Vancouver Canucks prospect Nils Höglander continues his great start to the season with two more assists in second SHL game

The Canucks’ prospects are getting more and more ice time and Nils Höglander is taking advantage of every second he’s given.

Höglander played in his second game of the SHL regular season on Saturday. He was slotted in to play on the top line and received powerplay time on the second unit as well.

He has been gaining the trust of his coaching staff over the past three seasons and this year we are finally seeing an outburst of points to match his effort level.

Höglander’s team, Rögle BK, won their game on Saturday by a count of 3-2. Rögle gave up the game-tying goal with just under two minutes remaining in the game. Immediately after the tying goal, Höglander went to work and dug a puck out of the corner to set up the game-winning goal.

This was Höglander’s second assist of the game. He has been excellent with the puck on his stick this season and now through 10 games of preseason and regular season action he is clicking at over a point per game. He now has four assists in only two regular season games.

Though he was not killing penalties today, he was very active in the defensive zone as he usually is. Höglander battled on the boards all game long and was rewarded for his efforts as both assists came from him gaining possession of the puck on the boards.

Here’s a look at his first assists of the game.

His first assist was exactly that, he worked to gain the possession of the puck before finding an open teammate who set up the goal.

It’s a perfect example of why secondary assists are still relevant. Many will say that secondary assists mean less than primary ones — and most of the time they are right — but this goal does not happen without Höglander working to get the puck and make a good pass to his teammate.

Remember this goal when people start to say that Höglander gets too many secondary assists.

He ended finishing the game with two assists, one shot on net and 15:05 of ice time. He was a regular on the first line and would have probably had even more ice time if his team didn’t take 18 penalty minutes today. 10 of those minutes were from a misconduct but the team still took four minor penalties on top of that.

Certain games are seeing their scheduled dates be changed but for now, Höglander’s next SHL game will be on Thursday, October 1st against Elias Pettersson’s former squad Växjö.

The SHL currently had a capacity for fans in attendance that is set at 50 patrons. This is changing in the month of October from 50 to 500, though some SHL teams are not making the change to have more fans in attendance due to COVID-19 concerns.

We will continue to follow Höglander’s season as he is off to an excellent start.

Bonus: I spoke with Nils Höglander on this past Wednesday’s episode of Canucks Conversation if you are interested in listening to what he had to say.