7.

A word I’ve heard a lot over the past three weeks has been ‘responsibility’. Coming into this season, given how last year went, and the amount of integral changes general manager Tom Fitzgerald made this summer, there’s a big sense of responsibility among the players to do right by their general manager and the work he has put in. And it’s not just from the returning players, it’s from those who he brought in to make the difference. They, too, feel that responsibility.

“He’s pushing, he wants to win. Fitzy wants to win,” Jacob Markstrom shared. “I feel like everybody wants the same thing, it’s just how we get there. And I think he, as a GM, has done everything in his power to make sure that’s possible. You’ve got to see that and take responsibility and you’ve got to come together as a group and show your appreciation. It’s not easy.

“You can say a lot of things in life, right?,” newcomer Brenden Dillon added. “Or you can say that you want to get in shape, you can say that you want to eat healthier, you can say that you want to work hard. But until you actually go do it, like, it’s pretty easy to say it. So I think for Fitzy, and of course, I’m just getting to know him, but he’s walked the walk that he said he’s going to do. And I think for all of us as players, when someone shows belief in you and whether they show confidence in you, all the different things like you want to follow through with that.”

8.

I loved Dillon’s hypothetical team when he was summing up Fitzgerald’s off-season pretty well: acquiring assets to make his team better. It was a well-rounded search, and Dillon joins a team now that has a true sense of everything.

“For our group, we know what our identity has been, and there’s a strength of us, and I think we want to continue to have that, but also add to that. For the guys who were brought in, you know, hockey teams need all different types of personalities, they also need different types of skill levels and all different types of just hockey players. You need a mixed bag. If you can have… I’d like to think they’d be good .. but if you have twenty Connor McDavids, it’s like you know, they’ll be good but sometimes you do need a little bit of everything.”

9.

This summer, Jonas Siegenthaler hosted his first hockey camp in Thailand. Siegenthaler is of Thai descent, his mom is Thai, and in fact, his parents recently relocated to live full-time in Thailand. I spoke with Siegenthaler about what the experience was like.

“They’re, they’re really proud of me. I’m the first Thai NHL player,” he said. “I don’t know when the next one is going to be, maybe 10 years? 20 years? The young kids there, they’re pretty good right now and they’re really good skill-wise, skating-wise. They’re actually, I would say better than kids in Switzerland. But their problem is they don’t have any games. That’s their main problem. They practice all week, skills. They don’t understand the game part as well. That’s the part that kind of stops them from developing to the next level.”

Siegenthaler said there are roughly only 600 registered hockey players in Thailand with roughly four junior teams. He’s hoping to find a way over the next few years to continue his camp and help the game grow to better heights but does say it’s ‘a difficult problem to solve’.

He shared this great story about a Q&A he had with the kids at the camp that really touched him.

“Some questions were so cute. It was this one little girl, she was sitting next to me in the locker room and she goes ‘Coach Siegs, one day I want to play in the NHL like you’. I was almost crying, you know it was just so, so nice.”

10.

The time has come for Seamus Casey to make his NHL debut. Head coach Sheldon Keefe confirmed it Thursday morning in Prague. The 20-year-old has done everything that’s been asked of him during this camp and has made his case; heard loud and clear.

And what a way to enter the NHL — on the Global Series stage in Prague. Casey will be just the 5th rookie to make their NHL debut at one of these international games since it was rebranded at the Global Series games in 2010. Overall, 36 players in NHL history have made their NHL debut outside of North America, but since the rebranding, Casey will become just the 5th.