IRVINE — The tipoff that Leo Carlsson might indeed be the second-best player in what many consider the Connor Bedard draft – first among equals, as it were – could be this: A month before last week’s NHL selection process, the 18-year-old Carlsson was playing with the big boys in the IIHF World Championships.
“Orebro (HK, the Swedish professional team for which he played last season) had him on the wing most of the year, almost the whole year,” said Matt Keator, Carlsson’s Boston-based agent, in a phone conversation. “And then he goes to the Swedish national team and he’s their first-line center on the national team at the Worlds.
“So that says a lot about him as a player and a prospect.”
Carlsson had three goals and two assists and was a plus-5 in that tournament, playing with and against seasoned professionals. That was a few months after logging three goals and three assists with a plus-4 in the World Junior Championships in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Those tournaments, as well as his performances with his club team – including 10 goals and 15 assists in 44 games this past season – convinced the Ducks to make him the No. 2 pick last Thursday, just another head-spinning moment in what has been a frenetic few weeks for Carlsson.
Among his Swedish teammates at the Worlds was Ducks forward and assistant captain Jakob Silfverberg. While Carlsson – rated the top European prospect coming into the draft – had no way of knowing whether the Ducks would use pick No. 2 on him, it was certainly a possibility. But his conversations with Silfverberg were less about the Ducks’ organization and “more like the weather and stuff,” he said.
That is a selling point, obviously. The beach day Carlsson and several others enjoyed on July 4, a day off during the week-long development camp, had to have reinforced that.
The World Championships, which concluded for the Swedes on May 25 when they lost to tournament co-host Latvia in the quarterfinals, began a hectic few weeks. That included two different trips home to train with Orebro, the NHL draft combine in Buffalo, a visit to Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final in Las Vegas with fellow prospects Bedard, Adam Fantilli and Will Smith and then the draft itself in Nashville.
The NHL combine is not the type of televised dog-and-pony show we see from the NFL. No on-ice evaluation; just physicals and lots of job interviews.
“Basically, it was a meeting … and then maybe an hour’s rest or 30 minutes rest, and then the next meeting,” Carlsson said. “And then lunch, and then more interviews and stuff like that. So pretty easy, actually.
“I mean, I got some tips from my agent on some answers and stuff like that. But I was myself. I didn’t have any problems with it.”
He seems capable of handling the difficult stuff, and the crazy stuff, even when his journey to Nashville turned into a 14-hour drive with his family because of weather-related flight cancellations. Is it a challenge to stay calm when things around him aren’t?
“Not really, to be honest,” he said. “I don’t know how to say it, but nothing becomes too crazy for me.”
This week he is wearing practice jersey No. 37 at the Ducks’ development camp at Great Park Ice, and maybe the low number is indicative of his status here. Even so, with on-ice skills work and physical testing interspersed with sessions on such things as nutrition and leadership, and with so many new faces to put names to, it can be disorienting.
“I think I’ve spoken to everybody,” he said. “I mean, of course, it’s hard with new faces everywhere, stuff like that. So it’s kind of hard to remember (who) is who sometimes, because there’s so many.”
New coach Greg Cronin had heard glowing reports of Carlsson, but in getting his first close look this week one thing stood out: At 6-foot-3 and a listed 194 pounds, he’s “a big kid.”
“Some guys that are 6-3 are narrowly built,” he said. “He’s got a big frame. I don’t know what his weight was at the combine, but if he’s a 193-pound guy in early June, what’s he gonna look like a year from now? … His frame can support 220 pounds, I think fairly easily. So that’s the first thing that stands out. And then he’s got long arms. He’s got reach and he’s got range to him. You know basketball people trumpet length a lot. He’s got length to him.
“It’s early, so we don’t know how much his body is going to grow in the next year, two, three, or four. But I think his upside, in relationship to his body growth, is huge. I mean, Connor Bedard’s not a big guy, right? So he doesn’t have Leo’s size. He’s got other skills that are really terrific. That’s why he’s the first pick overall. But I do think, just watching him skate, watching him move, he’s an athletic kid, which is important too. His athleticism to me shows up in practice with his skating and his movement in tight spaces.”
Carlsson said he grew up idolizing Sidney Crosby, but as a guy who has size but is shifty and won’t shirk his defensive duties, a more accurate comparable might be the Kings’ Anze Kopitar, who is 6-3, 225. And Carlsson has shown, through two seasons in the Swedish Hockey League and then the World Championships, that even at 17 and 18 he’s unfazed against more experienced competition.
No. 2 picks in the NHL draft are more of a risk than you might think. Going back through 30 years of drafts, you can find a little more than a handful who turned out to be true impact players: Drew Doughty, Evgeni Malkin, Daniel Sedin, Patrick Marleau, Chris Pronger and Trevor Linden. Guys like Eric and Jordan Staal (brothers taken No. 2 four years apart), Gabriel Landeskog and Jack Eichel are part of the next tier. And there are a lot of players taken No. 2 in that span who never reached the potential expected of them.
Carlsson already has a shot at being the best Ducks’ No. 2 pick ever, though the other two were productive in a different way.
Bobby Ryan, picked right after Crosby in the 2005 draft, had four straight 30-goal seasons for the Ducks and was eventually traded to Ottawa in 2013 for a package that included Silfverberg. Defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky, picked in ’94, was traded for future Hall of Famer Teemu Selanne in 1996, then reacquired in ’99 and traded to New Jersey in the summer of 2002 for a package that included Petr Sykora … and the Devils wound up beating the Ducks in the 2003 Stanley Cup Final.
But the immediate question Carlsson faces: After this development camp, which concludes Friday with an open practice at 11 a.m. and a 3-on-3 scrimmage at noon at Great Park Ice’s Five Point Arena, does he go back to Sweden for another year’s seasoning or start the clock on his NHL career?
The Swedish Hockey League preseason begins on Aug. 1, well before the early September start of the Ducks’ rookie camp, but Keator said there was “no rush” to what will be a group decision.
“He’ll talk to his family, his Swedish agents, myself, (Ducks GM) Pat Verbeek, his staff, and we’ll come to a consensus,” Keator said. “But in the end, it’s Leo’s life. And you know he’s going to make the decision with our input. But it’s a consensus thing. We all work together, and I’ve talked to Pat about it a few times, and he’s been great. And we’ll just see how it evolves.”
Whenever and however it does evolve, we know this: Leo Carlsson will approach it calmly.