Caden stood out early for me in this tournament, and one area I came away extremely impressed with was his ability on retrievals. Not only does he use a ton of different outlets to limit his predictability, but the deception he plays with while still being able to handle the puck at the speeds he does is quite impressive. On multiple occasions I noted Caden’s ability to lose the forechecker en route to firing up a great first-pass up and out of the zone. On a few occasions he even dropped the oncoming forechecker, buying himself even more time to make a clean play exiting the zone. Offensively, Caden showed tools and did well facilitating offense from the blue line and extending offensive pressure when possible. He also did well to identify lanes, whether that be shooting lanes through traffic or passing lanes to find a teammate’s stick for a deflection out front.

He only received credit for one assist, but his point shots were able to create rebound opportunities for his teammates out front to quickly pounce on and cash in. He moved well at the blue line and was able to create shooting lanes for himself, and his strong shooting through traffic forced good saves from the netminder. With his side on the front foot for much of this game he was a good offensive presence from the blue line.

Caden was the leader for the Shattuck team on the backend. I love the way he handled retrievals, using all his teammates at different points in the game, and never running the same routes, so that forecheckers were always guessing. He used shoulder and head fakes to provide the misdirection and had a plethora of options to move the puck. The smarts in the defensive zone really showed well, which afforded Shattuck many easy exits.