MINNEAPOLIS — It will take you roughly 15 hours to drive from the Minnesota Gophers’ home rink to Harborcenter, the practice home of the NHL’s Sabres, but if you’re itching to see the Gophers of the future, Buffalo is the place to be on the opening weekend of June.
Four players who have committed to skate for coach Bob Motzko’s Minnesota program are among the 85 pro hockey prospects invited to the 2022 NHL Scouting Combine, which will be held June 3-4 in Buffalo. It is one of the final formal opportunities for pro team scouts to get an on-ice look at some of the top young players in the world prior to the 2022 NHL Draft, which will be held July 7-8 in Montreal.
Two forwards and two defensemen bound for the U of M are among the players selected to participate. They are:
-
Ryan Chesley
, a defenseman from Minneapolis who played at both Shattuck-St. Mary’s and with the USA Hockey National Team Development Program.
-
Logan Cooley
, a forward from Pittsburgh who played for USA Hockey in Michigan last season. He is projected to be one of the top three picks in the draft.
-
Sam Rinzel
, a defenseman from Chaska who split his time between prep hockey at Chaska and the USHL with Waterloo. He is slated to join the Gophers in 2023-24.
- Jimmy Snuggerud , a forward from Chaska who played for USA Hockey in Michigan last season is a third-generation Gopher, following his father, Dave, and his grandfather, Jim Westby.
The invite list also includes Cruz Lucius, the Grant, Minn., forward who played last season for USA Hockey and was committed to the Gophers but reopened his recruitment in late April. According to a Lucius family source, Cruz is hoping to make a college choice sometime after the combine. Cruz's older brother Chaz was a first-round pick of the Winnipeg Jets last summer and signed a pro contract at the end of an injury-shortened freshman season with the Gophers.
Similar to the NFL combine which has become a major off-season event each winter prior to the football draft, the event will include fitness testing and media availability for the players. All four future Gophers were listed among the top 20 North American skaters in NHL Central Scouting’s final pre-draft ranking and all are likely to go in the first round. If that happens, it would be just the second time that four Gophers were selected in the draft’s opening round.
ADVERTISEMENT
