Skilled on offense, Stars prospect Jason Robertson asked for improvement defensively

WINNIPEG, Manitoba — To Texas Stars coach Derek Laxdal, young offensive forwards are like horses. They have habits. You have fixes.

“The biggest thing to me is they’re like young thoroughbreds,” Laxdal said during an interview last week in Winnipeg. “You have to break their habits, you have to break them in. They do a lot of good things offensively, and every young player does it, they’ll cheat offense a little bit and not pay attention to defensive side of the puck or putting pucks in good places.”

For the Stars’ AHL affiliate, this season is as representative as any when it comes to coaching young players. Texas has now lost 11 consecutive games after Sunday’s 4-3 loss to Toronto and has not won a game since Oct. 19. Of the 19 players who played Sunday against the Marlies, nine were in their first season of AHL competition.

The highest-profile first-year forward is Jason Robertson, the 2017 second-round pick who led the Ontario Hockey League in scoring with 117 points last season and leads Texas forwards with eight points on four goals and four assists. He is Texas’ most offensively gifted forward and perhaps the team’s most promising forward prospect (now that Denis Gurianov has graduated, the argument leans Robertson over Ty Dellandrea).

While Robertson leads the Texas forwards in scoring (defenseman Emil Djuse has 10 points), only one other AHL team has its leading scoring forward with as few points.

“Everything is more structured and to be able to create offense, you’ve got to break their structure and try to be more aggressive,” Robertson said. “Really play more with an edge, and that’s what I’m trying to incorporate into my offensive game is playing more with an edge, kind of chippy, a little harder with the puck, without it.”

For Robertson, putting points on the ledger won’t be the issue. It’ll be preventing odd-man rushes the other way, and remaining sound in his own zone.

“They want the puck so bad,” Laxdal said. “The way they think offense, they want the puck on their stick. Sometimes what he’ll do is he’ll dive in as the F3 (highest forward in the offensive zone) and miss the puck, try to strip it and then they go three on two the other way.”

Laxdal mentioned this was prevalent in other skilled forwards like Tye Felhaber, who was second in the OHL with 59 goals last season. And to move from the AHL to the NHL, they have role models to follow in Gurianov and Roope Hintz.

“The way Jim Montgomery runs his team, getting above pucks and being on the right side of pucks, we teach the same thing,” Laxdal said. “So if he learns it down here like Gurianov, like Hintz, when his time is ready -- or as Jim Nill would say, the fruit is ripe -- he’ll go out. He can score. That’s a natural talent that he has. He has to work at his defensive side of the game.

“It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to be a lot of one-on-one video. It’s going to be a lot of on-ice walkthroughs and going through the mistakes in the game. Sometimes, he’s going to have to sit during the game and just take a breath and sit back.”

At the other end of the ice, Robertson has the size to battle in the crease, though that wasn’t always part of his game at the major junior level. Robertson is listed at 6-3, 210 pounds.

“Just battling, a couple cross checks here and there to gain body position,” Robertson said. “It’s a lot harder than it was in junior. You could get away with rolling right off somebody, but here you really got to dig deep and gain body positioning when you get to the net and create space for yourself.”

Tufte update: Among Texas players, no one was as highly drafted as forward Riley Tufte was. Tufte was picked at No. 25 in 2016 and has had difficulty adjusting to his first professional season after three years at Minnesota-Duluth. Tufte has two points in 15 games and did not play Sunday in Toronto.

Tufte was never a big scorer in college (career high was 16 goals as a sophomore) and has occupied a bottom-six role in the AHL. He is listed at 6-6, 230 pounds.

This is what Laxdal said about him last week in Winnipeg:

“He’s a very immature player if you base it off pro status. Every game that he plays, every practice that he practices is going to allow him to mature more every day to try and get to the level he needs to be. He’s got to be physical. He’s got to be hard.

“Is he going to be a big top-six prolific goal scorer? I don’t know, but he has to play a certain way to give himself a chance to get there. In order to be a really good third-line left winger, he’s got to be a penalty killer, he’s got to be physical, he’s got to be hard on pucks. He’s got to use that big body.”