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*roastpuff* · 01-22-2020, 02:08 AM

World Junior Championship Whirlwind - Team Sweden Training Camp with Magnus Liljeström
Special Blog Feature from Superprospects

1078 words - Ready for Grading

Hej! My name is Magnus Liljeström and I've been asked to write a short blog feature for the Detroit Falcons and Team Sweden for the World Junior Championships training camp by Jan Parker Peters from Superprospects... apparently a lot of people want me to do something to increase my media exposure. I guess that's good that a lot of people want to know what I am doing and how I am doing. By the way you can follow me as well on my Twitter @MagnusLiljestr1 (https://twitter.com/MagnusLiljestr1) to see more day-to-day stuff!

Day 1:
It feels good to be able to speak Swedish once more! Not that I was having trouble communicating or anything, but it’s a sound that I have been used to since I was born, you know? Also, some of the other players brought in some knackebrot and saltlakrits - you do NOT know how much I have been missing those here in North America. Sure, I can go to IKEA and get myself some Daim bars, but the real stuff is so much better. Apparently my mama tried to send over some sillsalad and lutefisk through the mail but those packages got rejected by the US customs service, which is silly. Now I have to snoop around and see if anyone brought any canned surströmming along…

Day 2:
I’ve been paired with Noah Nystrom for my defensive assignment! Oh my goodness… this is so exciting! He’s definitely someone that I can look up to as a role model. Another two-way defenceman who had a super rookie season, with lots of hits and blocks contributing defensively for his team! That’s definitely what I want to be like in the future. We are on the third pairing, because there’s a lot of very experienced people in this team! Ahead of us is the pairing of Yxskaft-Bergstrom, and ahead of them is Ibrahimovic Jr.-Ohlsson! It’s so cool being on the same ice with these guys. I watched them before when I wasn’t qualified for the WJC yet, and they were impressive. It’s even more impressive when you’re watching them from the bench! The passes are so crisp and so good, and they’re so creative with the puck! Definitely taking notes down. Nystrom is also really really good, and even though we’re on the third pairing I think we are still going to face a lot of tough opposition from the other teams, especially DACH, UCORCAL, Canada and USA. They have so much talent that even the third and fourth lines that we’ll be facing will be formidable...

Day 3:
So many drills! I don’t know how Coach thinks these things up but by the end of the day I’m pretty tired! Sven [Svenson] looks pretty gassed as well, I guess the both of us need to work on our conditioning a bit more. Yompy [Stearf] looks pretty good though, so maybe he’s been sneaking in a little more cardio than us. Today was a pretty physical day. We did a lot of puck protection and retrieval drills along the walls, and some of these guys are pretty big for “world juniors!” I blocked a shot from Jake Primeau, and that hurt a lot - it got me right between the shot blocker and the skate, and my foot went numb for a bit. Jake came over to apologize - that was really nice of him - but he told me that he pulled that shot as well! Oh man, I would not want to block a full-force shot from him then, but most likely the other teams have people who can shoot as well as he does. This tournament might hurt more than I thought at first. Yikes!

Day 4:
We get a bit of a break today, as it is a video review day. We get to have the mistakes we made during the first few days of camp thrown back in our faces, yay! My turn in the barrel came when one of the two-on-one drills that I did went up on the screen. It was Karl [Krashwagen] coming in with Henrik Osterman… and they completely fooled me. Blew past me like I wasn’t even there. A two-on-one drill became a two-on-zero drill. Coach was pretty mad at me, I have to say. I did better the next time I was told to do the drill, but having it shown on video to the whole team is pretty embarrassing. I did get some praise for being in position for the next few times the drill was done, and forcing the shooter to shoot at Thorstrom and Kavanagh instead of passing.

We also reviewed some video from previous years on the other teams. Oh man! There are some scary good players out there. I’m getting pretty worried, I have to say. This is a kind of pressure that I have not felt before, playing on such a big stage. The world is watching!

Day 5:
Last day of camp! A bit bittersweet, I think. I have made better friends with the players that came to the camp, and met some of the players that I looked up to before I was drafted. It was pretty cool, we had some senior Swedish players drop by to say hello as well. Meeting Ola Wagstrom and Hippo Passamus was so cool, they did really well in the recent IIHF tournament that we had! Team Sweden went way further than I thought we would.

We had a full team scrimmage today, and I feel like I did pretty good! I made some good passes to Niklas [Fuhrberg] and Viktor [Erlingsson], one of them even turned into a goal! I managed to crunch Sven a couple of times, but he didn’t give up, and gave me a good shot in the back too.

I don’t know if I’m truly ready to face the best that the rest of the world has to throw at us, but I definitely feel like this camp did well to prepare us as a team, and to make us closer to each other. I think that will give us a reason to fight, and to play better than before - if not for our country then for our friends on this team.

Thank you for following along with me during this busy time, and I hope I wasn’t rambling too much! Adjö!

***golden_apricot*** · 01-22-2020, 06:08 AM

Hey @roastpuff great article but unfortunately as a member of the S53 class you are not eligible for this RBM. There will be three of these for your class starting in the coming weeks so you will not miss out.

*roastpuff* · 01-22-2020, 10:54 AM

Well, derp on my point. I'll leave it anyways

***golden_apricot*** · 01-22-2020, 11:03 AM

01-22-2020, 10:54 AMroastpuff Wrote: Well, derp on my point. I'll leave it anyways

I can fix the header and stuff for you. Sorry for the confusion i get where it comes from my dude. That said keep posting good stuff, this is the whole reason we started the RBM is the get articles like this in the media section. A lot of us enjoy reading media.

StamkosFan · 01-22-2020, 12:34 PM

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