ZURICH — To get an idea of what it is like to have a conversation with Montreal Canadiens prospect Vinzenz Rohrer, just look at an answer he gave to a relatively banal question that any player in his position receives regularly.
The answer provides insight into who Rohrer is and how he approaches his day-to-day life playing for the ZSC Lions in Zurich, about a 90-minute drive from his hometown in western Austria. He’s curious, he asks questions, he’s thoughtful.
“He’s a great kid, he really is,” Lions head coach Marc Crawford said. “He’s remarkable.”
The question was simple enough: What do you see as your path to the NHL?
Any legitimate NHL prospect — and Rohrer is definitely that — would have a standard answer to that question. Work hard, stay focused, hopefully I make it. Or something like that.
Not Rohrer.
“That’s a tough question, I also ask myself that sometimes,” Rohrer began, sitting in the player’s lounge at Swiss Life Arena in Zurich a few weeks ago. “I’m always in between in the perspective of goals. What is your goal? Where do you want to go? I think it’s always a tough thing with goals. If you set a goal and you reach the goal, you change with time. Is it still your goal? Do you actually want it? So I think that was always a thing. Obviously, everybody that’s in here, growing up as a young kid you always wanted to play in the NHL, I think every hockey player had that, also me.
“I don’t know, again I think it sounds rosy, but for me, I think how I would be really happy is if I, at some point, or after my career, I can say OK, that was your full potential. If that’s being here in Switzerland my entire life and I never got it and never made it, never went to Montreal, I think there’s worse things. But it’s obviously a dream, that’s why I’m here doing my time in the gym afterwards, to achieve that goal. But that’s my main focus too, to try to get better in every aspect, not even hockey, just in every aspect to get better. I think that makes you really happy, if you can embrace that. That’s kind of how I view things. But obviously the goal, and kind of the dream, is if you do everything like I think I’m doing it right now, developing and developing, that it is enough, and I reach my goal.”
That whole thing just came out of him, just like that. The changing nature of goals, the perspective of looking back on your career when you’re done, the possibility of being happy playing in Switzerland his whole career, all of it came out of him with a calm and a wisdom that betrayed the fact he only turned 19 in September — one of the youngest players taken in the 2022 draft.
“To be honest, I’ve never met a 19-year-old kid with that mindset in my life in the sport of hockey,” Zurich conditioning coach Mattia Stendahl said. “He’s so beyond what a 19-year-old kid is. He could be 35 years old. It’s almost unreal maturity when you talk to him.”
Rohrer, a third-round pick in 2022, is clearly not the best prospect the Canadiens have. But for many reasons, he might just be the most interesting.
The ZSC Lions of the Swiss National League are always looking for some kind of edge, a way they can gain any advantage in building a championship team in an increasingly competitive league.
Last summer, they identified Rohrer as one of those potential advantages. As an Austrian playing in the Ontario Hockey League with the Ottawa 67’s, Rohrer would not take up an import slot for Zurich, and the NHL-level training resources at their disposal could convince him to continue his development closer to home.
There was a benefit for the Canadiens as well, because had Rohrer remained in the OHL, they would need to either sign him to a contract after this season or allow him to re-enter the draft. If Rohrer went to Zurich, that requirement would no longer be there.
But for Rohrer, this was an incredibly difficult decision. The biggest, he said, of his young…
This article was originally published by a theathletic.com . Read the Original article here. .