I agree with you - Scheif was a lightweight - I stated that - but his skating technique was fine. Coming up through Jr and as a pro, he has always been a decent skater - his problem was strength. He was getting knocked down or off the puck very easily - please don't blame his skating on this shortfall.
At the end of the day, my point is - you don't need to be a thick kid to skate.
Laine's may need to work on his strength to hopefully improve his skating - I'm with you on this point and I honestly hope that is what he needs. But, personally, I feel he also needs to learn how to skate in addition to adding some leg muscle.
At this point in his career, as a player who has been compared to some of the best and who is preparing to make a ton of money, he is not a very good skater - that's all I'm saying.
I'm sure the Jets recognize this and will be pushing him to improve is skating technique, edge work, etc.
It's all good.
Now I’ll admit that we are maybe not having very different opinions on this after all. Well, to me Scheifele looked like a pretty average skater when he was 19, so there we might still disagree, if you think he was a really good skater already then. And I’m not just talking about him falling around easily, but also about his pretty average first steps and top speed at those times. But through the years he has become a completely different player with his strength, skating and stamina. Now I can easily say that he is an excellent skater. One of the best skating bigger guys in the whole league in fact.
With Laine’s skating I do definitely agree that to be really as good as he is expected to be, he needs to clearly get his first steps better. And sure he can most probably benefit still clearly from some technical skating exercising too. But I do trust the evaluation that Laine and his trainer Rautala made last season, that until Laine has gained (hopefully as soon as possible) enough of explosive strength to have a good enough of basis for the more technical skating training, he will maximize the training time to gaining the explosive strength and stamina as quickly as possible. The problem has been though also that he has very much needed more strength to his core also, to be better at board battles, but that is also essential for giving a good enough foundation for the better skating.
Now as he was training mostly both his leg muscles and core, it meant that last summer he gained in fact more weight than what the improved leg muscles were yet prepared to accelerate. This especially is natural because his body needs anyway some time to get used to the body mass and the bigger muscles. Especially the nerval system needs to accomodate to the changes of the body. Skating skill training is not really optimal at the time when very hard muscle training is happening and so much changes are happening to the body.
I’m still sure he will start doing also technical training with his skating, but it will start happening only when they think it is optimal with the muscle and stamina training. I’m also sure that their plan has been gone through with the Jets management and they have given their blessing for what they are doing with Laine’s training. He is that great an asset for the Jets that I find it practically impossible that this wouldnt be the case really.
Even though I think he can still at some point benefit by some amount from some technical skating training, i honestly dont still believe that he will get a huge difference from it. I dont see his skating technique as bad at all, he has show’n that he can turn well and keep his speed well then, and he has done some really surprisingly sharp turns for his size pretty effortlessly.
But stop and go play is definitely deadly for him at the moment. He can really look slow and clumsy when he needs to play in that way almost constantly in the NHL. It is because his muscles are still so weak that they can’t give him too quick acceleration and when he has such big body mass, he gets also exhausted which just makes the contrast look even bigger with his acceleration compared to smaller and quicker players.
I do truly believe that when Laine gets his explosive leg strength and stamina to the better level, he should become the player he has been expected to become, and that can be seriously something amazing, if he can get his skating to the level that Barkov for example has. It shouldn’t definitely be at least impossible, as Barkov was definitely a worse skater than Laine as a 19 year old, but nowadays he is already a pretty good skater. But it took him 3-4 years of really hard training to get there. No use to think that it should be much quicker for Laine to get there either.
