- Lekkerimaki has 37 NHL games and nine points four years after going 15th overall
- He enters the final season of his entry-level deal at a $918,333 cap hit
- Read below for what The Athletic says is still missing from his game
Jonathan Lekkerimaki is running out of runway in Vancouver.
Thomas Drance of The Athletic sized up the winger’s breakout odds this week and came away skeptical. Drance wrote that Lekkerimaki “needs to add core strength more than anything else” because “he’s not big enough or fast enough to hold up against NHL competition.”
Drance also pointed at the summer itself. He wrote that Lekkerimaki’s offseason “was at least partly compromised by recovery” from shoulder surgery, and that “it’s hard to imagine that he’ll be ready this fall to address his physical shortcomings.”
Vancouver announced that surgery in late February and built the timeline around training camp:
The season that surgery ended never got going. Lekkerimaki made the roster out of camp and scored in the opener, then got hurt in October and did not play again until the middle of November.
His reward for getting healthy was a bus ticket to Abbotsford.
Down in the AHL he was excellent again, piling up 13 goals and 20 points in 21 games. That followed 19 goals and 28 points in 36 games as a rookie pro, a run that helped Abbotsford win the 2025 Calder Cup.
The shot has never been the question. Take a look at him picking the top corner on the Maple Leafs in January:
Two goals and three points in 13 games was all he had to show for his NHL work last year. Four years after the draft, the resume reads 37 games, five goals, nine points.
Others from his class have already cashed in. Juraj Slafkovsky, Logan Cooley, Cutter Gauthier and Lane Hutson are all either signed long term or negotiating deals right now.
Money sharpens all of this. Lekkerimaki is in the last year of his entry-level contract at a $918,333 cap hit and becomes a restricted free agent next summer. He does keep one more season of waiver exemption, so Vancouver can bury him in Abbotsford without losing him, the same cushion that made last season’s demotions painless.
Camp opens Sept. 17 in Penticton, and the roster math is not hopeless. Manny Malhotra coached him in Abbotsford before taking the big job, and a club that just handed Zeev Buium an eight-year extension is not exactly stacked with proven wingers.
Paul Cotter, Max Sasson and Trey Fix-Wolansky are all in the way, though. Lekkerimaki has scored at every level below the NHL, and this is the camp where he either does it in Vancouver or starts hearing about his trade value.
