No offence, but Utunen clearly a defender
Canucks Top 10 Prospects: Smooth-skating Mr. Reliable Finn a mid-round pick
We're two weeks away from the 2020 NHL Entry Draft. The Vancouver Canucks don't have a pick until the third round. As they prepare for the draft we're evaluating at the top 10 prospects in the system, starting today at No. 10 with Toni Utunen
The Canucks have hit home runs in the first round in recent years, but a top 10 list means checking out more than the players who must make it, as the best teams find players in the edges of the draft.
Is Toni Utunen one of those guys? With the Canucks' current blue-line corps filled with veterans, there are likely spaces to come open in the next few seasons. Let's take a look at this smooth-skating Finn.
As a 14-year-old, playing against player two years older, Toni Utunen was nearly a point-per-game player.
He has not scored at that rate since. There's a big caveat there, though: Utunen kept moving up the age brackets, always playing with the older kids. At age 15, he skated for Tappara's Under-18 team.
Aged 16, he was on Tappara's top junior squad. Some of his teammates were set to turn 20. The next year he turned professional, skating 11 times for the senior Tappara squad in the Liiga (Finland's elite league) and also being loaned out to LeKi in the second-tier Mestis league for 28 games.
Utunen showed enough to draw the eyes of the Canucks.
He's never scored like he did when he first hit his teens, but it's clear the talent that drove him toward the net in those days has helped him refine his defensive game.
If you're not going to score against older players, you're going to have to be very good at stopping them if you're going to stick around.
Especially if you're not the biggest guy. Like so many modern defencemen, it's not size that drives Utunen's game — he's listed at five-foot-11 — it's his skating that makes it all work.
At the 2019 World Juniors, he played on Finland's first defensive pairing, alongside Henri Jokiharju, helping lead the Finns to gold. (The flashy Jokiharju just finished up his second NHL season.)
That same season, Utunen became a regular in the Tappara lineup, even if he didn't play a whole lot.
At the 2020 World Juniors, he wore an `A' for the Finnish world junior squad but once again struggled to get much ice time for Tappara. In fact, his playing time diminished after he returned from the worlds — ironically the defenceman Tappara picked up midseason and who pushed Utunen down to eighth on the depth chart was former Canucks defenceman Adam Polasek.
Dobber Prospects' Cam Robinson has watched a lot of Utunen over the last two years and called the young Finn the “consummate defensive defender.”
“The role he employs now is one of the steady, stay-athome type. He does this by effectively using his stick and gap control to thwart oncoming threats. Despite not being the largest player out there, he manoeuvres and angles well down low and can handle the front of the net as well,” said Robinson. “You will occasionally see him jump into the play and flash some of those former (offensive) traits, but don't ever expect it. He plays a safe and efficient style that should lend itself well to North American pro hockey. But it will also prohibit him from playing too high up any lineups.”
Finnish prospects writer Miika Arponen concurred about what works in Utunen's game.
“Same elements are still there that were his strengths when he was drafted: his effortless skating, defensive awareness and the no-risk puck handling, but he hasn't really gone forward in any aspect recently,” said Arponen.
That said, Utunen's growing reputation as a Mr. Reliable could represent a plateau, he warned.
“He has been given an opportunity to take a permanent spot on Tappara's defence but so far he hasn't been able to hold onto it. And unfortunately, based on pre-season games, it looks to be the case again this year as he is projected to be the seventh defenceman for Tappara again.”
Utunen seems set to play out the year in the Liiga and then could make a jump to the American Hockey League for 2021-22. He would need to sign a contract first, of course.
Add it all up and in a hypothetical future where he's able to turn things up a notch, win the trust of the coaches at Tappara this season, then soar higher again once he's joined Utica next year, putting himself on course for NHL consideration, it still seems Utunen's top end at the NHL level would be as a sixth or seventh defenceman.