by Andrew Giesbrecht, Staff Writer and Event Coordinator, All Habs Hockey Magazine
With their first round selection in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, 26th overall, the Montreal Canadiens select:
Noah Juulsen, D, Everett (WHL)
6-1, 176 lbs., Shoots R, Canada
TSN: No. 37 | ISS: No. 29 | McKeen’s: No. 20 | HP: No. 22
2014-’15: 68 GP, 9 G, 43 A, 52 PTS (Everett Silvertips)
Noah Juulsen is a skilled two-way defender. Able to force plays at both ends of the ice, and has certainly seemed willing to take the hit to make the play with the puck. However, Juulsen has a tendency to complicate things when playing away from the puck. Ranked first on the Silvertips last season in points for a defenseman. Juulsen came out of the 2014-’15 season as the third highest-scoring defenseman in the WHL, behind Ivan Provorov and Ryan Pilon. As a right-handed shot, falls into a deep pool of relative depth in the Canadiens system. According to TheHockeyWriters.com, Juulsen plays in a similar style to current NHL defensemen Sami Vatanen and James Wisniewski. Hopefully we can see him develop into the same force on the power play that we saw with Wisniewski in his time on the Canadiens.
During their broadcast, Sportsnet compared him to Ryan McDonagh and some on Twitter say that he has some Brent Seabrook in him. I’ve never seen him play so I couldn’t comment but time will tell.
I definitely like that upside better. The big issue I see is that he was unranked (I believe) at the start of the season, and shot up in the draft rankings the second half of the year.
Need to see some sustained production out of him to know what the Habs got.
His coach is an x-nhl’er and Martin Lapointe saw him play because of Sherback . So they know what they got.Plenty of upside.
Comments are closed.