Anton Edvin Rookie Profile

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Anton Edvin: The Next Great Estonian

 

 

Anton Edvin is an 18 year old right winger from Tapa, Estonia. He is 6'3" and 185 lbs. Unlike most players at this age he has put on enough muscle to feel comfortable in his frame, but he's still growing and could potentially have to add another 10 to 15 lbs before he really is at optimal performance.

 

Edvin's strengths are obvious now after three season of developing his talents with the national Estonian team (see biography). His skating, puck control and scoring abilities are off the charts. Although his skating was pretty atrocious to begin with you can see how playing so much football growing up has given him the innate ability to skate after some learning of the correct technique. His puck control skill is less a result of his talent and more of his hard work. Being a striker in football taught him to shield the ball and get into a good scoring position. Now in hockey he's adapted his talents to protect the puck and make good cross passes or hold onto it long enough to get close to the net and into a great position to take a shot. Scoring is the one thing the really came entirely to him naturally. After watching the Estonian national team play so many games he had picked up a few tricks right away and from the get go a stick in his hands just felt right. From anywhere below the tops of the circles Edvin's wrist shot is absolutely deadly and if he gets in close to the crease the goalie has no chance of stopping his crazy dangles.

 

Most young players have some areas of their game that are underdeveloped, unfortunately Edvin is no exception to this. Coming from being a striker he isn't used to having a play defense in any capacity so his defensive IQ is exceptionally low. He doesn't position himself well to keep opposing players to the outside, he finds himself out of position quite a bit of the time and he tends to coast just out of habit. To make it worse, his national coach rather than fixing this issue has taken to ignoring it and only working on the offensive aspects of Edvin's game. Although this has worked for the lower level competition that Estonia faces nationally, this is going to be a huge hangup for any higher level coaches. In addition he really does not have any checking ability whatsoever. The most contact he makes is generally when he feels he can get the puck from the opposing players and it is less of a check and more of a shove to get into a better position get the puck and skate away from the opposing player. Finally, his slap shot is very weak. His wrist shot and deking skills have been good enough for him to get by for now, but as coaches want to use him more and more on the power play we'll see him spending more time after practice alone working on his slap shot. He's mostly been a net-front guy on the power player for now, but to play to his highest potential he'll really have to develop his shot from the outside.