Hockeysverige’s editor in chief Uffe Bodin interviewed Landeskog on video a few days ago. A translation of the interview is found below. 

About being the youngest captain for a struggling team:

”I learned a lot about myself and the team, and about leadership. When things are so up and down, it’s not easy to know how to deal with them as a captain. There were a lot of team meetings. A lot to learn about how to act like a captain, what to say and how to deal with some situations.  How to deal with the coach and how to be the go-between between the coach and the team. That is something you learn with time and I think I made a lot of progress in that regard in just 3-4 months time. I’m already looking forward to next year and hopefully I will learn just as much next year.”

”It felt good to get him back, and by the time he got back, we had won as many games as we had lost. We had put ourselves in a decent situation by the time he got back. I don’t think the O’Reilly situation affected us as much as the fact that we were so much up and down during the season. That was the thing that made it a rough season.”

Photo: Michael Martin (nhl.com)

Photo Credit: MPC Stjärngolf

Marcus has practiced on ice with his former SEL team Färjestad two times a week in the time leading up to his departure for Washington. But he has put in more time at the gym this summer than on the ice.

“I haven’t spent that much time on the ice yet. I have focused more on the off ice training this summer. I think that is what I need the most right now.”

“I’m leaving for Washington on Monday [September 3], and our training camp starts on September 21,” Marcus Johansson told the Swedish paper nwt.se in an interview posted on the paper’s website earlier today.

Marcus Johansson on Färjestad’s bench during practice. Photo: Erik Granqvist

Last summer Marcus trained with Ulf Karlsson, the former coach of the Swedish track and field team.
This year Marcus has been working out with the former head athletic trainer for Färjestad, Jonas Asplund. Ulf Karlsson was the former head athletic trainer for Färjestad before Asplund. Just like Ulf Karlsson, Asplund has a background in track and field, both as an athlete and as a trainer. He worked for Färjestad back when Marcus played there. I think they go back as far as Marcus’s time as a teenager on Färjestad’s junior teams, so they are very familiar with each other.

Marcus has been training with the promising Minnesota Wild D prospect Jonas Brodin. Brodin was selected tenth in the 2011 draft, and he is moving to Minnesota to try to make the team this year.

Even though Marcus improved his points total from 27 in his rookie year to 46 in his sophomore season, he still thinks he can perform better.

“Sure, things have been going good for me, but I don’t think that I have outperformed expectations. I have very high expectations for myself. My big goal this year is to go all the way with Washington. I believe we have a team that is good enough to win the Stanley Cup. We were good enough to win it all last season too, but we had some bad bounces in the playoffs,” Johansson said to nwt.se.

Marcus had only good things to say about the additions George McPhee has made to the team over the last couple of months.

“We have added some really good new pieces like Mike Ribiero from the Dallas Stars. I’m also really excited about our new assistant coach Calle Johansson. Calle is very highly regarded in Washington, and Washington is the team that is closest to his heart.”

In an interview with Swedish paper Värmlands Dagblad last week before the Swedish Elite League decided to close the door to Swedish NHL players for now, Marcus talked about his feelings about playing in the AHL. Marcus Johansson said to Värmlands Folkblad on whether he would play with Färjestad or in the AHL: “It’s a possibility [that I will play in the AHL]. In the end it will be up to Washington to decide where I play. If they really want me to play there, then I guess I will have to do that. But I don’t think that any NHL player really wants to play in the AHL.”

The conclusion you can draw from this is that nothing is set in stone quite yet for the SEL in regards to NHL players. I guess time will tell what eventually will happen.

It’s possible that Hockeyligan will stick together and have a united front for the rest of the season. But here are some thoughts on why it easily could be a very divided group in a couple of months. First off, because Hockeyligan is made up of competitors, it’s always easy for them to agree on things before the season has begun.

In the NHL the teams that fail and finish in the bottom of the league are “rewarded” by high draft picks, but in the SEL, the teams are punished instead. Players usually have out clauses in their contracts for the possibility that the team is relegated so they can easily abandon the team and sign with a team remaining in the SEL. There are no player drafts either in the SEL so there is no influx of potentially very good players in the future for the teams finishing poorly in the standings.

It is easy to stay united before the season starts but it is not as easy later in the year when general managers are fighting for their jobs as their teams are fighting for playoff spots and trying to avoid the dreaded Kvalserien. If the best players in the world are available in that situation, it is easy to believe that a general manager would take the risk of signing a player even if the contract is not structured in the way the league had decided upon on a few months previous.

Nicklas Bäckström on the hiring of fellow Swede Calle Johansson as a new assistant coach for the Washington Capitals:

”It’s really great that we got Calle. I know him a little bit and he is incredibly knowledgeable about hockey. If he can teach us everything he knows it would be perfect for us, especially for our D- men. Also, he is a great guy and will probably be good for the atmosphere as well.”

Bäckström on the potential lockout:

Bäckström on dreams of the Stanley Cup:

“I always dream of the Stanley Cup, but I don’t want to put up one of those goals. We aim to make the playoffs to begin with. At the same time, it’s time for us as a team to take that next step now. It will be my sixth year, although it feels like I just got there last year, and Ovechkin’s eighth. Green has also been there for a long time. The years go by … We are the players that Washington focused their resources on. So we are the ones that have to make things happen.”

Bäckström on Tre Kronor:

”I was only there for three days for the last World Championships, I would have liked to have been there from the beginning instead. It’s not easy to fly in, in the middle of things like that. But we had a great team and I would love to do it again. As long as I’m free from injuries, I will always accept a Tre Kronor invitation. It’s an honour to represent my country.”

Bäckström on Filip Forsberg :

”It’s great that we added more Swedes to the team. We also picked Christian Djoos, Pär’s kid. [Ed.note: Christian Djoos's dad, Pär Djoos, is a long time SEL player and he is currently working as a coach in Sweden.] Unfortunately I haven’t seen either of them play, but I have heard that they are both highly skilled players and very talented. They also seem to be good and humble guys. To have humble guys on the team is important. To be successful as a team you need to have humble players. You need to be humble to achieve success, I think.”

The final day also included a lot of cake eating (Brynäs, in its one hundredth year of existence this year, won the Swedish championship) and awards handed out for best (hockey?) hair, and of course “the meatball of the week” award which was handed out to the kid who ate the most meatballs during the camp; this year’s winner managed to eat 59 meatballs.

Nicklas started out his career with Valbo HC (Valbo’s ice rink is now named after him) but moved on to play for Brynäs in his teens. The first Brynäs team he was on was their under 16 team.
“I started to play hockey when I was just 2-3 years old. That’s really early but I tagged along with my older brother and dad [Nicklas's dad Anders played for Brynäs between 1978-88]. A while later I started playing at Valbo’s hockey school. I practically lived at the rink in Valbo,” Bäckström tells Brynäs’s official site.

Nicklas answered questions on what he does to keep up his motivation to train two times a day five days a week as he does in the summer,  how he deals with going through rough patches and a difficult injury like concussion, and if he has ever considered quitting hockey.

“No, I never got to the point that I wanted to give up on hockey. One of the things I love most about hockey is to just hang out with the guys in the locker room. However, I did spend a lot of time thinking about why I didn’t heal up properly and if I ever would feel good again.”

“The thing I liked most about hockey summer school as a kid was that it was filled with fun hockey stuff both on and off the ice. We also did other things such as going swimming. It was the combination of things that made it so much fun. I went to summer hockey school for 7 or 8 years as a kid and always had a great time.”

All the pics are courtesy of Brynäs.se, where you also can read more about Bäckström’s visit.

***

Nicklas Bäckström and Marcus Johansson will both play for Peter Forsberg and Markus Näslund’s charity team the Icebreakers this year. Nicklas Bäckström has played on the team for a couple of years but this year will be the first time for Marcus.

The team consists of current and former Swedish NHL players. They will play two games against Swedish teams this year: Timrå on August 8 and Visby on August 9.
The purpose of the Icebreakers is to raise money for sick children. They have raised 6 million Swedish kronor since the foundation was started in 2002. All of the players that take part in the event always say the same thing: playing in the games is fun but the reason they do it every year is to meet the children. They visit the children’s hospital in all the cities they travel to play in, as well as meeting all the kids that receive the money they raised through the games. It’s the interaction with the kids that makes it all worthwhile to the players.

NHL-players like Henrik Zetterberg, Jacob Markström, Anders Lindbäck, Mikael Samuelsson, Magnus Pääjärvi and Marcus Johansson as well as some former NHL players are taking part in the tournament.

Nicklas Bäckström at Gävle Children’s Hospital in 2010

”So far we have been able to donate 135,000 kronor. It’s great that so many people help out to make this whole thing possible,” says Nicklas’s dad Anders Bäckström to Gefle Dagblad.

*******

Nicklas told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that he thinks the LA Kings will beat the New Jersey Devils in five games.

Bäckström mostly talked about the WC tournament and his expectations of winning the gold medal for Sweden. Sweden had not won gold at the World Championships for 6 years. He also talked talked briefly about the concussion he suffered on January 3 after getting elbowed in the head by Rene Bourque.

Thanks to that vicious elbow, Nicklas Bäckström missed 40 games in the regular season. During that period, he had talked with the press about how frustrating it had been to deal with the concussion. He had always sounded optimistic about the possibility that he would be able to return  to play, but upon arriving in Sweden he admitted that wasn’t the way he felt privately.

Nicklas Bäckström arriving at Arlanda after a 10 hour flight still wearing the same clothes as when he did his ”end of the season” interviews in Washington.

“It wasn’t fun, but it feels better now,” Bäckström said to Swedish newspaper Expressen. He followed up by admitting that he thought the whole season was in jeopardy.

”It’s been hard and very frustrating. I think it’s the worst kind of injury you can have because you are not allowed to do anything. But I feel better now and it feels great to be back. I’m just so happy that I can stand here today and talk about playing hockey again,” Nicklas Bäckström told Swedish Radio.

“The thought about Worlds has been at the back of my mind for a long time. It’s an honor to play for my country and when the tourney is being played at home it feels extra special.”

”I’m hoping that I can take a flight that leaves Washington on Monday and arrives in Stockholm on Tuesday morning. That would mean that I could play against Latvia on Tuesday night,” Nicklas Bäckström told Swedish paper Expressen.

”I’m healthy and feel like I’m in good shape.  If you think about it, I only played half a season due to the injury I had this year.”

Nicklas Bäckström practicing with Tre Kronor.

Last year Bäckström turned down an invitation to play for Tre Kronor in the World Championship due to a recurring thumb injury. Because of that, he received massive criticism in the Swedish press during the entire summer of 2011 and the criticism has never  completely stopped since then. I have written about that criticism and Nicklas’s comments about it before in this post from November last year.

”I have always said that if I’m healthy, I will never turn down a invitation to play for my country. The last two times I’ve been asked to play for Tre Kronor, I have been too injured and haven’t been allowed to play. I simply couldn’t play then, but this year my body feels healthy,” Bäckström told another Swedish paper Aftonbladet.

New York Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist told Swedish Radio that Nicklas Bäckström was one of the Washington Capitals key players.

Breakfast with @tiesto and @krisahlbom http://t.co/bmNtf5p1—
Nicklas Backstrom (@backstrom19) March 07, 2012

Nicklas Bäckström and Tiësto having breakfast at Riche. Photo: @krisahlbom

]]> http://hockeyramblings.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/nicklas-backstrom-in-stockholm/feed/ 5 hockeyramblings Nicklas Bäckström and Tiësto having breakfast at Riche. Photo: @krisahlbom