about five years,” Nill said. “When you draft them they’ve got to play two or three years of junior of college and then one or two in the minors. We’re now getting an influx of six, seven or eight guys.”

Keeping his bags packed
After spending the week in Detroit, McCollum will get a two-week break at his home near Buffalo, N.Y. before heading upstate to Lake Placid for the U.S. world junior team’s tryout camp Aug. 1.
McCollum is expected to battle for the starting goaltender job on the American team and he’s already looking forward to the Christmas tournament in Ottawa. Having visited Ottawa with his Guelph Storm teammates, McCollum expressed sympathy for the welcome visiting players are going to receive.

“I feel sorry for any team that plays Canada up there,” McCollum said. “They don’t know what there in for. The fans in Ottawa are so loud it’s going to be very difficult to play.”

Game is healthy
Nill isn’t buying into the talk the new CBA is a failure because of the mega-dollar contracts handed out to free agents this month.

While things might not be perfect, he feels the game is much healthier than in the pre-lockout era.

“I think the revenues show that,” said Nill, pointing out salaries have become a fixed cost. “Our game has grown and the revenues show that. If the revenues have grown it must be healthy.
“Canadian franchises were the weak sisters and now they’re strong. The Edmontons, Calgarys, their revenues are sky high.

“Part of it was the Canadian dollar, but even their business-side of things is doing well. They’re sold out every game.”

Nill feels what has upset many observers is big money was given to some players who weren’t necessarily considered the league’s elite talents.

In his opinion, that’s a product of so many teams tying up their young stars early, creating a greater demand for a few top-end talents.

As for smaller market teams being forced to spend $40-million to reach the salary cap floor when they’ve traditionally capped expenditures in the mid-to-low 30s, Nill offers one simple question.

“Isn’t that what revenue sharing is for?” Nill said. “Some teams that normally spent about $32-million are getting an additional $10 to $12-million in revenue sharing. That gets them to the $40-millon.”