Okay well, in Koivula's case I'm kind of out of in the woods as of this moment. There was plenty of talk about his skill-set, mainly with his hands and scoring potential in the long run and of course because he was in the same summer training camp as Laine, Ristolainen, Rantanen etc, ran by the best development trainer in the country. I had high hopes for him going into the 2018 WJC as a 19 year old where he was playing in a top six role but he failed with the rest of the team. Then again, as said the whole team failed, but what can you expect when it's ran by an imbecile (the same coach that let Hepoeniemi double-shift whenever he wanted and rob off large proportions of Kakko ice time this year). Yeah they won gold this time around but not getting past the QF was just a minute away also. So what turned out to be the gold medal might have just as well been a quick exist out of which Ahokas (the head coach) is already very accustomed to.
Anyway skating has always been Otto's worst weakness. Since I haven't really kept a tag on him ever since moving across the Atlantic and playing in the AHL, I cannot really determine if he has been able to improve that aspect a lot. At least based on that clip, he seems to be able to keep up the pace with the glide so who knows, maybe he just needs time to sort out the technique. The bigger kids tend to need their own time to really find their game, pace and build up the physical core and Koivula is no exception to the rule. I'm hoping he could turn into something that we're talking heck of a lot about in the coming years but as of this moment unfortunately that's really everything I can provide to this particular discussion. I never thought he'd switch to playing C so that's a nice and positive surprise.