What I’m seeing at Canucks development camp: Braeden Cootes, Adam Novotný and more

ABBOTSFORD, B.C. — As you’d expect given that co-presidents Henrik and Daniel Sedin and general manager Ryan Johnson have their managerial roots in player development, Vancouver Canucks development camp had a different look and feel in comparison with years past.

It also had a new location, at the Rogers Forum, where the Abbotsford Canucks play.

There are downsides, of course, to this approach. For example, Niklas Aaram-Olsen, the Norwegian sharpshooter selected in the second round of the 2026 NHL Draft, had never been to Vancouver previously. He told The Athletic on Thursday that he wouldn’t really have a chance to see the city and what it has to offer before departing back home to Oslo to prepare for his first collegiate season at Boston University this August.

The upside, however, is that the facility is entirely controlled by the Canucks, and it’s fit for professional players. The Canucks also tweaked the content of development camp. There was a pronounced emphasis on the professional standards expected of players, and matching much of what the twins and Johnson have told fans publicly, those expectations extended from on-ice instruction and play to working out in the gym to interacting with the community and participating in good works.

On Tuesday, following the first on-ice session of development camp, Canucks prospects went to volunteer at a Fraser Valley food bank, as the club’s cultural rebuild continues, too.

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Development camp trends

On Tuesday, the Canucks held a for-fun skills-based practice. On Thursday, the club held a five-game three-on-three tournament.

In general, we should be very careful not to draw much of any evaluative significance from this environment, especially because development camps across the NHL are becoming smaller and more intimate with every passing year. The Canucks’ approach is very much in line with these wider trends.

The practice pace is casual, focused entirely on puck touches and fun-looking drills. From what we witnessed on Tuesday and Thursday, there are zero battle drills or anything approximating a real scrimmage or training camp-like environment. There is a coach for every player and a half, and most of the drills look legitimately fun. There are no hidden bag skates.

The days of teams scrambling after the draft to swell their development camp ranks with invite players are over. Nobody in the NHL, and certainly not the Canucks, is bringing 40 players or more to a development camp, then hosting it like a mini training camp concluding with a significant, competitive scrimmage.

At Canucks development camp this week, for example, there were three goaltenders total. There were only five defenders.

What matters at an NHL development camp these days mostly occurs away from the observation of the media. As one Eastern Conference NHL staffer told me of their club’s approach this week, the focus of development camp is increasingly on the educational content off the ice. The on-ice sessions are more like a treat to keep the participants engaged in the overall syllabus.

There is always something to learn and evaluate, of course, but we should heavily qualify any player takes or observations with the reality that it’s early July, the hockey environment is casual, and the evaluative side of development camp has been toned down heavily, both by the Canucks and across the NHL.

The three-on-three tournament and the Novotný show

Adam Novotný spent almost the entirety of his first draft-eligible season as an 18-year-old in the OHL. At this age and stage, every little bit of maturity matters. For context, Novotný is almost six full months older than fellow 2026 first-round pick Caleb Malhotra.

The wide-bodied Czech forward was the standout at the three-on-three tournament, scoring at will and creating glitzy and impressive scoring chances.

Now, once again, it’s early July, and it was a three-on-three tournament pitting three teams splitting five total defenders against one another. Games lasted for eight minutes, with a running clock. There was a round robin, then a semifinal and a final. This was an environment for offence, and most of Vancouver’s top prospects had some incredible moments, so let’s take all of this with a grain of salt.

Malhotra scored a pair of goals in his team’s four games, including a goal on a brilliant wrist shot. Aaram-Olsen had a stunner finish, sending a water bottle to the emergency room. And Braeden Cootes controlled games at a different level than anyone else on the ice sheet, challenging checkers one-on-one and beating them regularly, including on one impressive sequence where he willed himself past a pair of checkers to create a breakaway, scored, and then manufactured a second consecutive breakaway off the ensuing faceoff (which the goaltender stopped).

Still, it was Novotný that stole the show. His combination of puck control, width, skill and speed gave him an almost comical level of juice in this environment. Novotný was consistently able to weave around defenders through the neutral zone. When he arrived, he’d cycle in-zone, alternating between cutting inside on his check for a shot, or sometimes he’d just beat defenders out wide.

While he was largely puck-dominant, he had a series of slick feeds, including a shot-fake no-look pass that set up a Group 3 goal in their final three-on-three game.

On a few sequences, having probed his check for several seconds, he’d skate out into the neutral zone to regroup, then cut back toward the net, beat a defender wide and set himself up for a breakaway.

While Malhotra will be heading to Boston University this fall, Novotný will be at Canucks training camp. It’s difficult to know how ready he may be, and I wouldn’t pretend to draw anything substantive from the wildly fun display he put on in Abbotsford on Thursday, but given his physical maturity and makeup, I’m not sure we should sleep on him as a dark-horse candidate to push to play a small handful of NHL games this fall.

Braeden Cootes’ readiness

Cootes needs a greater level of challenge than what the new-look WHL — which is getting younger every year — has to offer.

The 19-year-old is spending his summer near his hometown of Sherwood Park, Alta., skating with a group of professionals at the practice rink at Rogers Arena in downtown Edmonton. It’s the same group Cootes skated with last year, and includes a variety of established NHL players like Sam Steel, Olen Zellweger and Kirby and Colton Dach. Some Oilers players, like Mattias Ekholm, join the group later in the summer when they begin to filter back into town ahead of training camp.

That Cootes is invited to join them, and has been skating with that group since he was 18, is bullish in and of itself. This is clearly a young man who’s already carrying himself like a professional, already skating in the summers with professionals, and who signed his entry-level contract almost immediately after the Canucks selected him in the first round of the 2025 draft because the new NIL-based college route didn’t particularly interest him. He wants to play professional hockey, and based on the weight he’s put on over the past 12 months, he looks ready to do that this fall.

For Cootes, more than anything, when he gets back to the NHL — and he played three games to open the regular season last year — he wants to approach it a bit differently. Understandably, after his stellar showing at Canucks training camp, Cootes felt like he was a bit awed in his cup of coffee in the NHL.

This time around, he wants to be a bit less respectful. A bit more assertive and confident about his ability to belong.

“I would say when I got to Prince Albert, after the World Juniors, I felt like I could’ve had a bit more confidence, even if I was playing in a more limited role (for Canada),” Cootes told The Athletic this week. “Towards the end of the year, though, I was watching guys like Matthew Schaefer, and he’s a great player with so much skill, but it’s also the mentality he has when he’s out there. He has so much swagger, he plays so fearless. When you can bring that sort of confidence, it’s like a superpower out there.

“You get to the NHL and you’re playing against guys you’ve been watching your whole life. They’re your idols. It’s kind of weird, because suddenly you’re opponents out there and they’re grown men, but you can’t let it be a thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re going against Ekholm or some kid in the Dub, you gotta try to act like it’s the same thing.”

The NCAA adjustment

There’s an increasing number of young players heading to the NCAA for their draft-plus-one or draft-plus-two season. Two of Vancouver’s top picks in 2026, Malhotra and Aaram-Olsen, will be heading to Boston University, where they’ll join fellow Canucks prospect Aiden Celebrini, a senior defender.

From what The Athletic could gather, Celebrini has already been telling them about the program and giving out recommendations on the best things to do at BU and in Boston. It’s a dynamic that’s already caused his future freshmen teammates to start referring to him, endearingly, as “Unc.”

The adjustment from the major junior level, or from European pro leagues, to the NCAA is a sharp one for most prospects. NCAA players are older, and now that the league is importing several hundred of the best young European and CHL-based junior players every year, Division I competition is tougher than it’s ever been.

A bunch of the top 2026 draft eligibles, for example, from Gavin McKenna to Tynan Lawrence to Oscar Hemming, struggled to produce last season when they first joined the NCAA as 17-year-olds. It was a similar story for a lot of CHL grads.

One Canucks prospect, however, made the transition seamlessly: Michigan State University forward Anthony Romani. Last season, Romani, 20, joined a loaded Michigan State Spartans team, which featured the likes of Porter Martone and Charlie Stramel, and immediately earned a spot as a productive top-six forward, producing 28 points in 37 games and boosting his prospect stock significantly in the process.

As you’d expect, a bunch of his fellow Canucks prospects at development camp sought out Romani over the course of this week, seeking out tips and tricks about how to succeed at the NCAA level.

“For sure,” Romani laughed when The Athletic inquired as to whether his fellow prospects were picking his brain on adjusting to the NCAA ranks. “Caleb was talking to me the other day just about how the adjustment was, just asking about different teams and the style of play and how college is.

“It’s definitely going to be a bit of an adjustment for those guys, but I’m sure a player like Caleb will probably transition pretty well. It just takes time. I think you just have to really buy into the different style of game that it is. It’s definitely a harder game, less time and space. I think it’s the perfect in-between hockey (between the junior level and the professional level).”

The stylistic differences between the NCAA and major junior are sharp. In particular, in major junior, the most dominant players can take long shifts and play a lot of east-west hockey. The NCAA game is more stress-based with a lot of dump and chase, and an emphasis on combining physicality with quick-strike offensive attacks to capitalize on mistakes.

“There’s a lot more bumps, like bumps away from the puck,” Romani said. “There’s not much time and space, and east-west plays are hard to make. It’s a lot of fast, give-and-go, puck-moving games, and you have to play fast …

“I think I took a little bit of time, kind of near the end of the second half, second half there, I kind of started to figure it out. Just finding the right spots on the ice. Making sure you’re dumping guys away from the puck. Just little things that can get you open in the O-zone, stuff to help scoring. But it’s definitely an adjustment.”