Flyers prospect Robert Hagg now living up to the hype
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — It started with a heart-to-heart conversation as it almost always does.
The sanctuary of a hockey coach’s office leads to that eureka moment for a player and defenseman Robert Hagg’s came at about this time last year with a quarter of the season to go.
He took a seat in the grey mesh, wheeled office chair with orange trim in front of Scott Gordon’s desk. The Flyers’ 2013 second-round pick wasn’t playing up to the hype. In fact, he was getting worse.
“I figured that I had to do something, otherwise I wasn’t going to last long in this organization,” said Hagg, a native of Uppsala, Sweden. “Then we talked about just simplifying the game, play hard, play physical, take care of the D zone and I think I did that the last two and a half months last year and this year as well.”
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It almost seemed counterintuitive. Play simple? How does that lead to offense? It sounds like more of a cliché than a real solution.
Well, it’s working. Plus-minus is a flawed stat, but Hagg went from minus-11 last year in 65 games to plus-10 in his first 43 games this season. That’s a big jump. Something is clearly going right and it’s more than Hagg’s self-deprecating humor that this year’s Lehigh Valley Phantoms team is just better than last year’s.
“You look at his game and part of it is where a player comes from,” said Gordon, his second season as the Phantoms’ bench boss. “Him playing in Sweden, the big rinks, there’s a lot of opportunity for him to make long passes. The lanes are bigger, the success rate is greater and a lot of his game was still in that mode last year.”
Hagg admits that he was trying too many of those home-run plays, those long passes meant to spring a forward on a breakaway but too often resulted in a turnover.
The best defense in Sweden is filling up the other team’s net before they can fill yours. Here in North America it’s different and Hagg has made the necessary adjustments.
“It seems like the less you do, the better it goes for you over here,” said the 6-foot-2, 212-pound Hagg. “You don’t have to look for that home-run play every single time. Sometimes it’s just putting it off the glass and out, getting it out of the D zone and that’s making a good play. Back home it’s like you have to find a good tape-to-tape pass from blueline to blueline to make something happen.”
Finally, Hagg is coming around. The consensus among the Phantoms’ coaching staff is that he has been the most consistent defenseman this year and that’s after the team added Moorestown native T.J. Brennan and Will O’Neill, two of the top offensive defensemen in the AHL the last several years.
Last year Hagg, “never got to a point where you knew what you were going to get from him,” his coach said.
He’s come a long way and that’s a big jump for a defenseman who was almost the forgotten name in the crop of prospects on the blueline the Flyers have been grooming.
Ivan Provorov and Shayne Gostisbehere are already in the NHL. Hagg, 2013 first-round pick Sam Morin and 2014 first-round pick Travis Sanheim are all with the Phantoms trying to see who is next.
“I can’t help it if Sammy or Sanheim is getting ahead of me or behind me,” Hagg said. “That’s not my job, it’s the Flyers job to do that. All I can take care of is do my job every single day. Of course it’s great to have Sanheim and Sam with me to practice with them every single day. We have to compete basically every single practice because I know they’re going to give their all every single day so that means I have to do it as well.”
His defense partner for the last month, Brennan, sees maturity in Hagg, who turned 22 just last week. The two go back a couple years. Brennan, even though he wasn’t in the Flyers organization yet, would do some summer workouts in Voorhees because of how close to home it was and he’d run into Hagg, who was trying to get acclimated to North American Hockey.
“To me in a partner you want someone you can trust. You can turn your back to them and know they’ll clean up what’s behind you. Unfortunately whoever is stuck with me has a lot of responsibility,” Brennan joked, “but I think the coaches really like that pairing and I’m trying to work on my end. It’s definitely something I feel like I can trust him with.”
Hagg and Gordon had another chat at the beginning of the year. It’s not uncommon for the players and coaches to have sit-down meetings in a developmental league like the AHL, but this one Gordon gave Hagg a test.
He wanted to give him more responsibility to play defensive first and let the offense come organically. He’s passed with flying colors and wants to go from the forgotten prospect to the NHL.
“Hopefully I can prove to management down here that I am as good as I am and I’m ready to make the jump up, but that’s not up to me,” Hagg said. “If they tell me I need one more year in the minor league, OK that’s it. But I’m going to do everything I can to get to the NHL as fast as I can as well.”
Dave Isaac; 856-486-2479;disaac@gannett.com
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