Changing the team does not remove the main problem of ice hockey player Kasperi Kapanen, writes Urheilu’s NHL editor Tommi Seppälä.
Tommi Seppälä NHL reporter
It would be easy to fill in all the platitudes and clichés Casper Kapasen about another great opportunity in the ranks of last summer’s Stanley Cup finalist.
St. The Louis Blues threw an underperforming winger on the transfer list on Monday, and to be honest, I didn’t think there would be a long line of takers.
Anyway, one was found – and not just any club, but the championship candidate Edmonton Oilers.
In Edmonton, Kapanen, 28, will get his first chance in the NHL.
Maybe this time the fault wasn’t actually in the player himself. After all, St. Louis, an organization that has sunk into the company of an intermediate model in a gruesome way. There is no view of the upper floors, but also not low enough to get access to the best booking slots.
Perhaps one of the NHL’s undeniably roughest and most depressing cities did not inspire Kapanen’s artistic nature enough. Well, in this regard, there is nothing better to come. Even though Edmonton’s core center has been revitalized, there is no Toronto either. Canadian Forsa.
Seriously speaking, the change brought by new opportunities is starting to be hard to believe for Kapanen.
Kapanen, 28, is in his prime as a hockey player, but he has been playing poorly for a long time.
In the summer, he received a one-year contract worth “only” one million bucks, which would have sounded alarm bells. It was easy to say that the NHL career was on the line in every game of the season that started.
“Spark Lost”
However, nothing had changed when the games started. Kapanen was once again phlegmatic as usual. A flash here, another one here, but it has been pointless to look for passion, self-confidence, joy in the game or the right kind of despair from the execution or body language.
Kapanen’s fast skating has been talked about as a strength for years, but Kapanen hasn’t been able to utilize his strength at the NHL level for ages.
For one reason or another, Kapanen, booked by Pittsburgh in the first round in the summer of 2014, seems to have lost his spark in the sport. The right kind of performance rage that aroused admiration, with which Kapanen once broke into the team playing in Toronto, has been missing for a long time. At that time, Kapanen was simply forced by the head coach Mike Babcock’s to fool oneself.
Now Kapanen did the complete opposite. The head coach With Drew Bannister was not St. In Louis, there’s a reason to play Finn. It is no coincidence that Kapanen was on the transfer list for the second time in nine months.
In the early season, Kapanen was undoubtedly one of the weakest attackers on his team, if not the weakest. Five against five St. Louis lost the game with 1–7 goals while Kapanen was on the ice.
What can you expect?
Will Kapanen’s career take off in Edmonton’s top organization for a new flourish?
It would be easy to paint visions of playing in the top chains next to top players. Now there could be a chance for that through injuries. It would be easy to see how Edmonton’s quick change of direction hockey suits Kapanen’s speed.
No external factors matter much right now. The only thing that matters is how Kapanen reacts to his – probably last – new opportunity. If, like previous years, the attitude is of the “doom and gloom” type, the transfer list calls for the well-known puck family to be washed away before the Alberta snow melts.
Kapanen has to dig out the rage that made him throw things at his home in Toronto after the farm command.
Even after all these years, let’s start to be in the “I believe when I see” attitude. Unfortunately.