Cologne in the NHL: Next award and club record for Leon Draisaitl

cologne –

Overtime is going on, 5:5 between the Edmonton Oilers and New York Rangers last Saturday at Canadian Rogers Stadium. Next goal is to decide, only their best teams on the ice and arguably the best ever at the moment, who decides the match after a superb pass from Darnell Nurse. Leon Drysittel (26) stands free in front of Rangers’ Russian goalkeeper Alexander Georgiev, and lets the puck past him into the net – for the 10th goal in overtime in his career. Club record.

This has consequences: Oilers’ victory, spot on Draisaitl, who began to see celebration and slithers over the ice – accompanied by the cheers of his team and several people in the arena. While Georgiev had had enough and left the gate, he ran without looking around. He must have been thinking: Drysetel again, what else do you want to do there?

Drycitel: more potent and harsher

For now, Draisaitl, who observers believe played unparalleled in the season before last, is more effective and ruthless. The Cologne native has already been named the NHL Player of the Year in 2020, the Olympus of his sport as the individual award.

But with things going for now, the way he meets and helps Driesitl, he’s taken another leap forward. After ten games, the Oilers are topping the Pacific League table with nine wins and one loss, and Drysittel is currently the top scorer in the world’s best league with 23 points – provided ten goals and 13 assists. The fact that new Canadian ice hockey champion Conor McDavid follows in second place, MVP of 2021, with eight goals and 14 assists, speaks volumes for the Oilers streak. Because McDavid is the captain of the Draisaitl team.

Recent NHL accomplishments of course do not go unnoticed, and so on Tuesday Draisaitl was named Player of the Week for the third time in the new NHL season. So the trend is: This really great striker is now playing with more clarity and quality at the end.

The dractile feature: inner balance and the gift of self-control

Anyone who meets Leon Drysittel meets a quiet young man who does not like to draw attention to himself with words. This inner balance and gift of restraint is an advantage over the ice, as he plays calmly as if there is no pressure. Edmonton is the site of the NHL that symbolizes great longing. It is the city where Wayne Gretzky played and won, Canadian ice saint, worshiping there as in football Pele, Maradona, Messi and Ronaldo together. In 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988, the Oilers, led by Gretzky, won the Stanley Cup, the most important trophy in ice hockey. The great Gretzky left town in 1988, and in 1990 the Oilers climbed again without him – but since then, aside from a worthless conference title in 2006, little has been achieved.

But now, with a newly organized and greatly improved team, with Draisaitl and McDavid taken to different ranks by storm, things are suddenly going well. Top stars work from Cologne and Canada, as well as the team. Draisaitl contributed to this with a keen desire to improve. In this respect, he is similar to German basketball champion Dirk Nowitzki, who worked meticulously after the season with his mentor Holger Gschwendner at the Franconian Hall. Draisaitl also continues to train in the off-season and has already made up for his severe shortfall in speed in this way. Even on his summer vacation at his home in Cologne, when his father Peter Drysitl, former center and coach of Kolner High and a 146-time national player, visited his father, he spent a lot of time training at the ice rinks in Cologne.

Gretsky: “Lyon is getting stronger every year”

Gretsky also recorded all this: “Leon is getting stronger every year. Many of them have talent. But Leon combines talent with the right attitude. He has the necessary work ethic.” Talent may help, but, as Gretsky says: “It is good only because he works hard from Order that every day.”
Draisaitl himself remains calm, at the moment he is happy with the stages of success: “I think we now have the deepest team since I’ve been here.” It’s been since 2015 – but everything has never been quite as well as in fall 2021: not only did Draisaitl and McDavid shine, but the entire Oilers team.