After Bjorck’s success at World Juniors, Kimby saw a more confident player and rewarded him with ice time in more important situations.<\/p>\n
“We played him top minutes against our opponent’s first center the rest of the year,” Kimby said. “We played him top minutes short-handed, and I think he earned that. I think he averaged 20 or 21 minutes going from January to when we get knocked out of the playoffs.”<\/p>\n
Bjorck also played important minutes at the World Championship, where his average ice time (18:44) ranked third among Sweden forwards. That included 18:58 against Canada in the opener, which led to the compliment he received from Crosby.<\/p>\n
Bjorck tried to downplay Crosby’s comments.<\/p>\n
“When you’re in front of camera like that, you really don’t want to talk (badly) about a player,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom what I’ve heard, and talking to him a little bit there, he seems like a very nice person. It’s very nice to hear. It’s a legend of the game and one of the best.”<\/p>\n
Bjorck’s friends were quick to let him know about Crosby\u2019s comments, but he’s keeping his ego in check. He knows there still are facets of his game that need to improve before he can be ready to join Crosby in the NHL.<\/p>\n
“I want to be an all-around player, so just I’m trying to get better at everything, of course,” Bjorck said. “Going up to the SHL this season, when you’re starting to take face-offs there in the last half of the season, it was very hard; not the same as in the juniors in any way. So, I started working a lot of that with the coaches and some other guys from the team, (Marcus) Krueger. … I think that went better in the World Championship as well, and later on in the season.”<\/p>\n
Kimby said he’d like to see Bjorck add some deception to his offensive game and continue to develop physically to win more of the battles he’s always ready to jump into.<\/p>\n
Bjorck expects to play at least one more season in Djurgarden, but playing in the World Championship gave him a good idea of how close he is to being NHL ready.<\/p>\n
“It’s a hard question to talk about yourself like that, but I think I held my own and did pretty well against some very good NHL players in the World Championship,” he said. “You want to have confidence, but I would like to give it a shot in the next couple of years, anyways.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Bjorck’s success at World Juniors, Kimby saw a more confident player and rewarded him with ice time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733342,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-733341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}