Pierre-Edouard Bellemare received some sage advice when he began taking faceoffs for the Swedish team Skelleftea AIK.
“‘Just so you know, you won’t be as good as me,’” Bellemare recalled teammate Erik Forssell telling him during the 2011-12 season. “‘I have around 20,000 faceoffs in my career; you probably have so far 500. So you’re going to have to work extremely hard to learn all the trades of it.’”
The Golden Knights center took that instruction to heart and spent years studying the subtleties and nuances that go into winning in the faceoff circle. It’s something all the Knights’ centers have done, because they say it takes a combination of technique, preparation and repetition to be good on the draw.