What Makes A Veteran?

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What Makes a Veteran?

What makes someone a Veteran? And, even more importantly, what makes for a “veteran presence”? Is it the amount of battles you fought, the time you’ve been where you are, your mental attitude, a combination of all those things or something completely different? We wanted to explore this question and we did so by looking at a VHL player who has started to enter the “veteran” stage of his career.

This definition of a “veteran stage” is a rather shaky one to begin with, the VHL generally puts it at around a players third or fourth post draft season but lots of things can be different for lots of players when judging their veteran status. Did they spend an extra season or two in juniors or not, how big a role have they played on their VHL team since hitting the big leagues, how much success has their team had and how many situations has the team put them in that allowed for the development of a veteran mindset?

The player we want to talk about today is Robin Galante Nilsson, a Defenseman out of Sweden who was drafted in S76 and is currently playing for the Vancouver Wolves. Galante Nilsson’s career so far has not been a particularly flashy one, but we still think it can give us some interesting insight about what makes someone a veteran.

RGN was one of the relatively rare cases of a player that went up to the VHL right after being drafted, spending no extra send-down seasons in juniors after his first year there. As we’ve learned from both Galante Nilsson and his GMs, it was his explicit wish to play with and against the highest level of competition possible and do so as early as possible, even if it would come with some growing pains. We would argue that this is definitely something that helps someone develop a veteran mindest earlier in his career than many other players, being willing to take a beating if necessary if it means you learn faster, rather than beating up on weaker competition yourself in juniors for another year.

We were also pleasantly surprised to learn that he managed to take that step without upsetting his junior team either. The Philadelphia Reapers, one of the most stacked squads in juniors at the time, would definitely have preferred to keep one of their star defenseman for at least another season, but RGN and his GMs were able to communicate fairly and respectfully enough to allow him to move on anyway to pursue his dream, with no bad blood or grudges from his team altogether. Galante Nilsson thanked them by continually praising the Reapers front office in multiple interviews he’s given since then, marking them as a team that puts their players well-being above all else which hopefully has helped make the Reapers a top adress for young talent to go to to develop their skills and take the next step in their careers.

Once he got to the VHL, Galante Nilsson joined the Vancouver Wolves who had drafted him 10th Overall. He has now just finished up his third season with the team, which interestingly enough has taken sort of the opposite trajectory than he as a player did. While Robin managed to grow and develop, continously improving both his point totals and defensive numbers, the Wolves went from a team that was able to do some damage in the playoffs to a squad that is deep in a rebuild. With Robin now at a stage of his career where his name might start popping up in some awards combinations, and with him being one of the older players of a squad that seems likely to remain on the rebuilding path for a little bit older, that brings us back to our initial question: What makes someone a veteran?

By all accounts, Galante Nilsson qualifies as a veteran at this point. On a team that has been getting younger and that has traded away a lot of its older talent, he is both one of the older and of the more productive players and now the question is how he can put those skills to good use on a team that is likely not going to be competitive on the ice for another season or two. Will he be able to be the veteran presence that will help his younger teammates grow and develop their own game, or will it make more sense for the Wolves to move him as well as they did with a lot of their other veteran players? It’s a question we might see answered soon...