Elmer Soderblom

Last Season

Seven goals and six assists in 59 games — 13 points, minus-one, at 11:07 a night with 23 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

Better hands than the frame suggests. A hundred and one unblocked attempts, seven goals, median 24 feet with 42 per cent from inside twenty.

Thirty-two points in 106 career games. He is not going to create anything, but he does not fumble the puck the way men his size usually do.

The Physical Game

Six foot eight and 252 pounds, the tallest man in this edition alongside Rempe and sixteen pounds lighter than him. He is genuinely enormous and he screens goaltenders simply by existing.

Twenty-three penalty minutes in 59 games is low, and it is the criticism every large forward in this book gets: he occupies space rather than imposing on it.

The skating is the ceiling and it is a hard one.

The Intangibles

Forty-nine point two per cent of the expected goals, 46th percentile, in 638 minutes on a club that finished fourth at generating offence.

Eight points in his last ten, four of them goals — the best run of his career.

He is 25, a hundred and fifty-ninth overall pick, and the sort of player a club keeps because there is no other way to buy that much net-front space. Whether he can skate well enough to keep the job is the whole question.