

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Former Vancouver Canucks second-round draft pick Anton Rodin will reportedly be monitored by curious NHL teams at the upcoming Karjala Cup in Finland, according to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman.

“Hard to say how many potential European free agents can make an impact in North America,” Friedman wrote in his latest 30 Thoughts column, but there are at least two others who will be monitored in Finland. Both are Swedes.

“One is Anton Rodin, an about-to-be-25-year-old forward drafted in 2009 by Vancouver. He played in the AHL, but couldn’t get a one-way contract and went home. (UPDATE: I had checked to see if Vancouver retained his rights and misunderstood the results. He is still Canucks property.)”

Would Rodin interest the Canucks? And if not, could the club potentially finagle an asset from another team that’s willing to roll the dice on the SHL’s leading scorer?

The first thing to cover off here is Rodin’s status. According to an old tweet from Brad Ziemer of the Vancouver Sun, Rodin was tendered a qualifying offer by the club in 2013. Because he’s just about to turn 25-years-old, I’d wager heavily that he remains on Vancouver’s reserve list as a restricted free agent. So the Canucks are holding the cards here as it pertains to the NHL side of things, as Friedman has confirmed.

One fly in the ointment could be Rodin’s SHL contract status. As we covered off in September Rodin recently signed a three-year extension with Brynas, which could complicate the process of bringing Rodin back to North America.

Currently, Rodin is leading all SHL scorers with 24 points in 16 games for Brynas – Jacob Markstrom’s old SHL club. He’s been pretty great in the SHL since returning, though when we last saw him play in North America, he was struggling enormously on some Chicago Wolves teams that just couldn’t score.

In Rodin’s last AHL season, he managed just 14 points in 49 games. The PCS model doesn’t see that as a death kneel for a player’s chances of making the NHL necessarily, although only about 16.5 percent of forwards with a similar build who scored at a similar rate in their age-21 AHL campaigns managed to play 200 NHL games. Most of those guys were grinder-type players like Bob Corkum or Jamal Mayers though the PCS model also generates Mike Santorelli and David Booth as comparables.

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One other factor we might consider when evaluating Rodin’s play on North American ice is his bum shoulder, which he tried to play through during his time with the Canucks organization. I’d be curious to know what impact that had on his pedestrian counting stats.

If we run Rodin’s current season through the PCS model, we generate just five comparable players, only one of whom managed to become an NHL regular – Norwegian forward Espen Knutsen. There’s only one comparable player from the last 15 years though and that’s Cam Abbott, which is a testament to how productive Rodin has been so far this year.

In recent seasons, we’ve seen the SHL, and international leagues more generally, become utilized as a more frequent talent pipeline by the NHL’s 30-member clubs. From Jori Lehtera to Melker Karlsson to Carl Soderberg to Pierre-Edouard Bellemare to Steve Moses, it seems as if NHL teams are more willing to gamble on players who’ve been successful in European professional leagues than they were four or five years ago.

In Soderberg and Lehtera’s cases, though, the players returned to the teams that held their rights. We haven’t ever seen a team pony up draft picks in order to gamble on successful European league professionals in their mid-20s, at least as far as I can remember.

We’ll have to see what the club opts to do with Rodin. They’ll only hold his restricted rights for a couple more years, or until he turns 27. It’ll almost surely take a one-way deal to bring him over though, and we have no idea whether or not the Canucks have any interest in seeing whether Rodin can contribute at the NHL level.

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If the club looks to flip Rodin, don’t expect much of a return. Still, if the Canucks can find a team interested in paying even a modest price in order to gamble on the SHL’s leading scorer, then that’s found money for the club. And you can’t argue with found money.





