Lost wunderkind finally arrives
Baertschi discovers defensive game and is becoming more of a true NHLer than a Swiss miss
At the ripe old age of 23, Sven Baertschi can look over the uneven terrain he’s travelled and understand everything happened for a reason.
His free fall in Calgary from franchise saviour to first-round flame out? That was difficult, but maybe the game had come too easy to him and he needed a lesson in the reality of playing in the NHL.
The deadline deal that sent him from the Flames to the Canucks for a second-round pick? Sure it was an indication how far his stock had fallen, but he needed a fresh start.
The start of this season when he struggled to keep a place in the Canucks’ lineup? Again, not ideal, but for the first time he learned there was a defensive side to the puck and that’s turned around his career.
“Do I get mad about what happened (in Calgary)?” Baertschi says. “Not really. I’m in a great situation here. Everything worked out the way it should have.
“Was it good for me to go through some tough times? Yeah. Did I learn from it? Yeah. It helped me mature as a player and a person.”
Even if that maturation process is far from complete.
The Swiss national is now 46 games into his first complete NHL season and, if nothing else, he’s already established himself as one of the most intriguing characters to enter the Canucks organization in the last decade. Blessed by the hockey gods with outsized talent and cursed with overheated expectations at a young age, Baertschi has offered glimpses of what he might be and for the Canucks, that’s found money.
Again, no one’s confusing him with Patrick Kane just yet, but if he can establish himself as a consistent 25-goal scorer, it’s a massive development for the Canucks. At the start of the season, Willie Desjardins admits he was uncertain if Baertschi could play in the NHL. Now, it seems like a first-round talent has been dropped into their lineup, even if it’s taken five years for that first-rounder to arrive.
“He’s come a long way since the start of the year,” says the Canucks head coach. “There was a point where we didn’t know if he could play. But Travis Green (who coached Baertschi in the WHL and briefly in the AHL) spoke really highly of him and (Canucks assistant general manager) John Weisbrod really believed in him. There were some pretty good hockey men in his corner, so it was easy to stick with him.”
Baertschi didn’t always have those allies in the early part of his pro career.
The WHL’s Portland Winterhawks drafted the Bern native seventh overall in the 2010 Canadian Hockey League import draft on the recommendation of agent Andre Rufner, who also represented Winterhawks star Nino Niederreiter.
“We didn’t know anything about him,” says Mike Johnston, the former Canucks assistant who was then the coach and GM in Portland “We took a flyer on him.”
Good call. Baertschi scored 34 goals and recorded 85 points in his rookie WHL season, was drafted 13th overall by the Flames in 2011, then came back with a monster 94 points in 47 games before the Flames called him up at the end of the season.
He scored three goals in five games and Calgarians were confident they had the next Mike Bossy on their hands. Things, however, didn’t quite turn out that way.
After splitting time between Calgary and the AHL in his first year as a pro, Baertschi returned to a regime change in Calgary for the 2013-14 season and quickly discovered new president Brian Burke wasn’t a charter member of his fan club.
Before the season started, Burke famously said of Baertschi: “There are three zones in the ice surfaces in this league. I don’t see that he’s learned to play and compete in two of them.”
You can guess what this did to the young man’s confidence, even if it was a fairly accurate description of his game.
“It happens so often with young players, especially offensive players,” says Johnston. “When you lose your confidence, you’ve lost everything. He just started going around and around.”
The situation came to a head late last season when Baertschi asked for a trade and told the Flames he wouldn’t re-sign in Calgary. In swept Canucks GM Jim Benning, who sent a second-round draft pick to the Flames for the lost wunderkind.
There would be one final act to play out for Baertschi and the Canucks and it came while Desjardins was trying to figure out if Baertschi was an NHLer or a Swiss miss.
When he wasn’t scoring at the start of the season, Baertschi was at least putting in an effort on the game’s details. He’ll never be aS elke candidate,but he began to understand how he had to play in the NHL and that kept him in the lineup long enough to find some chemistry with Bo Horvat and rediscover his scoring touch.
“It’s good to feel good about my defensive game because I did struggle at the start of my NHL career,” he says. “It’s no secret.”
Baertschi says he has found a home in Vancouver.
“Once you find that stability. that good balance, it helps a lot,” he says. “It gives you a little more freedom. Maybe a mistake or two won’t hurt that much. It’s just playing with confidence and when you’re a confident player they’ll keep putting you out.”
Sounds like the voice of experience.