Paul Vincent has worked as a skills and skating coach in hockey for more than four decades, pioneering the role at Boston College and RPI, and eventually bringing it to the NHL with the Lightning, Panthers, Bruins and Blackhawks. His clients have included everyone from Tony Amonte and Adam Oates (who lived with him for three summers) to Nate Thompson and Bobby Trivigno.
He guesses that for 13 of those years he has worked with now-Sharks second-round pick Cam Lund, joking about how he has known him “forever.”
For many of those years, Lund was never the it hotshot prospect — never the kid other hockey parents would say “That kid can’t miss” about. What he was, though, was always a great kid who “works really hard, knew he still has a ways to go, and wants to get better.” And because of that, “he has come an amazingly long way,” according to Vincent.
Four years ago, when a 15-year-old Lund moved out of youth hockey and into prep school Cushing Academy for his sophomore year of high school, parents on the team he’d played on had told Cushing’s head coach that he was going to have a hard time playing at the prep level that year.
When the coach relayed that to Vincent, the longtime skills coach snapped back.
“Whoever told you that is wrong because he works so hard and with that, he has proven people wrong,” he said.
Today, that continues to be true.
Today, Lund is now entering a different sophomore year, this one at Northeastern University as a second-round pick of the Sharks and a candidate for Team USA at the 2024 world juniors in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Today, there aren’t many people left to prove wrong. Now it’s just about making it.
If you ask Vincent, Northeastern head coach Jerry Keefe, or former Green Bay Gamblers head coach and general manager Pat Mikesch, about Lund, they each talk about a player of potential and power.
Keefe calls Lund a “big-time skater” who “has high, high-end speed.”
“He can really transition a puck through the neutral zone and when he works against a bad gap, he’s a real tough guy to defend,” Keefe said. “He shoots the puck really well. And he’s a skilled kid. He’s a skilled, 6-foot-2.5 player with great skating ability. He’s one of those guys who can pick up a puck and the next thing you know he’s on a breakaway.”
Mikesch calls him “really physically gifted” with “extreme power in his legs.”
“Lundy’s definitely that raw athlete,” Mikesch said. “I always compared him to Charlie Coyle — just physically advanced for a young player and then learning the game quickly to go along with it.”
Added Vincent: “He’s a strong, strong skater. He’s got a great release on the puck. And his ice awareness has gotten really good. And he’s only going to get better.”
Lund, drafted No. 34 by the Sharks in the 2022 NHL Draft, only just turned 19 in June, but has turned heads around the hockey world over the course of back-to-back rookie seasons in the USHL and NCAA.
Three years ago, while his peers were playing in the USHL, or at the national development program, or north of the border in the CHL as 16-year-olds, Lund was a sub-point-per-game player and just the third-leading scorer on the Boston Jr. Bruins in the NCDC of the USPHL. He played for the Jr. Bruins because COVID shutdown what should have been his junior year at Cushing and the NCDC was able to pull off a condensed season in a hub format in Florida.
After a point-per-game season at Cushing in his one and only season there, Vincent, who was working with the Panthers during the NCDC hub, saw a rapidly-developing player on a few trips up to the suburbs of Tampa to watch him play. But it was still usually his linemate Collin Graf, who last year finished third in the NCAA in scoring with 59 points in 41 games at Quinnipiac, who usually stole the show.
“He grew there. He got to play against older guys and he started to blossom. And we’d talked about things that he needed to work on and he was willing to work on those things. He’s just willing and wants to get better,” Vincent said.
The following year, at 17, Lund registered just one point in his first nine games of his draft year with the Gamblers, finally scoring his first goal of the season in his 10th game.
Still, NHL scouts saw the potential Keefe and Mikesch saw in him early, helped by a USA-leading four-goals-in-four-games at the 2021 Hlinka Gretzky Cup, and despite his limited track record, NHL Central Scouting gave him a “B” rating (which “indicates a 2nd/3rd round candidate”) in their first players to watch list of his draft year back in October of 2021.
By year’s end, he’d made good on that promise, still finishing the year with 25 goals and 50 points in 62 games even after his slow start — and finding chemistry with teammate and would-be fellow second-round pick Ryan Greene, who was chosen 57th by the Blackhawks.
Under Mikesch, Lund moved from center, the position he’d played at youth levels and into prep school, to right wing specifically so that he could stay on a line with Greene.
“For a one-year player to come into the USHL and do what he did was impressive,” said Mikesch. “And (Lund and Greene) loved playing together and they fed off of each other but (with) different attributes. (Lund) can just rifle a puck. So his attributes are much more physical and that’s why I think they played well together because of that, because where Ryan was able to slow the game down, Lundy was always ready to push the pace and provide the shot. Ryan I always had to convince him to take a shot because he always wanted to take one more look for Lundy, who was going to be an option.”
His production was good for second among all under-18 skaters in the USHL behind only Adam Fantilli, and earned him a USHL All-Rookie Second Team nod. That play made him NHL Central Scouting’s No. 40-ranked North American skater on their final list ahead of the draft. His athleticism also made him a standout at the 2022 NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo in advance of the draft, and solidified him as a high pick to the Sharks.
The momentum he’d built in his one and only season in the USHL continued into his post-draft season as a freshman at Northeastern, too, scoring in his first NCAA game and finishing the year fifth on the Huskies in scoring with 23 points in 35 games, good for ninth amongst all under-19 forwards in college hockey and earning him a Hockey East All-Rookie Team honors.
It also earned him a long look at last winter’s selection camp for Team USA’s 2023 world junior team, a camp he performed well at only to be among the final cuts.
Under Keefe, he also quickly began to round out his game, finding ways to impact play through more than just his physical tools.
Even though he had a productive first season, Keefe also argues that Lund was a little unlucky last season, joking that he probably had a breakaway or two per game that he didn’t finish on.
“He can play a power game. The game has probably been a little bit easy for him at points in his career, where he has been able to outskate guys and out-skill them, whereas now as you get to higher levels you can’t do that anymore, you’ve got to add pieces to your game and that’s what he’s doing,” Keefe said. “But he’s a dangerous player, he’s always a threat, and I like his overall game — he’s getting better and better. For me, he has come on with his all-around game. I think he has done a really good job with that. He’s checking better, his awareness is better, and he’s really learning how to play at the college level and what you have to do at this level and beyond to have success.”
While Vincent, Mikesch and Keefe talk about Lund, the hockey player, in near-identical terms, when they talk about Lund, the kid, they use different descriptors.
“I won’t say he’s an airhead but he’s an airhead,” Mikesch said with a chuckle. “He makes everybody smile, he’ll make everybody laugh, and he’ll let people laugh at him which is kind of unique for athletes at that age. But he’s fun to be around. He’s a little bit quiet in that he’s not a rah-rah guy and he’s just focussed on himself come game time, but he fits in well, that’s for sure.”
Though Vincent says Lund “can be an airhead at times,” he says he’s more often “extremely focused.”
“His thing is that he does the right things,” Vincent said. “And he comes from great people. His mom (Shannon, a nurse) and dad (Eric, who owns an auto body business in their hometown of Bridgewater, Mass.) are just fantastic. And I’m kind of a hard-nosed old schooler, and he has been around me a long time, and he listens and learns which is all I ask for.”
Keefe knows that the so-called airhead moniker is how Lund is perceived — a theme that scouts and NHL teams reiterated throughout the draft process — but argues there’s more to him than that as well.
“I think there’s a lot more there to the kid than some people might not know. He’s an intense kid, he’s a really well-liked guy in our dressing room for sure. As a freshman coming in guys would bust his chops a little bit and now I notice he’s really busting other people’s chops. So he’s got a quiet confidence for sure,” Keefe said.
“But when you really get to know the kid, he’s an intelligent player. He takes a lot in and when you watch video with him he brings up a lot of good points and he’s not afraid to point out what he saw. And then the other part is he’s a young kid, so I think you’re starting to see Cam Lund take that next step in the maturity process. So good for him. I love the kid. He’s an awesome kid, he’s a great teammate, and I just think he’s going to continue getting better and better. We’re excited.”
Standing inside USA Hockey Arena shortly after a game at the World Junior Summer Showcase recently, Lund is trying to contextualize just how far he has come in the last 24 or so months.
For starters, he guesses he was 20 pounds lighter two years ago.
“I was skinny and I really wasn’t that strong,” he says.
He certainly wasn’t thinking about the world juniors when he was playing for the Jr. Bruins in the middle of the pandemic, either.
His goals for this season, however, are twofold: He plans to shoot more and he plans to work his way onto the world junior team.
“I think my big expectation for myself is scoring more goals. Last year I didn’t score as many goals as I expected, so I want to take a step forward there and be more of a shooter,” he said. “(And) knowing I got cut last year (from the world junior team), and how much it sucked, I’m coming back this year trying to prove a point and hungry.”
Keefe and Mikesch think he’s ready to play on the world stage and score more this season, as well.
“I think he can play a power game for the U.S. team and he’s definitely going to have top-end speed on that team. So he brings that, which means that he can be a really good F1 on a forecheck,” Keefe said. “He’s got underrated toughness, when he finishes his checks he can run right through you. So he can bring a lot of different elements. It’s not just his scoring game. I like his ability to forecheck with his speed.”
As for Vincent? He doesn’t think Lund’s ready — he knows he is.
“He had a good freshman year at Northeastern,” Vincent said, “(and) I think he’s going to have an incredible sophomore year.”
With reporting in Plymouth, Mich.
(Top photo of Cam Lund after winning the 2023 men’s Beanpot championship: Erica Denhoff / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)