Canucks prospect Lekkerimäki has made big improvements to his game

What a difference a year can make. At this time last season, Jonathan Lekkerimäki was preparing for the World Juniors with little momentum. The 19-year-old Vancouver Canucks prospect looked behind and disengaged on every play, reeling off a slow, health-plagued start in Sweden’s second-tier professional league, HockeyAllsvenskan. 

Present day, the Canucks’ first-round pick in 2022 is the antithesis of the player he was the season before. A more dangerous and engaged scoring threat, Lekkerimäki got off to a torrid goal-scoring start for Örebro HK, registering eight goals through his first 15 games of the season.

Even with a recent cool-off, the Swedish winger stands 10th in goal-scoring in the Swedish Hockey League, only four back from the league lead, amassing 16 points across 24 games played while averaging only 15:29 minutes of ice time. 

By all accounts, Lekkerimäki has seen improvements across his entire game, albeit with a few caveats.  

Dynamic play in transition

Returning to last season’s playoffs, Lekkerimäki started to show more dynamism off the rush, which has only continued this year in the SHL. While he’s not the most manipulative player one-on-one, relying more on handling execution, speed mismatches, and exploitation of defender mistakes, the former 15th-overall pick has racked up an impressive collection of individual efforts and a mountain of skill blending through the first half of the season. 

When he is at his best, Lekkerimäki is challenging defenders, targeting poor body positioning, deking through their defensive triangles, and activating his edges laterally to jump through seams, even flashing a second gear to create separation en route to the net.

If he is able to create space, Lekkerimäki shows off his outer-worldly release.  

Even in scenarios where the winger has control and support on the entry, there is a heightened level of creation. He delays to open seams, tries to funnel pucks to slot-driving teammates, and executes quickly.

Pass-off-pad shots and one-touch passing are littered throughout his tape. When Lekkerimäki has teammate support, he becomes more deceptive, looking to freeze defenders with feints and changes in direction. 

With all this being said, the Huddinge-born forward still possesses a lot of perimeter habits.

He completely misses opportunities to adjust his rush pattern to the inside to eat up available space and further break down defenders looking to gap up. When he is faced with pressure on the outside, he defaults into cutbacks to maintain control, often finding himself mobbed by backcheckers.

He’s possessed these delay elements all the way back to his draft season, and while they are positive from a possession point of view, they act as a smokescreen to cover for perimeter puck movement. The more slot-oriented play, the better in terms of his translatability to the NHL. 

The even-strength question for Lekkerimäki

There is no doubt that Lekkerimäki’s five-on-five play has seen drastic improvements since his draft season.

Where there were very few attacks into the middle of the ice, now there is more of a concerted effort to transport the puck to higher-danger scoring areas. Some of the Swede’s best sequences this season have come from lateral cuts into the slot, where he leveraged his shooting and puck placement. 

Even off-puck, he’s sprinting to get into open seams and soft areas of the ice to shoot off the pass and work quick-strike scoring plays. The narrative that he plays disengaged hockey is dead.

The problem is that this isn’t a constant across Lekkerimäki’s minutes. You’ll hear many prospect evaluators lament about soft, perimeter play, which is true by all accounts. At times, he actively seeks out the open room along the perimeter of the ice, turning over pucks in pressure while trapping himself in limited space. 

While the puck spends most of the time along the boards in a given game, great scorers are more focused on getting off the walls than lapping the offensive zone in the buffer space that the large ice surface provides — a habit he needs to dispel.    

Power-play dominance for Lekkermaki

On top of the improving five-on-five play, Lekkerimäki is crushing it as a primary right-hand shot threat on the power play.

His shot mechanics are impressive, rotating through his knee to power pucks on the net with precision. His angle-changing wrist shots have also been a problem for SHL goaltenders this season. He’s so proficient at moving and timing activations into pass seams that he could operate on an NHL powerplay today. 

Engagement defensively

When you hear Canucks development coach Mikael Samuelsson talk about working with prospects like Lekkerimäki, the defensive end of the puck is most likely one of the primary areas of focus.

It’s clear that under head coach Rick Tocchet, soft, defensively unreliable players will not get much leeway in his system. The good news is that Lekkerimäki’s first half of the season’s defensive efforts have been the biggest year-over-year improvement.

While cutting all of his game tape this season, Lekkerimäki is clearly a more disruptive quantity. He anticipates passing and jumps into lanes, knocks pucks away with well-timed poke-checks, and even throws his weight around to push attacks off the puck. 

His efforts on the backcheck have been remarkable. Lekkerimäki picks pockets, hounds puck carriers with pressure, helping guide them to the outside, and he’s sprinting back to cut off pass lanes. Even when he turns the puck over, he is often the first to rush back to limit the compounding of mistakes. 

Lekkerimäki expectations for World Juniors

Leading into the World Junior Championship, we will likely see a more confident, dangerous, and engaged Lekkerimäki. With Sweden fielding one of the strongest rosters in the tournament, expect the Canucks prospect to be a key, if not the top-scoring option for the team. He’ll be one of the older players on the roster, tasked with carrying a lot of the offensive load. 

Beyond the annual tournament, it wouldn’t be shocking if Lekkerimäki continued his resurgence of play in the future with Örebro. His game isn’t perfect, but considerable improvements keep the top-six forward projection alive for the prospect.

The next challenge will be adapting to the North American game, which is likely the next step after this season has concluded. Expect the organization to slow-roll his development in Abbotsford.

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