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The 5-foot-7, 153-pound right-shot winger has a fan in TSN’s Craig Button, who wrote on X last year: “Skilled, dynamic & electrifying player. One of the top players for the 2025 NHL draft.”
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Published Sep 01, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 5 minute read
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Cameron Schmidt became just the seventh WHL player in the past 30 years to score 30 goals in his 16-year-old season. Photo by Robert J WILTON
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Vancouver Giants sniper Cameron Schmidt will be yet another case study this season in how NHL teams feel about smaller players.
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The common narrative has been that clubs are more open now to relying on highly skilled, diminutive types, and there have been various success stories the past few seasons. Cole Caufield (5-foot-8, 175 pounds), Logan Stankoven (5-foot-8, 171 pounds) and Alex DeBrincat (5-foot-8, 180 pounds) are among those who come to mind.
There’s also an argument that Stankoven, for example, should have been a top 15 pick in the 2021 NHL Draft, where he instead went No. 47 overall to the Dallas Stars. And there’s the fact that there were a mere 10 players taken in June’s seven-round, 225-pick draft who were 5-foot-10 or shorter, according to the NHL records website. That is down from 30 players of that stature in 2023 and 45 in 2022.
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We’ll get a better idea of whether this past draft was a one-off in that regard or a trend with how the next draft plays out next summer. Schmidt is eligible for the first time. He’s 5-foot-7 and 153 pounds. The right-shot winger from Prince George is coming off playing first-line minutes and scoring three times in five games last month with Team Canada at the Under-18 Hlinka Gretzky Cup in Edmonton.
Last season with the Giants, Schmidt became just the seventh WHL player in the past 30 years to score 30 goals in his 16-year-old season. He wound up with 31 goals and 58 points in 59 games.
The first five players in that 30-goal group all went on to become first-round NHL draft picks, while Medicine Hat Tigers winger Gavin McKenna, who beat Schmidt to the celebrated mark by a couple of weeks last season, is being pegged as a possible first-overall selection in 2026.
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This Giants opened training camp last week at the Langley Events Centre. They’ll play their first of four pre-season games on Saturday (7 p.m.) against the Victoria Royals at Port Coquitlam’s Jon Baillie Arena, and they’ll open the WHL regular season on Sept. 20 at the Langley Events Centre against the Seattle Thunderbirds.
NHL Central Scouting generally puts out its players to watch list in late October. That will be one of the first major gauges for where pro teams see Schmidt in this draft class.
For what it’s worth, Seattle Kraken winger Kailer Yamamoto was the lightest player in the NHL last season, coming in at 153 pounds on his 5-foot-8 frame. And he was a 2017 first-round pick of the Edmonton Oilers, who took him at No. 22.
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“Size is something that I can’t control,” Schmidt, 17, said during a break in action this weekend at the LEC. “I just have to go out there and play my game. We’ve seen Stankoven and other guys doing well at that level and it’s showing me a road I can take.”
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Skating is Schmidt’s big ticket. He rockets around the ice. There were Schmidt shifts last season that felt so much like Olympic 100-metre races that they should have begun with a starter’s pistol and ended with finish-line tape.
Leagues don’t keep track of breakaway chances, but Schmidt must have led the WHL in that category. There were nights he was getting two or three of them.
Despite his size, he doesn’t shy away from high-traffic areas, with Schmidt explaining that, “I’ve always got my head up, I always know who’s around me.”
And while defence will be the default question mark for someone his build and with his offensive aptitude, it did feel like his all-around game improved as last season wore on. It felt like he was gaining the trust of coach Manny Viveiros.
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“You see his speed right away but then you watch the little stuff in a game and you realize that he can do almost anything,” Vancouver defenceman Mazden Leslie said.
TSN analyst Craig Button has been hyping up Schmidt since last season. After Schmidt bagged his 30th goal, Button wrote on X: “If you have not seen Cameron Schmidt play, buckle up. Skilled, dynamic & electrifying player. One of the top players for the 2025 NHL draft.”
In a story on the TSN website before the Hlinka Gretzky, Button was quoted as saying this about Schmidt: “He’s a player for me, when he gets the puck in open ice, it’s lights out. He’s a competitor. He’s in the mix. He’s not a player that needs the game to be set up a certain way. He knows how to take his attributes and impact the game.”
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Schmidt says he doesn’t have any personal stats goals for this season. For what it’s worth, Gilbert Brule had the previous Giants’ record for goals by a 16-year-old with 25 in 2003-04, and he went for 39 goals and 87 points the following season. Evander Kane bagged 24 goals as a 16-year-old with Vancouver in 2007-08 and then counted 48 goals and 96 points the following campaign.
“I go into a season and just try to play my game. I know I have things to work on,” Schmidt said. “This will be an exciting year. It’s my draft year. It’s in the back of my head, but it’s also something that I’ve been working toward.”
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The Giants, as a team, are working toward taking a step forward after finishing in the sixth spot in the Western Conference at 32-32-4-0 and losing in the first round of the playoffs to the Everett Silvertips last season.
Both Leslie and Schmidt talked about how the focus is to become a more difficult team to face. There were stretches last season where the Giants were too loose in their own zone, and left either Brett Mirwald or Matthew Hutchison in the Vancouver net to their own devices. Vancouver was outshot by their opponent 49 times last season, which was a league high.
“We need to be harder as a team. We can’t let it be easy in any area of the ice,” said Leslie. “That’s something Everett really did to us. We’ve seen firsthand how you win. We know what we have to do.”
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Schmidt added: “We’ve set a different standard this year. We want to be harder to play against.”
SEwen@postmedia.com
@SteveEwen
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Courtesy : https://theprovince.com/sports/vancouver-giants-cameron-schmidt-nhl-draft-year