In hindsight, Medicine Hat Tigers head coach and general manager Willie Desjardins thinks a first-round rating coming out of last year would have even been high for Cayden Lindstrom.
So when he came back and posted nine points in three preseason games and then 10 goals and 15 points in the 12 regular season games he played before NHL Central Scouting gave him an ‘A’ rating (which “indicates a first-round candidate”) on their preliminary players to watch list in October, it took even the person who drafted him in the third round of the WHL Draft and coached him through his rookie season and into his draft year a little by surprise.
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By the time NHL Central Scouting released its midterm ranking for the draft, though, and Lindstrom had risen all the way to No. 3 on their list of North American skaters, Desjardins, a former NHL coach with the Kings, Canucks and Stars, was no longer surprised. Lindstrom was picked fourth by the Blue Jackets.
A year earlier, Lindstrom “had a good year” as a 16-year-old and had really grown as the season went on. But he’d also been moved between the wing and centre, and even healthy scratched. His 42 points in 61 games at year’s end were respectable, and he was named to Canada’s summer Hlinka Gretzky Cup roster, where he registered three points in five games, but he wasn’t a star.
Then he “just kind of took off.”
“He just kind of came back and he was dominant right from the start,” Desjardins said on a phone call last week. “Just a totally different player. Way more confident. Way more assertive on the ice.”
When a back injury (and a minor hand injury) derailed his season heading into the Christmas break, he’d registered 27 goals, 46 points and 66 penalty minutes in just 32 games, a 68-game full WHL season pace of 57 goals, 98 points and 140 penalty minutes. He had a real chance to break 100 points (before the injuries, he was on a 12-game point streak that saw him score 13 goals and 21 points).
Months later, there are just two questions. The first isn’t whether he’s a first-round pick in the draft, but just how high he might go. On talent and upside, a consensus of NHL scouts believes he belongs in the top-five conversation. But the second question — the more pressing one for NHL clubs — is about the status of his health.
This week, his agency, Wasserman Hockey, is expected to deliver a pair of reports to NHL Central Scouting which outline everything they’ve gone through over the last several months. The reports will be made available to all 32 NHL clubs ahead of the upcoming Scouting Combine in Buffalo. One will be written by Lindstrom’s physiotherapist, Ryan Murray of the East Vancouver Sports and Rehabilitation Clinic. The other will be written by the doctor who has treated Lindstrom.
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His agent, Daren Hermiston, said “all indications are he’ll be fine,” and that both Murray and the doctor, who is an NHL team physician, will indicate in their reports that “they feel Cayden will make a full recovery without requiring surgery.”
According to Hermiston, he’s back in the gym five days a week and on the ice three days a week.
On a phone call last week, Lindstrom told The Athletic that he’s “slowly getting there.”
“I’m not there quite yet but I’ll be there pretty soon I think,” he said.
Despite the injury and his smaller sample size this season, Lindstrom’s No. 3 ranking still held strong when NHL Central Scouting released its final list for the 2024 draft — a sign of the belief scouts still have in the 6-foot-3.25, 210-pound centre and his projection.
It’s a projection that Desjardins now believes is well-earned.
“He can be a really hard guy to play against for other No. 1 centres (in the NHL),” Desjardins said. “A lot of the skilled forwards are not going to want to have to play against him every night. You don’t want to have to play against that guy — that’s so hard and powerful. For one, he’s physically gifted. But on top of that his standards are really high for himself. He doesn’t accept being average. He wants to be good, he’s upset if he’s not good, he pushes himself to be good so it’s not just his physical makeup it’s his mental as well. He expects himself to be elite all the time.”
And the more you learn about him, the more that last side of him, the mental side, comes into focus as much as the physical side does.
When Sumeet Wareh first started working with Lindstrom, it was September of 2021 and he was one of his players with the Delta Hockey Academy’s U17 prep team. After coaching him that season, they’ve also worked together through LAB 9INE, his video analysis and on-ice skill development business (Wareh is also a scout for the Tigers).
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That season, when he first coached him, Lindstrom was “very raw (but) remarkably athletic.”
“When I first saw him, he reminded me of a football running back on the ice. Just quick, fast, lots of speed and strength,” Wareh told The Athletic. “Tremendous amount of speed, skill and strength at that age. Most I’ve seen ever actually at that age.”
A couple of years before that, when Hermiston first saw him play, he was playing midget A hockey in Fort St. John, B.C., near the province’s northern border with Alberta, as a first-year Bantam.
Hermiston’s first impression was that “he had basically no idea at that time how to play hockey.” His second impression was that he was huge and that while he lacked the polish of 13- and 14-year-old AAA players who’d had more high-level coaching, he was already much faster and stronger than players who were older than him.
“I can’t say I knew this was coming, that would be a lie, but when you see a kid who is going to be really big and really gifted physically, you just wonder about the hockey sense (and) so you put them together with great coaches,” Hermiston said. “I knew that the overall athleticism was top 1 percent.”
Once he got to know him further, he learned that he was raised by a single mother, Trisha, with three younger sisters, and that how close he was with his mom and two grandparents really defines him. Trisha is a medical assistant who is in school to become a registered nurse (RN).
“She means a lot. She taught me a lot. She gave me a lot of strong values. Everything I do is really for her and the rest of my family,” Lindstrom said. “She really motivates me to work harder and push myself every day to get better. She taught me to respect everyone and do to others what you would want done to you. And just to value your family.”
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The team at Wasserman helped him get set up at Delta, but it meant moving 1,200 kilometres — a near-14-hour drive south, about the same distance as to Medicine Hat — and living away from his family since an early age.
“(His story is) very rare obviously for the hockey world with how expensive the hockey world is,” Hermiston said. “To Cayden’s credit, he worked his butt off and is obviously making a pretty good go at this right now. And to Willie Desjardins’ credit, and a few others who’ve coached him, they really helped him on the hockey sense side, and the kid worked really hard, and now the physical attributes look even better.”
At Delta, Wareh saw him learn in real time how to take his tools and execute them systematically, encouraging him to express himself within the team’s structure.
“His strength, his speed, and his ability to execute the game with his skill set is like the ultimate power forward. He just needed to learn the game, how to play the right way,” Wareh said. “To me, that was the biggest solving question for him.”
Lindstrom really latched onto the video work they did together too, learning what was acceptable and how to better manage the puck so that he could apply his natural gifts in games.
Those natural gifts, especially the speed, Lindstrom said come from playing other sports — track and field, baseball and soccer — growing up. He has never really worked with a skating coach but ran the 100-metre, 200-metre and 400-metre for years, always preferring the sprint of the 100. He played at a high level on the diamond as a shortstop, third-baseman, pitcher and catcher, as well, eventually having to choose between baseball and hockey at 13.
“I think I’m a skilled power forward who is a really powerful skater and also really agile. I’ve got shiftiness, I protect the puck very well, and I shoot the puck very well,” Lindstrom said. “But the skating has always just come naturally.”
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Wareh believes that Lindstrom landing with Desjardins, a coach with NHL experience who is also “very open and lets the players be themselves,” was the “perfect spot for him to develop even more.”
“From his rookie season to now I think he’s really just focusing on his identity now — having conversations about his strengths, agreeing on becoming a 200-foot power forward offensively and defensively,” Wareh said. “It’s not about him just scoring as many goals as he can, it’s about being a power forward at both ends of the rink. What we’re trying to build is what he is on a nightly basis and managing that identity as a power forward and making sure we’re working on the individual skills that come with that power forward identity.”
This season, Desjardins said, “(Lindstrom’s) structure got way better.” He also got meaner, according to his coach.
“He plays hard and he’s got some real meanness. He has good vision, he makes some high, high-end plays, and he does things quick. He’s a fast-twitch guy. Everything he does he does it quick,” Desjardins said.
Desjardins, Wareh and Hermiston all describe him as reserved, quiet and serious, but also a curious student of the game who looks for information and never questions coaching.
“He’s got great respect, he’s got really good values, he’s really polite, and he focuses on his job more than anything else,” Desjardins said. “He’s there, he wants to be good, and he’s focused on that.”
Over the last several months, Desjardins also learned about his perseverance in the way he dealt with his back injury. That included coming back early for Medicine Hat’s first-round playoff series even though he registered just two points in four games and didn’t look like the player he was pre-injury.
“He was able to stay with it,” Desjardins said. “He came back and his compete was good. He was willing to come back and play even though he wasn’t 100 percent. He was willing to go out and give us what he had and you have to respect that in the young man because he knew that everybody was watching him and that if he goes out and plays and doesn’t do well what that would do, but he was willing to take that risk and play.”
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In advance of the draft, he plans to attend the combine in Buffalo in the first week of June and then Wasserman Hockey’s pre-draft camp in Toronto on June 10 to meet with teams and answer any questions they may have.
No matter what happens at the draft, or where he gets picked, he’s proud of himself.
For the way he played in the fall: “I don’t know if I expected it but I definitely wanted it to happen and I definitely worked hard in the summer and worked on all of my weaknesses and strengths,” he said.
And for what he has overcome since. He credits Murray and his trainer Matt Holtzmann, also of the East Vancouver Sports and Rehabilitation Clinic, for helping him manage it and rebuild his strength.
“I’m taking away to just take care of my body way more. I’ve learned so much along the way during these last few months, whether it’s mobility, or different stretches, or different workouts I can do,” Lindstrom said. “Just taking care of my overall wellness.”
Once he gets back to full health, Wareh thinks the sky’s the limit.
“I think he can play in all areas of the ice. We’ve been looking at Roope Hintz a lot. Just a power forward that can score. Or Chris Kreider in his prime type of player. That could be a top-line forward,” Wareh said. “The potential for him, that’s what’s exciting. Because he can kind of be who he wants to be. With that much skill and size, with the maturity and his ability to not only possess the scoring and finishing abilities but also his defensive ability in his own end. The potential is very high.”
(Top photo: Brian Liesse / WHL Images)
