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Canucks Army Prospect Profile: #2 Olli Juolevi
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Jeremy Davis
Aug 31, 2016, 10:00 EDTUpdated:
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Eleven years after the Canucks drafted the dearly departed Luc Bourdon tenth overall at the 2005 NHL Entry Draft, they finally selected another defenceman in the first round. Enter Finnish blueliner Olli Juolevi, an offensive minded future power play quarterback lauded for his creativity, intelligence and ability to process the game.
Hopefully a fixture on Vancouver’s blue line for years to come, Juolevi debuts at #2 on our countdown of the top 20 Canucks prospects.
Whenever the Canucks have gone in search of new players or personnel, their list of requirements tend to have a few familiar features: character and leadership for example. But more than anything, the Canucks’ brass have an affinity for some variation on winning: a winning environment, players you win with, knowing how to win, winning at all levels – that sort of thing.
The are few players that had more experience with winning this season than Olli Juolevi. Whether wearing the Knights’ crest in London, or the Leijona of the Finnish national team, Juolevi finished all of his tournaments lifting a trophy over his head. As the only player this year to win both a Memorial Cup and a World Junior gold medal, Juolevi joins a small group of players that happens to include current Canucks president Trevor Linden (1988). He was just the 22nd player to achieve this feat, and the first ever European.
For a refresher on his style of play, here’s a quote from Curtis Joe of Elite Prospects:
A competitive spark-plug, Olli Juolevi is a complete, all-around defenceman who can hem the opposition in their own end or make things difficult for the opposition at home; either way, he puts the pressure on and lays it on thick. A strong and balanced skater, he can rush the puck through the neutral zone with ease or backcheck with haste. Uses his size to his advantage, but knows his physical limits and plays within them. Instead of playing overly physical, he makes his presence felt by exhibiting his high-end playmaking ability and puck possession play. All-in-all, a well-rounded blueliner who thrives under pressure and can be trusted in all situations.

As the highest Vancouver draft pick since the Sedins in 1999, and the highest Canucks defenceman selected since Bryan Allen the year previous, there will be plenty of expectations placed on Juolevi’s shoulders. There was a fair bit of handwringing in Vancouver following the pick, and whether the Canucks were correct in choosing Juolevi over teammate Matthew Tkachuk, or another defenceman, the Canucks are quite confident in the choice they made. They’ve slung plenty of praise on the young Finn over the past two months, and they aren’t alone in that regard: plenty of industry analysts have given glowing reports about Juolevi as well.
“I think he can be a number one [defenceman],” Shane Malloy of Hockey Prospect Radio told TSN 1040 shortly after the draft. “And the reason I think so is because of his hockey sense and his poise. That’s what separates that number two from the number one, is, not only the poise with the puck under duress, especially when you’re going back to retrieve it, but defensively. I don’t want to say he’s Nick Lidstrom, but he some tendencies of Lidstrom in terms of being very good at taking away time and space. That’s what Lidstrom was a master of, he used to drive people bananas because you just couldn’t do anything with him. It didn’t matter what speed, what angle, what you tried with him, he was just always in the way, and that tends to be what Juolevi does.”
In our Prospect Profile of Juolevi before the draft, I spoke of Juolevi’s greatest attribute – his hockey IQ:
Juolevi could have the highest eventual offensive upside of the [available defencemen], owing mostly to his high level hockey IQ, with an NHL scout calling him “one of the smartest players in the last few years”. He thinks the game exceptionally well and can often find solutions to problems before they even occur. His head has helped him not only on the ice, but off of it. According to Hockey Prospect’s Mark Edwards, “multiple teams raved about his combine interview being not just one of the best this year but over multiple years.”
Using the latest version of our Prospects Graduated Probabilities System, I’ve determined that 40.6 percent of Juolevi’s closest statistically comparable players carved out NHL careers. His list of successful matches includes a few impressive names, like Drew Doughty, Alex Pietrangelo and P.K. Subban, while Dennis Wideman, Zach Bogosian and former Canuck Lukas Krajicek also meet the threshold. His successful matches averaged about 32 points per season (era adjusted) over their careers. In his draft-minus-one season in Finland’s U20 league, Juolevi’s 32 points in 44 games granted him just one match: Aki-Petteri Berg, a former third overall pick of the Los Angeles Kings who, though he played over 600 NHL games, never consistently produced offense.
Juolevi’s roughly 40 percent chance of success is a little lower than what we’d hope for at fifth overall, a draft position that has saw 95% of players reach 200 NHL games between 1990 and 2009. Of course, it’s likely that pGPS is underselling Juolevi a bit, having not taken into account where he was projected to go in draft rankings. After all, Canucks Army alumni Cam Lawrence and Josh Weissbock have shown that combining scouting rankings with statistical measures have led to higher levels of predicting success (in an article that unfortunately no longer exists).
SEASON
TEAM
LEAGUE
GP
G
A
P
pGPS %
pGPS p82
pGPS R
2014-15
Jokerit U20
SM-Liiga Jr.A
44
6
26
32
100.0
13.3
16.23
2015-16
Finland U20
WJC U20
7
0
9
9
N/A*
2015-16
London Knights
OHL
57
9
33
42
40.6
32.2
15.93
*Indeterminate: no players above the standard similarity threshold.
That said, Juolevi’s projections are still lower than fellow top 20 defenceman Mikhail Sergachev (53.3 percent), Jake Bean (50.0 percent) and Jakub Chychrun (50.0 percent). Juolevi had fewer goals and points, and lower points per game and NHL equivalency values than each of these three other players. That his OHL production lags behind these peers, all of whom went later in the draft, is reminiscent of a discussion that surrounded Juolevi in the later part of the 2015-16 season: that much of his pedigree was the result of a fantastic World Junior tournament, as opposed to his OHL play. His OHL numbers have in fact been rather pedestrian for an NHL first round selection, and on the low side for a top-five pick.
The mystery of the two Juolevi’s has yet to be solved. In either situation, he was surrounded by world class players: Mitch Marner and Matthew Tkachuk in London, and Patrik Laine and Jesse Puljujarvi in Finland – all of which are top-six NHL selections. On each team he was the number one defenceman and received top power play time (although on London the offense mainly ran through Mitch Marner). A tournament all-star, Juolevi had nine points in seven games en route to WJC gold. At times in the OHL, he didn’t quite seem to measure up to the player he was in Helsinki, but late in the season he demonstrated that he has a tendency to rise to the occasion when the stakes are highest, scoring seven points in four games during the Memorial Cup tournament.

Even if you are to admit that his international prowess outweighed his CHL performance, it’s hardly surprising that the Canucks took such a shine to him. Based on Benning’s previous selections, it seems that the Canucks GM weights international performance heavily in his decision making. Previous picks like Dmitry Zhukenov, Lukas Jasek and Guillaume Brisebois are examples of players whose international play outshone pedestrian league-play numbers.
Juolevi jumps immediately to the top of a list of Vancouver defensive prospect pool that has become quite impressive over the past 18 months, with Jordan Subban, Tate Olson, Troy Stecher, Guillaume Brisebois, Carl Neill and Cole Candella elsewhere in the system and Ben Hutton, Nikita Tryamkin and Andrey Pedan stepping into NHL roles. It’s been an abrupt about-face for a group that has been an area of concern for the past half decade, and Olli Juolevi is the crown jewel of them all.

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