Red Wings’ Axel Sandin Pellikka wants revenge at the World Juniors — with his dad’s help

OTTAWA — When Axel Sandin Pellikka struggled to score in his first year with Skelleftea AIK’s U18 group, or when he was disappointed in himself after a game, his father, Janne, put together a worksheet for him to fill out after every game. He told him to pretend it was a team project.

The worksheet included three questions:

1. Name three things you did well today.
2. If there was anything you did poorly, what could you have done otherwise?
3. Tomorrow, how will you execute and learn from your mistake(s)?

“Eight or nine days later, Axel’s coach came back to me, ‘What the heck have you done? Axel, he’s so coachable. If I tell him to do this the next practice, he’s executing exactly this,’” Janne said.

It worked wonders for Sandin Pellikka then, and it still does today.

“It was a vital part of my career …  just letting go of mistakes and stuff pretty early,” Sandin Pellikka said. “After practice, after a game, I just write it down, put it aside, and then I just focus. Focus on the next game.”

To this day, the 19-year-old defenseman fills out the same worksheet after a game if he’s feeling up to it. But he can’t remember if he filled it out after last year’s loss to Team USA in the gold medal game at the 2024 World Juniors; he only remembers the disappointment of coming so close and falling short on home ice in Gothenburg.

“It sucks. You want to win a gold, it’s what we’re always going for and to lose that at home, it sucks,” Sandin Pellikka said. “We’re looking for revenge this year for sure.”

A year later, in his third World Juniors, the Detroit Red Wings’ top prospect has led Sweden to the semifinals and leads the tournament in points with nine, tied with Slovakia’s Dalibor Dvorsky. He kickstarted his tournament with a hat trick in Sweden’s 5-2 opening preliminary round win over Slovakia. Sweden went on to sweep Group B and entered the knockout stage as the only undefeated team.

AXEL SANDIN PELLIKKA HAT-TRICK ALERT.

Sweden’s captain picks up his third goal in the opening game of the #WorldJuniors to make it 4-1 for his team. pic.twitter.com/ZpspvpAbGK

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) December 26, 2024

Heading into Saturday’s semifinal against Finland, he has a sense of what he might write down for question No. 2.

“I tried to do a backhand flip on the blue line,” he said. “We’ll skip it.”

Sandin Pellikka is well on his way to repeating as the tournament’s top defenseman but says he isn’t interested in personal triumphs. He’s only focused on winning his country’s third-ever gold medal and first since 2012 — this time as captain, an “honor” he’s taking very seriously.

“I’m here to win a championship with the team. Nothing personal,” he said.

Sandin Pellikka loves to score goals and looks up to fellow Swedish defenseman and goal scorer Erik Karlsson, but Skelleftea general manager Erik Forssell has also seen firsthand how Sandin Pellikka’s defensive play one-on-one has improved over the past two seasons. He’s also taken note of how much his confidence has grown.

“When he came into the league two years ago, age 17,” Forssell said, “his skating and how he moves the puck, handles the puck, stood out right away, and that is obviously what makes him a very special player. But the last two years he has really improved that defensive play and now being one of the best.

“He’s confident and he believes in himself. And I think that’s a very valuable asset as a player in the team because when games are tough and tight, there’s a lot of pressure. Having players that can be confident is very, very important. “

Last season, Sandin Pellikka helped Skelleftea to its first Swedish Hockey League title since 2014 with 18 points in 39 regular-season games and seven points in 14 playoff games. He also won the Salming Trophy as Sweden’s top Swedish-born defenseman of the year. And he’s off to another strong start with 22 points in 25 games this season.

Pierre Johnsson, Sandin Pellikka’s assistant coach in Skelleftea, isn’t surprised to see him leading the charge at this year’s tournament in Ottawa.

“Going into that tournament with, I mean, it’s still a bit of pressure for him playing his third World Junior Championship and being the captain of Sweden. It takes a bit to hold up that pressure. But, I mean, he’s this hard-headed guy, so I’m not surprised,” Johnsson said.

“He knows what to do in those games that are so tight. … He’s so calm,” said Viggo Gustafsson, one of Sandin Pellikka’s D partners for Sweden.

Off the ice, Sandin Pellikka has strived to be an approachable leader for his teammates.

“I just want to lead by example. … And then just be a cool guy outside and just talk with everyone,” he said. “Be a nice guy outside off the rink, and I want everybody to feel like they could talk to me.”

Teammate Tom Willander, with whom Sandin Pellikka has spent time on the power play, says his captain is “a great guy” who is fun to be around.

“I think just kind of the chemistry we have in the group, I think he does a good job of kind of leading that,” Willander said.

Janne is just as honored to see his son sporting the “C” in his third stint at the World Juniors. Though Sandin Pellikka is from Gällivare, which Janne calls “the silent part of Sweden” — “We are the silent people, we don’t speak to everybody,” he said — he had no doubt his son would be a good leader and knows his experience and skills earned him the role.

“He’s open-minded. He can speak to everybody. He loves to be the one in charge for everything,” Janne said. “I think he has always had this talent to come into a new locker room and be one of the guys, though he has not known everybody. For like training camps and so on, he has come in like ‘Hi, I’m Axel, I will try to fit in here. I want to play hockey.’”

That love for hockey started when Sandin Pellikka was very young. He started out following in Janne’s footsteps as a cross-country skier until his grandfather, Martin, bought him hockey equipment one Christmas.

“He wanted to get me on the skis as fast as possible,” Sandin Pellikka recalled. “But I remember my dad had told me when I got my first hockey equipment, went to the rink and tried it once, I just told my dad we’re going to quit skiing because hockey was way more fun.”

Eventually, he would bang his hockey stick on the door of their home repeatedly until Janne agreed time and time again to take him back to the rink to shoot pucks.

“We tried to slow him down. ‘You can’t go.’ But he banged his stick into the door, so there were holes from the inside,” Janne said. “But what should I, as a parent, do? He was crying. He hit the door. Let’s go to the ice barn, of course, all the time. I can’t afford new doors.”

All these years later, it was surreal watching his son get drafted by the Detroit Red Wings with the No. 17 pick in the 2023 NHL Draft. Janne beams when thinking back to the moment it happened in Nashville.

“That was, what you call it? That was the s—,” Janne said. “When the guy was like, ‘For Detroit, Axel Sandin Pellikka from Skelleftea,’ at first we thought, ‘Oh, nobody else is here from Skelleftea. Oh, that’s my son.’”

Sandin Pellikka regularly keeps in touch with Red Wings European development Niklas Kronwall, who visits him in Skelleftea once or twice a month.

“He just tells me to play my game and don’t think too much,” Sandin Pellikka said.

He credits his dad’s worksheets with helping him do just that.

“It’s like a notebook and then just put it aside and then just focus on the next game. It’s really comforting,” Sandin Pellikka said. “My dad has switched now from paper to a Google Form so he sends me a message every night so when I feel like it, I just put some stuff down there and and go on.

“As a hockey player, it’s not always ups, it’s some downs too. So it’s nice when things are going a little tougher to just write things down.”

As for what it’s going to take to win gold, Sandin Pellikka is leaning in on the confidence that helped earn him the captaincy. Sweden coach Magnus Havelid hopes to get even more out of his captain.

“He’s a good person and a good leader so hopefully I can get a little bit more out of him in the semi now,” Havelid said after his team’s 3-2 quarterfinal win over Latvia. “My key players, I need to challenge them a little bit more because they have to lead the team. I hope after the tournament you can say ‘This was an outstanding performance’ … but let’s see.”

(Top photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)