Will Zellers Won the Junior Player of the Year Award Following a Historic Season with the Green Bay Gamblers
Pat McCadden flashed back to the first game Will Zellers played for the USHL’s Green Bay Gamblers.
It was two seasons ago, just a week after Zellers turned 17 years old. He had just completed his high school season at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota when he played in his one and only USHL game of the 2022-23 season. He drove down to Dubuque, Iowa, to meet the team.
“He scored in the game, and I thought he was our best player in the third period,” said McCadden, who was an assistant coach for Green Bay at the time. “So, I knew how good and talented he was.”
Zellers did more dazzling in McCadden’s first season as Green Bay’s head coach this year. The Maple Grove, Minnesota, native broke the club record for goals in a season and earned USHL Player of the Year honors.
Zellers led the USHL with 44 goals and 1.37 points per game. He also registered 27 assists in his 52 games played. That offensive onslaught was a major reason Zellers also reaped another reward: USA Hockey’s Junior Player of the Year Award. Zellers will be among the honorees June 6 at the USA Hockey President’s Awards Dinner in Denver.
The numbers would have been even better had Zellers not missed the first couple weeks of the season following shoulder surgery at the end of the 2023-24 Shattuck-St. Mary’s season that prevented him from joining the Gamblers in the playoffs.
“Where do I start?” said Marc Boxer, USA Hockey’s director of junior hockey. “He almost averaged a goal a game in the league, in the USHL, which is quite significant. It’s a hard league to play in. It’s really a hard league for somebody to score that many goals, so his offensive instincts are high end; he’s got an elite stick.”
NHL teams covet goal scorers as much as anything, which is why the Colorado Avalanche selected Zellers — a 5-foot-10-inch, 163-pound left wing with a left-handed shot — in the third round of the 2024 NHL Draft. While in Green Bay this season, the Boston Bruins acquired Zellers as part of the Charlie Coyle trade.
It really hasn’t mattered where Zellers was playing, he is always finding the back of the net. He tallied 57 goals and 54 assists in 54 games in his final year at Shattuck-St. Mary’s, as well as 14 goals and seven assists in 14 games in three international tournaments for the U.S. before his big season with the Gamblers.
In his return from shoulder surgery, Zellers started his assault on the Gamblers’ record book. He scored three of Green Bay’s seven goals in a two-game sweep of the Omaha Lancers in his first action of the season.
“He didn’t skip a beat,” McCadden said, “He just never really stopped. Like there was not more than a couple games all year that he didn’t go without scoring a goal. It was remarkable to watch. And as a coach, you kind of wonder, ‘OK, when’s he going to hit the wall? Is he going to go three, four weeks without scoring a goal?’ And it just never happened. He just kept finding ways to score.”
The next stop for Zellers is college. He will play at North Dakota beginning this fall for first-year coach Dane Jackson, who has been on the coaching staff the last 19 years.
McCadden and Boxer noted that Zellers made great strides in his overall game this season. Already a proficient scorer, Zellers put in the work to become a bigger defensive presence.
“I give him a ton of credit,” McCadden said. “He wants to play in the National Hockey League. He understands that it’s not just about scoring. You’ve got to be able to go out there and defend and have your coaching staff trust you. He’s so gifted offensively that you know he doesn’t need to worry about that part of his game as much and if he can make sure that he’s detailed and in as his coaches’ trust, he should make it, in my opinion and he should be able to play this game and get paid to do it for a long, long time.”
Boxer also mentioned that Zellers needs to get stronger, especially as the competition gets more intense at each level. Boxer noticed tremendous improvement in Zellers’ two-way game this season.
“The biggest things for these types of kids is just the maturity in their game,” Boxer said. “Are they going to play winning hockey all the time? Are they going to do the little things? Because as you move up the food chain, it gets harder and harder to be on the first power play. You’ve got to learn to do other things. You’ve got to learn to be good playing maybe on a third line. You’ve got to learn to kill penalties. You’ve got to learn to be really dependable.”
Boxer has witnessed Zellers’ talents from putting together U.S. rosters for international tournaments, including for the 2024 World Junior A Challenge, which the U.S. won.
In addition to having a wealth of talent on the ice, Zellers has shown the willingness to put in the work to not only to improve his skills, but to be a teammate others look up to.
“He’s a character of a kid,” Boxer said. “You like being around him. That’s the fun thing about when you’re with these teams, when we put them together, we do a lot of work on making sure that you have character kids. Now, you don’t get it right all the time, 100%, but he’s one of those guys you like having on your team.”
Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.
Source: usahockey.com