Dynamic Czech & Minnesota Wild Prospect Ventures To The OHL To Bolster His Development
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Why Blackhawks prospect Marek Vanacker has ‘a lot of untapped potential'
MINNEAPOLIS — Nearly 15 months ago, Marek Vanacker stood at the LECOM Harborcenter in Buffalo, N.Y., with his arm in a sling. He was at the NHL Scouting Combine, and he was just four days removed from shoulder surgery. He injured his shoulder in November of his draft season in a game against the London Knights and played through it for the remainder of the year, missing only one of his Brantford Bulldogs' 68 games. Despite the injury, he still managed to register 36 goals and 82 points, leading the team in scoring. A couple of weeks prior to the surgery, he even flew to Finland to play for Team Canada at U18 worlds, winning a gold medal. Advertisement 'It hurt off and on a little bit, it bugged me, but I just tried to move it out of my mind and just did my thing,' he said at the time. 'I'm looking at it pretty positively. I've got six months here to get better and stronger and healthier, so I'm just looking at it as time to keep working hard, be in the gym, and get stronger. There's ups and downs for it, but I'm using it as an up. I don't think this is going to affect a whole lot. A lot of NHL players have had it. So it's just a little bump in the road that I have to come over.' That year, he jumped from No. 25 on NHL Central Scouting's midterm list of North American skaters for the draft to No. 17 on their final list. Their report talked about a speedy, '200-foot player' who is 'one of the hardest workers on the ice' and had 'taken his game to the next level.' A few weeks after the combine, the Chicago Blackhawks traded both of their second-round picks in the 2024 draft to move up into the first round and select him with the 27th pick. At the time, he was set to lose his full post-draft summer of skating and training and had set his sights on a December return from the injury. While he rehabbed, he worked on his lower-body strength and dedicated himself to video. Fast forward, and he's standing inside Ridder Arena at the World Junior Summer Showcase with a chance to audition to play for Team Canada again at the 2026 World Juniors. 'It has been pretty crazy,' he said of the last year or so. 'It was tough, but everybody's got to battle through some adversity, and I just had to keep a good mindset and put in the extra work that I fell behind on. So to get the invite to come out here is pretty special.' He eventually returned to play in the OHL on Nov. 29. Though it took him some time to get back to feeling like himself, he scored 30 goals and 53 points in 56 combined regular-season and playoff games to finish last season. Advertisement 'For him, it was a challenge because when you miss training camp, it's one thing, regular season it ramps up to another level, and by the time you get to midseason, everyone's pretty dialed in,' Bulldogs head coach Jay McKee said on a phone call earlier this year. 'But when you're as skilled as he is and you've had the success that he had (in his draft year), as a young player, you just want to step in and be right back to where you were. But he really started to come back into his own, and the game started to happen more natural, and he became the impact player that we had last year again.' Bulldogs general manager Spencer Hyman, who took over the team shortly after Vanacker returned to it, immediately saw in him some of his brother, the Oilers' Zach. 'It's an interesting situation for me because I've been so close to this type of lineup formation my whole life, because how I view Marek is what my brother means to Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl,' Hyman said. 'Marek is the guy who does the hard work in the corners, and he's a goal scorer at the net. He's a fierce forechecker. He's very aggressive on his attack for pucks. He's great at hunting pucks down. And he's a finisher. So for me it's critical to have a player like Marek play with a player like (linemate and Kraken first-rounder) Jake O'Brien, because guys like Jake want the puck and Marek's the type of player who goes and gets the puck.' Last season, Vanacker and O'Brien played on the Bulldogs' quote-unquote second line behind Patrick Thomas and Nick Lardis. This coming season, the team will belong to Vanacker and O'Brien. And they know it. 'He's a very, very good player, as you could see in his draft year,' O'Brien said. 'Just his speed and his ability to shoot the puck. He's really fun to play with because he gets hard on pucks every time and creates space for me. And with the injury last year, it was kind of tough for him, but I'm sure this year he's going to have a really big year.' Advertisement The Bulldogs have high expectations for the duo and what they can accomplish together. 'The way he looks in practice, and the mentality, and the way he's training in the gym, I think Marek's primed to have a huge year,' Hyman said. 'I think he's the best power forward in the CHL, and there were games last year where you could tell he was himself again. He's going to have a massive year, and we're really excited.' McKee lauds Vanacker as a fantastic person who has a good attitude and a 'switch when he gets on the ice into a really high-end competitive mode.' During his rehab last year, he stayed around the team and had a positive influence on their group, according to McKee. If they had let him come back earlier, McKee said he would have played a couple of weeks sooner. 'He's a real good culture kid and teammate,' McKee said. Hyman said Vanacker puts all the onus on himself and is dedicated, after success in minor hockey, to winning an OHL Championship with the Bulldogs this season before he turns pro with Chicago. As a player, McKee says he has 'breakaway speed' and believes he can become a 'top-six forward that has the ability to be both a power play and a penalty kill guy' in the NHL. 'With his acceleration and top-end speed, he can be a dual threat in the sense that he can kill off penalties but also chip in here and there with some short-handed goals,' McKee said. 'Teams that play with one player at the top of their power play, it's always a threat when you've got a guy like Marek and his speed on the kill if there's a blocked shot or a chipped puck, and you go on the offense pretty quick with a guy like him. He's got high-end speed with a high level of compete and a great shot. Those combinations really helped propel him. He was a guy who was dominating on the ice often for us (in his draft year).' Vanacker says his work ethic comes from his parents and his farm upbringing. His dad, Kevin, works for Farm Credit Canada in Woodstock, Ontario. His mom, Jaime, is an elementary school teacher (she taught him for one year, and he jokes that she picked on him). They still live on their farm, and he has worked on a farm over the last five years while training for hockey. Advertisement He's from Delhi, Ontario, a small community of about 4,000 people, about 40 minutes south of Brantford, and the Bulldogs' move from Hamilton to Brantford was a welcome one, as he grew up playing for the Brantford 99ers. 'It was like going back to a home rink,' he said. He describes his game as determined and tenacious, and himself as that too. He wants to be Ryan O'Reilly with more speed and looks up to O'Reilly for his competitive, smart, trustworthy game. This summer, he has worked with skills coaches Andrew Fritsch and Josh Wrobel, and strength and conditioning coach Luke VanMoerkerke (who is also the Bulldogs' strength and conditioning coach), determined to have a huge final season in the OHL. 'I'm super excited. We made a couple of moves through the summer, and our team is going to be fun,' he said of the upcoming season with the title-chasing Bulldogs. 'As long as we stick together and work hard, I think we're going to have huge success and hopefully add a couple of more pieces and go for it this year.' Listed at 6-foot-1 and about 190 pounds these days, he's trying to add more muscle with VanMoerkerke without losing his speed. It's his first summer working with Wrobel, who also works in player development for the Pittsburgh Penguins. He was brought to Wrobel by Lardis, his fellow Blackhawks prospect and now-former Bulldogs teammate. After their first skate together, Wrobel was 'very excited about it' and felt they really clicked, and there were a couple of lightbulb moments for Vanacker. Wrobel could immediately see that Vanacker was big and strong, moved well and could shoot the puck, but he also saw the potential for so much more. 'It's weird to say (he's) raw of a first-round pick, but my first impressions of him were 'there's a lot of untapped potential here' because I think there's a lot there where he hasn't even scraped the surface,' Wrobel said. Advertisement In that way, Vanacker reminded him a little of his longtime client and Islanders prospect Calum Ritchie, who also lost a summer of his development in the OHL to shoulder surgery and had to play catch-up. '(Vanacker's) put up good numbers already, but at the point he's at now, if we can add some things now going into next season, (he) could look like a completely different hockey player now and really surprise some people,' Wrobel said. 'He's a kid where I don't want the skate to end, and there's so much more information that I want to give to him and get through, but I don't want to rush him either. It has been really exciting working with him because he's very coachable, and you can tell some kids are out there just kind of going through the motions at times. I feel like he's locked into everything, and he's asking questions about everything.' Together, they've worked on taking pucks off the wall. Wrobel has also tried to get him not to overshoot pucks, teaching him to have spots in the net prepared before he gets it so that he can get his shots off quicker, rather than always trying to rip it. He reminds him a little of Rangers forward Will Cuylle, who also needed to learn that when they started working together. 'We've talked about just trying to loosen him up a little bit and quiet his body down when he's getting into scoring areas,' Wrobel said. 'Everything has so much power behind it. And it's funny, he even asked me like 'How do I do that (loosen up)?' And I'm like 'We just need to find a way to kind of get you to relax a little bit and not be so tense when you get to those areas and get opportunities.'' On Tuesday, in Canada's Red-White game at the World Junior Summer Showcase, he scored for Red on a backdoor redirect on the power play — hugging the post like Zach Hyman — and had multiple other looks, including an early one from Sascha Boisvert and another short-handed in a give-and-go with Kashawn Aitcheson. Dale Hunter, Canada's head coach for this year's tournament and the longtime head coach of the London Knights, has seen it firsthand in the OHL as well. 'He's a power forward, he's hard to play against, he plays heavy, and he brings that with skill and driving the net,' Hunter said. 'When he's going, he's hard to stop.' Advertisement After his summer of training, he's eager to show it and prove himself at main camp with the Blackhawks. And once he's back in Brantford and healthy for a full season again, he doesn't plan to look back. 'I think he's going to have an opportunity to really dominate,' Wrobel said. (Photos courtesy of OHL Images)
