Welcome back to Top Shelf Prospects, the column that brings you the next crop of professional hockey players. Each day our LWOS Prospects Writers will bring you a new player profile or topical article in the lead-up to the 2024 NHL Entry Draft. Be sure to bookmark the site, follow Ben Kerr, and Frederik Frandsen on Twitter, and spread the word for the site that will bring you analytical and critical profiles and scouting reports! Last Word On Hockey Prospects is your new headquarters for everything “NHL Draft”! Today we bring you our Veeti Väisänen Scouting Report.
Veeti Väisänen 2024 NHL Draft Scouting Report
Defenceman — Shoots Left
Born June 15th, 2006 — Hamina, FIN
Height 6’0″ — Weight 187 lbs [184 cm / 85 kg]
Skating:
Like many aspects of Veeti Väisänen’s game, his skating is solid, but not amazing. It won’t blow anyone away, but it also won’t be a weakness for him. His speed is fairly average with decent top speed, but lacking acceleration. This partly comes from how stiff his strides are and how his balance isn’t perfect, meaning he has to compensate for his mechanics, which hurts the overall skating. When he gets it going, his edges are strong enough, and allows him to maneuver at an effective level of performance.
Off the puck, he has a lot of smart movement, which allows him to be able to get into the right areas to get involved in games. His transition game mostly comes from his maturity rather than skating, as he often uses a mix of patience and awareness to get away from pressure and slow the game down behind the net.
Offensive Game
Veeti Väisänen plays a very controlled and simple offensive game. It’s once again not going to blow anyone away, but as a defenceman, it doesn’t really need to. He is incredibly smart as a puck mover and makes simple but correct plays on the blue line. His vision and playmaking abilities are again strong for a defenceman. These skills allow him to make plays from the point that can open up the opposing defence.
His shot is also fairly good overall, as it comes off his blade with a ton of power. This combines with his ability to get pucks through traffic and ultimately, test the goalie. However, the accuracy in terms of hitting the net and not being straight in the stomach is missing. It’s often simply shots that lack a bit of a goalscoring instinct. He also plays things very safe and will back out even though he could have made a pinch to keep the zone. A conservative style of offence, that Väisänen would do well to change with a tweak towards the brave and creative.
Defensive Game
By far the best and most noticeable part of Veeti Väisänen is how he plays defence. It’s extremely mature, smart, and calculated. His body positioning is clean towards the puck carrier and his stick is active and disciplined. He always seems to force plays to the outside rather than get beat on the inside.
He also is quite solid when it comes to noticing a play developing and finding a way to get into a position to block lanes with his body or stick. It’s once again simple, calm, and calculated without any drama. Which as a defenceman, are all qualities that a lot of teams would love to have in their system.
Projection and Comparison on Veeti Väisänen’s Scouting Report
Veeti Väisänen will by no means be the most exciting pick of the draft. He is an incredibly safe and in some ways boring pick to make. The Finnish defender won’t score more than 20 points in a season or make a highlight real plays like some of the other prospects.
However, the value of picking Veeti Väisänen could be just as huge in the long run. Because what Väisänen offers in terms of potential is stability on the backend. He is the type of player who can play 20 minutes per game without anyone noticing, similar to a player like Erik Cernak. One you won’t see in the headlines, but one that helps the other team’s stars stay off the scoresheet. It will need some refinement and improvements, but Veeti Väisänen could become a steady and stable top-four defenceman in the NHL.
Main photo: Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports
