Gabriel Eliasson is sitting in the Buffalo Marriott at LECOM Harborcenter, trying to explain one of the three penalties he has taken in his first two games as an Ottawa Senator.
“I was boxing out a guy and my stick was broken and I got a penalty for that. That, in my opinion, is some bull—-,” he says, fidgeting with a water bottle.
It’s 4 p.m. on the second day of his first NHL rookie tournament. Down the hall and through a pair of doors, his teammates mingle on the concourse of the Sabres’ practice rink to catch the final game of the day. After a second straight loss to start the tournament, they’ve hopped into track suits. Eliasson has put his suit back on. “It’s the only clothes I have,” he says.
Eliasson, drafted in the second round of the 2024 NHL Draft by the Senators, is the most feared prospect in hockey.
Last season, in 36 games at Sweden’s J20 level, he had just six points to his league-leading 103 penalty minutes (11 more than the nearest player). In 22 games with Sweden’s U18 team across multiple competitions, he had another 77 penalty minutes, including a penalty in every single game at U18 worlds except the bronze medal one. In that tournament, he took multiple minors against Switzerland, Kazakhstan and Czechia and was frequently benched, playing under 10 minutes against Switzerland, Sweden and Canada. In another game at the February Five Nations tournament, he took 27 penalty minutes against Team USA.
The penalty in question this time was the second of his Sens debut, his stick breaking on a cross-check in front of the net midway through the third period. He took his first penalty, for roughing, within his first period. The cross-check wasn’t his first cross-check of the game, either. He delivered that to the back of Devils forward Chase Stillman after the whistle on his very first shift and had been mixing one in during or after just about every shift that followed.
He took a third penalty late in the second period of his second game, riding a player rounding the net into the boards for an interference call. The Penguins scored on the ensuing power play to break a 2-2 tie and take a 3-2 lead into the second intermission. He’d take his fourth penalty of the tournament a couple of days later, that one offsetting for roughing.
Asked about his penchant for spending time in the box, he sits up tall and shakes his head.
“Some think that I’m very aggressive and I can’t handle it,” he says, acutely aware of his reputation, “but it’s not like that. Some penalties are just bad penalties, of course, but some of them are not. I think I can switch it. When I go off the ice, I’m just a good guy. I’d never fight in the street or something like that. That’s not me. But on the ice I’m never scared when I go out.”
He realized early in his career that he needed to lean into his menacing body and identity instead of away from it.
“I love it,” he says of his mean style. “I really do. And you cannot be physical if you just say one day, ‘I’m going to be physical.’ The main reason that I play so physical is because I’m competitive. Like I hate to lose. Not even lose the whistles or the games, I hate to lose battles. I want to win everything.”
Some of who he is on the ice is just a byproduct of his 6-7, 206-pound frame (he got that from his dad, who is 6-4).
But a lot of it has to do with where he’s come from. The chip on his shoulder has been years in the making, the critics and the snubs piling up. All the way up, he was heavily criticized in Sweden because he wasn’t the typical Swedish defenseman.
“He’s just so different than everybody else there,” said his agent, Quartexx’s Randy Edmonds, who has been a coach and general manager in Sweden.
He grew up playing his youth hockey for Hanhals, a small club in a suburb of Gothenburg. Typically, the top U16 players interview with several clubs in advance of their first year of junior at the J18 level. By proximity, Frölunda should have been his club. They didn’t even interview him, telling him he wasn’t a “Frölunda-type player.”
When the provincial teams were made for TV-pucken, Sweden’s big under-16 tournament, his province didn’t even invite him to the tryout.
“I didn’t even get a chance,” Eliasson said of TV-pucken. “So they just didn’t want me. And then they didn’t want me in Frölunda.”
After the Frölunda snub came questions from other clubs: “Well, what’s the deal with Eliasson then if he’s 25 minutes away and they don’t want him?”
Eventually, he landed with HV71, but he was one of the last picks to go there, too.
He says going to HV71, and missing out on TV-pucken and Frölunda, were the best things to ever happen to him because they motivated him to “train so hard every single day in my U16 year, like an underdog.”
In his first fall at HV71, he looked raw and staff could tell he’d come from a small club, not used to working out every day and being on the ice twice a day.
But living on his own in an apartment in the middle of the pandemic, Eliasson, then 16, taught himself how to cook and started a routine where ahead of 7:30 a.m. practices he’d catch the bus to be at the rink for 6:30 a.m. to work in HV71’s “skills corner,” filming himself practicing his stickhandling and shooting.
Still, before Christmas in his first year with HV71’s J18 team in 2022-23, he had the fifth-most ice time on the team and was playing on its third pairing. He never played for the national team that year either, only ever getting told he was a reserve.
Throughout, his self-confidence never wavered and he never lost his enthusiasm, constantly telling himself, “I can take the next step.”
“I don’t think I would ever say ‘I can’t play there’ or ‘I can’t do that.’ I’m a hard-working guy and I have belief in myself,” Eliasson said.
After Christmas, he took off, his execution of simple plays coming around. At the end of that first season, HV71 extended him an invitation to try out for their J20 team and the Swedish national team did the same for their 40-man camp for the Hlinka Gretzky Cup.
When the door opened a crack for both, he slammed through it. Where both teams had a lot of defenseman who could move pucks, they didn’t have anyone like Eliasson.
It took a while for Gabriel Eliasson to get a chance with the Tre Kronor, but once the door opened a crack he burst through it. (Steven Ellis / Daily Faceoff)
Heading into Sweden’s camp, Edmonds guesses there were 8-10 defensemen in the country who were better than him. But he really enjoyed the role of clearing the net, killing penalties, blocking shots and being physical. Over the course of camp, comments of “wow, who’s this kid?” turned into “Oh my God, what a kid, such a great teammate, keeps the room light.”
From that moment on, away he went, making the J20 team and the national team for the first time — and just in the nick of time in both cases as he entered his NHL draft year.
After the Hlinka, NHL clubs started calling and never stopped. By midseason, he ranked 21st on NHL Central Scouting’s list of European skaters for the 2024 draft. Though he fell to 29th on their final list, he’d become a source of fascination for NHL scouts. Beyond the hulking size and disposition, he was also one of the youngest players in the class because of his September birthday. And he could skate.
“There were a lot of people writing before the draft that his skating has to improve, but every NHL scout I’ve talked to, they all rave that he’s a big guy but he skates really, really well,” Edmonds said.
At the combine, he interviewed with 29 teams and did well in his interviews and the testing, finishing top-10 in left and right grip strength as well as second in the VO2 Max. On the eve of the draft, one team called Edmonds and his boss Darren Ferris to set up another interview with him. They thought he might even go late in the first round.
“Holy jumpin’, who would have thought that a year ago?” Edmonds remembers thinking that night.
When he didn’t go in the first round, they thought the Sharks, who’d been really interested in him, might take him with the first pick of the second round. Then the Senators selected him at No. 39 a few picks later.
New general manager Steve Staios was among those impressed by him during the interview process.
“You meet the young man and he’s extremely polite and bright and soft-spoken off the ice,” Staios told The Athletic on a recent phone call, pausing to laugh. “But not on the ice.”
In watching him, Staois and his staff also felt “you need players like (Eliasson) to win.”
“The competitiveness of this young man is really off the charts and he comes by it honestly. And as we continued to watch him progress, he’s a big man that’s highly competitive and he skates well for his size. Like all prospects, there are other areas of his game that need to round out but I think you find it harder and harder as years go on to find this type of player,” Staois said.
In that way, there are some similarities between Eliasson and another defenseman Staios had during his time as general manager of the Hamilton Bulldogs: Arber Xhekaj.
“They’re both fierce competitors. And the same as Arber, Gabriel will have to fine-tune his game,” Staios said. “And Arbs put in the work. And when you find a character like Gabriel, and a person like him, and his passion for the game, you know that he’s going to maximize his potential. He’s a great teammate as well. So those are the qualities that really drew us to him.”
One of those areas that needs to round out, the Senators know, is his discipline.
“He’s definitely got that cross-check down pat,” Senators rookie tournament coach David Bell said with a chuckle. “(But) it’s definitely a learning curve. I mean, you can’t take the penalties that he took in that first game but like they’d say, ‘You’d rather try to put the fire out than start one.’ So that’s what I like about him. But I mean, the smaller ice, he’s going to get engaged more often than he did over there so it’s going to be an adjustment for him. But I think at 6-foot-7, to learn to use his reach as opposed to his cross-check, to use his leverage, and pin guys more, and use his stick to make himself bigger. He does a lot of damage when it’s on the ice but it needs to be on the ice a little more.”
They’re confident he’ll find the balance in time, though.
“He loves to work, he’s a great kid, he’s got a great attitude, and I’m not worried. First year, big guy like that coming over here, his ceiling’s really, really high,” Bell said. “Probably my biggest takeaway is how much he loves the hockey and how much he has adapted to North America, his mannerisms on the bench, his mannerisms off the ice, he fits right in.”
Staios says it’ll all come with experience.
“The offensive players need to learn how to use their teammates a little bit better and play in traffic and those types of things, and it’s no different than Gabriel’s game and having to adjust to how far he can push the physicality and the time and place to do it,” Staios said. “And that comes with maturity, it comes with making mistakes. I’m sure there’s going to be times where he gets a little overzealous and it doesn’t benefit the team, and those are the learning moments.”
Staios also believes he’ll benefit from the move to North America this season as well.
“Some leagues and some areas there’s a different style and I do think that for other players who grew up in North America that maybe going to Sweden could fit their style better than here. But in Gabriel’s case, coming here to develop his game on the smaller ice and in the style of play is going to be good for his development and we hope it expedites his development,” Staois said.
Initially, he was committed to play for the University of Michigan and the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders selected him with the second pick of the USHL Entry Draft. But after the Niagara IceDogs took him with the 12th pick in the CHL Import Draft, an opportunity to play for the contending Barrie Colts — who officially acquired him from the IceDogs for a 2028 third-round pick and 2027 15th-rounder on Wednesday morning — opened up and the fit made a lot of sense. For starters, playing in the OHL would allow him to be closer to the Senators and their staff, as well as Quartexx’s development people in Toronto. Barrie is also along the corridor to North Bay, where Edmonds lives when he’s in Canada.
After a strong summer of training and time spent with Sweden’s U20 team in Plymouth and Switzerland, as well as in Toronto for a camp with Quartexx and Ottawa before and after the rookie tournament while he awaited a trade (he decided not to attend Niagara’s camp, knowing the move was coming), Eliasson decided to accelerate his timeline with the hopes he could sign a contract with the Sens this year.
He also lengthened his stick, which was 3.5 inches too short last season. Staff with HV71 had encouraged him to change but he’d refused to, not wanting to mess with it in season.
Eliasson knows there’s still a long way to go, too. He knows his puck skills need to develop. He knows he’s still growing into his body.
But motivation has never been his problem. He has always put in the work. That, more than anything else, is what has always stood out to Edmonds about him.
“He’s a guy who is 100 percent or zero and he doesn’t know how to turn it off,” Edmonds said. “I don’t know if I’ve met a Swede in 30 years that just had that confidence and willingness to get better.”
He taught himself how to juggle when he was younger to work on his coordination. He plays a lot of tennis in the summer to work on his footwork.
“A lot of big players that are 6-foot-7 are really bad skaters but I’ve worked really hard for my skating and my mobility and getting fast,” Eliasson said.
He has worked the last three years with three-time Stanley Cup champion Niklas Hjalmarsson, one of the people who has really believed in him.
“You’re similar to me when I was your age. I wasn’t a star, I was a defensive defenseman,” Hjalmarsson has told him.
But he’s always going to be himself along the way.
“I got a lot of critiques last season about my play but I’m just doing my way,” Eliasson said. “Of course I don’t want to make anything bad for my team but I always go my style, and now I’m going to move to North America and play like this and we’ll see what’s going to happen. I think it’s going to be a very positive thing when I play this hockey over here.”
— With reporting in Buffalo.
(Photos: Steven Ellis / Daily Faceoff)
