VANTAA, Finland — His strength and conditioning coach says “he’s a freak.”
His teammates stop and watch him in the gym. Earlier this season, when the Barrie Colts posted a video of him lifting, NHL teams reached out to ask if it was fake.
In a 2.4-kilometre run in training camp, he beat his nearest teammate by 30 seconds, running a 3:30 pace per kilometre, “very impressive” for a 6-foot-2, 209-pound athlete.
He might be the fittest, strongest player in the 2024 NHL Draft.
He’s also one of its most well-rounded. At year’s end, when the OHL released its annual coaches poll, he was named the Eastern Conference’s hardest worker, top penalty killer, and second-best defensive forward.
Those most familiar with his game insist his production doesn’t even begin to outline his impact on a game.
In his draft year, he scored a respectable 30 goals and 67 points in 73 combined regular season and playoff games, good for second on the Colts in scoring. Last summer, he began as Canada’s 13th forward at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup before climbing up the lineup and registering six points in five games to help lead Canada to a gold medal.
This week, at U18 worlds in Finland, he’s technically listed as the team’s fourth-line centre in lineup charts. He has three points in five games into the semifinals. But he has slotted between the team’s two alternate captains, Malcolm Spence and Carson Wetsch, he’s the first player over the board on the penalty kill or for a late faceoff, and his 16:39 average ice time is second among the team’s forwards behind only captain Porter Martone’s 17:45.
The team’s head coach, Gardiner MacDougall, said he has been “tremendous” and called him one of the team’s key players.
And while he’s projected to be a late-first or second-round pick, he has earned the respect not just of everyone in the OHL — “Big Beaudoin fan,” one OHL GM recently texted — but of everyone with Hockey Canada and everyone else he has worked with along the way.
To a tee, they’re all convinced of one thing: He’s going to be a good NHL player and he’s never going to stop working until that’s accomplished.
Adam Bracken has been training the best athletes in the Ottawa area for 17 years now.
He has worked with NHLers like Ryan Spooner and Paul Byron, among others.
He has never had anyone in his gym, The Fitness Lab, who is “as focussed or as dialled in as (Beaudoin).” That athlete, he insists, “doesn’t really exist.”
“He’s a nut with everything about himself to the point where it’s almost concerning,” Bracken said on a recent phone call, scoffing. “I think he’s said to me ‘I’ve never had a French fry in my life’ and I don’t doubt it.”
In the gym, he’s “not even comparable” to Bracken’s other clients his age. Last summer, he moved him into his pro group, a group that currently includes Spooner and current European pros like Blaine Byron and Nick Petersen, because he needed to be there.
Normally, if he were to go to his pro clients about a just-turned-17-year-old client joining their group, they’d say “f— that, we’ve got work to do.” After his first day, they said, “Who is this kid? What’s this kid’s deal? He’s a man child.”
Said Bracken: “He set the tone for that group. He pushed the pace with every single one of them. He outlifted all of my pro guys. He was faster than them. He outworked all of them. It’s been pretty cool to watch.”
By the end of last offseason, they were all rooting for him and watching him closely as he entered his draft year.
A lot of who he is, he says, comes from where he comes from — and the uncommon but fortunate upbringing he had.
Beaudoin was born in Ottawa but moved at four months old to Sweden and spent the first seven years of his life in Sweden and Switzerland. His dad, Eric, is a retired hockey player turned mortgage broker who won an OHL title, was drafted 92nd by the Lightning in the 1998 NHL Draft, and…
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