He wants the pressure: Lucas Raymond is built for the Red Wings road ahead

The first try, Lucas Raymond said, was “really, really bad.”

Of all the tasks he could have been assigned by Frölunda Hockey Club’s mental coach this summer, learning to juggle was certainly an unusual one. Depending on who you ask, the explanation for the assignment was either as intricate as connecting different sides of the brain, or as simple as getting players outside their comfort zone. Either way, fluidly cycling between catching and throwing more objects than a person has hands is not supposed to come easily.

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One morning, Raymond’s father, Jean, checked in to see how he was faring. The answer: “Not so good, not so good.”

Then Jean checked back the next day. Lucas was starting to learn tricks.

“You learn pretty quick,” Lucas Raymond said, “if you really practice.”

It took him just two or three days to get the skill down pat.

For those who know Raymond, none of this could have been too surprising. He has always been stubborn. When Lucas and his older brother, Hugo, were younger, Jean would get home from the office, change out of his suit and hurry down to the basement for floor hockey with his sons. They would play and play, and depending on how it was going, they would play some more.

If Lucas and Hugo were losing, that just meant the game wasn’t over yet.

“You just couldn’t get out of there,” Jean recalled. “You just had to continue playing until at least a draw. A draw was acceptable, and defeat never was.”

This is just how Lucas Raymond is wired. When the Red Wings selected him fourth overall in the 2020 NHL Draft, he became their highest selection in 30 years, a high-pressure distinction as the proud Original Six franchise attempts to return to its former glory. Last year, the Red Wings won just 17 out of 71 games, and the fan base, in turn, placed all its hopes on the draft to make all that losing worth it.

Expectations, in other words, are high. And as Raymond meets them, they may grow higher still. That’s a tall charge for an 18 year old.

By all indications, though, it’s also the kind of situation in which Raymond is built to thrive. For all of his many talents, and the single-minded competitiveness that drove him to where he is, none may be as important as Raymond’s ability to embrace pressure. Not just to withstand it, but, as his brother said, to “get better” under it.

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“He wants the pressure,” said Tobias Johansson, Frölunda’s J20 coach.

“He feeds from it.”

Raymond’s mother, Cecilia Wosse Raymond, uses a few simple words to describe Lucas as a child. Very happy. Positive. Stubborn. 

“And very competitive,” she said. “In everything.”

That meant sports, but also in running up the stairs, or in reading. It’s entirely possible he got that from her. When Cecilia was 15, she made Sweden’s national team in squash. She windsurfed. She skied. And now she’s a personal trainer.

The family is full of athletes, really. Hugo, who is 21, is also a professional hockey player for Göteborgs IK in Sweden’s Division 3 league. Jean, who moved to Sweden from France at age 15, was a soccer player growing up.

“Me and Dad are like — we’re still competitive,” Hugo Raymond said. “But Mom and Lucas can be pretty brutal.”

No matter where Raymond gets it from genetically, though, there are precious few sources of competitive drive that can compare to growing up as a little brother.

The Raymond boys started out playing soccer with their dad as a coach, giving Lucas some early exposure at being the youngest and smallest player on the team. He was quick and skilled, and Jean even thinks Lucas could have had a future in soccer, too — if he hadn’t needed to focus on just one sport around 11 or 12 years old. But Jean thinks those early days on the pitch taught Lucas to avoid the bigger guys. He had to use his smarts to hold his own against older players, and also to participate socially.

As it turned out, playing with older kids became a baseline for Raymond. Hugo, who is two-and-a-half years older, was Lucas’ idol growing up. Thus, big brother brought Lucas along whenever he and his friends would go off to play soccer or street hockey.

“Growing up, hanging around with older kids kind of makes you mature even more, I think,” Raymond said. “And you know, it’s a tough environment as well, being the youngest guy in a crew when we’re playing street hockey. So I think that kind of helped me as well. I loved it. It was so fun, and I think that also drove me to try to become even better since they were older, stronger and, of course, better. I think that drove me to want to beat them and train even more.”

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Those around Raymond could see these aspects of his personality at work. Johansson, who was at the time coaching Hugo on Frölunda’s U16 team, remembers seeing a young Lucas at the rink for Hugo’s practices, constantly carrying his hockey stick and a ball. “Always trying to do a move walking through the halls,” Johansson said.

The coach saw it as a reflection of Raymond’s desire to get better, putting in the hours, and would ask him, jokingly: “Did you bring your gear today? Because I want to play you.”

“No,” Raymond would reply. “I’m just going to work on my stick handling.”

It didn’t take too long, however, until Raymond was in fact playing games at the U16 level. He first did so in the 2014-15 season, despite not turning 13 until late March. The next season he played five games in the U16 Elite league, Sweden’s top division for that age range, and had seven assists. He was rising to the challenge in front of him.

It’s rarely a seamless experience being so young for a level, though, and Raymond was no exception. He and Johansson both remember an instance early on when Raymond was tripped deep in the offensive zone, with no penalty call from the referee. Rather than getting up and backchecking, Raymond lingered to jaw at the ref.

When he returned to the bench, Johansson let him have it: This was not how a Frölunda player behaved. A Frölunda player takes care of business and does his best.

Raymond describes it as “probably the first time I really heard somebody really yell at me.” Johansson calls it the moment he “became his coach 100 percent.”

Really, the two were just getting started together. Johansson would go on to coach the J18 and J20 elites and serve as the organization’s director of player development for all juniors. Raymond’s production, meanwhile, only accelerated. He scored more than two points per game in the U16 elite league (and more than a goal per game), and even worked his way into some J18 games in the 2016-17 season — during which he turned 15. The next year he dominated that age group, and made his debut in the J20 elite league.

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“At every level, he’s been kind of the star, the go-to guy,” Frölunda GM Fredrik Sjöström said. “And I think he kind of strives to be center stage. I think he likes that. When the big games and important games (come), he elevates himself.”

Frölunda’s track record in developing future NHLers is staggering. From 2007- 2020, it has had 47 players drafted to the NHL, including Erik Karlsson, John Klingberg, Robin Lehner and Rasmus Dahlin.

Raymond, year by year, was on his way to becoming the next one.

But for all his success, he also still had a lot to learn, including how to rein in the competitiveness that was in part driving him to where he was going. Never wanting to settle, he could become frustrated when he didn’t succeed. Johansson said even losing a small-area game in practice, when most players hardly care, could spur Lucas’ competitiveness.

“I think everyone that is really competitive, especially when you’re young, you sometimes can have trouble controlling it,” Raymond said. “So (Johansson) really helped me with that, as well, to really channel it to a good cause. I think when you want to win so bad, you can get frustrated that the team isn’t winning or you (aren’t) playing good and you feel like you’re not helping and you get frustrated. So to be able to control that and channel it to something good, I think that’s been huge.”

Johansson is also quick to note that Raymond’s inner fire is what led him to be picked fourth overall. He said he sees the same thing in Dahlin, the 2018 No. 1 pick of the Sabres, who trained with Frölunda during the long NHL layoff. It shows up in activities as simple as floor ball.

“They can’t lose,” Johansson said. “They can’t lose anything. That’s Lucas, all the time.”

But that’s also only part of the story. Johansson says they’ve talked for years at Frölunda about how having a conversation with Raymond at 16 was already like speaking to a 22-year-old.

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Some of that, no doubt, must come from being around Hugo and his older friends growing up. Some of it may be innate. But the rest can likely be traced back to Jean and Cecilia, who Sjöström described as “maybe not like the hardcore hockey family.”

Instead, Cecilia’s brother Magnus Wosse describes Jean and Cecilia (who are divorced but remain good friends) as “very sensitive parents” who never pushed their sons. They supported the boys, bringing them to games and practices, but you don’t get the sense talking to anyone in the family that hockey was made out to be the entire world for Hugo or Lucas. Which, considering the family’s collective athletic pedigree, stands out.

Jean has been a fan of Frölunda hockey for 35 years, but when he and Cecilia were independently asked when they knew Lucas might have a shot at being this good at the sport, each said they never looked at it that way. Although, as strangers around Gothenburg have begun to recognize Raymond in public and ask for photos or autographs, they’ve become vividly aware of their son’s budding celebrity.

Hockey is only part of the conversation, though, when Raymond’s parents talk about him. They also go out of their way to bring up things like his emotional intelligence.

Much in the same way Raymond’s game contains multitudes — allowing him to play the role of playmaker, finisher, or simply a dogged competitor — so too does his personality.

“He always has time for everyone that wants to speak to him, and the younger kids in hockey,” Cecilia said. “Or even if we met young guys in the streets at home in Gothenburg, they know who Lucas is, and he always takes time for them. And if I ask him to come along with some of my friends’ kids who play hockey who are much younger, he says, ‘Yeah, of course.’ … He’s so humble, I think that’s what I’m mostly proud of, of Lucas. … Not what he accomplishes in his hockey. That’s just a bonus, I think.”

This is the Raymond his family knows — the one who, for as fiery as he can be on the ice, also still has a soft spot for some of the simpler things in life.

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“I don’t think Lucas wants me to tell this,” Hugo said, “but he loves romantic films with a great ending. … Every night, we try to find a movie, a romantic movie, with a great ending. And if it doesn’t have a great ending, we watch a new one.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why,” Lucas said. “Just, I like those feel-good movies, that afterwards you get a good feeling. The best if it’s a happy ending.”

The 2019 World Under-18 Championship took place in Raymond’s native Sweden, with a dizzying array of talent on display. A ridiculous Team USA, stacked with soon-to-be 2019 first-round picks including No. 1 Jack Hughes, headlined the event. Canada was star-studded up front, too, featuring first-round picks Dylan Cozens, Peyton Krebs and Alex Newhook.

Sweden, meanwhile, was led by a blue line loaded with 2019 talent, including first-round picks Philip Broberg, Victor Söderström and Tobias Björnfot. They still had some legit prospects at forward for that summer’s draft, including Simon Holmstrom and Karl Henriksson, but the Swedes were also leaning heavily on a pair of kids in the 2020 class: Raymond and his fellow winger Alexander Holtz.

Playing together alongside Henriksson, this was a massive stage for the two young Swedes to show a global audience what they could do.

Before the tournament, Raymond had been a key player for Frölunda’s junior teams in their playoffs, playing for both the J20 SuperElit and J18 Allsvenskan clubs. He had 18 points in 11 games between the two postseasons, but early in the World U18 tournament, he wasn’t lighting it up to the same degree.

Tobias Johansson was out having beers with others one night when a scout approached him about Raymond. He says the scout essentially told him: You just destroyed him for this tournament. You just were thinking about your team in Frölunda, you weren’t thinking about the player.

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This was late in the round-robin, before the quarterfinals had begun, so Johansson didn’t say anything. He saw the scout once or twice more during the elimination rounds, during which Raymond posted a couple of assists but still wasn’t necessarily playing up to his full potential. But Johansson knew something about Raymond then that perhaps this scout did not.

“The biggest asset or skill I think Lucas has,” Johansson said, “is that he is playing his best when the team needs him the most, and the game is the most important.”

Johansson’s theory is this aptitude comes from always being the younger, smaller kid playing with the age groups above him. All that experience being skilled, but smaller than other players who could beat him physically, bred a type of competitiveness that can thrive in those moments.

But he can’t say for sure, because Raymond has been this way for as long as he’s known him.

During the elimination rounds, Sweden had beaten the Czech Republic and then Canada to advance to the final. Meanwhile, Russia, led by the 2020 draft’s top  goalie prospect Yaroslav Askarov, upset the stacked U.S. team in a shootout. That set up a final game between Sweden and Russia, in Sweden, for the World U18 gold medal.

“I think it’s fun games when it’s kind of all on the line,” Raymond said on his draft night. “The tight games, I think that’s where everybody steps up and you can almost feel — it’s a certain feeling in those type of games, and I really enjoy it.”

This, without a doubt, was that kind of game. Raymond struck first, opening the scoring midway through the first period by streaking down the left side of the ice, burning a Russian defender and sniping Askarov. Russia battled back, eventually taking a 3-2 lead in the third period, less than 10 minutes from clinching the gold. But 25 seconds later, Raymond answered with a one-timer from the slot. The game headed for overtime.

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On that kind of world stage, in a tournament headlined by players just a couple months from being drafted — and in his home country, no less — moments don’t get much bigger. So naturally, five and a half minutes into overtime, Raymond took a pass at the left circle, made one move around a defender, sniped Askarov again, then turned and skated down the ice to celebrate winning gold.

“And that scout never spoke to me again,” Johansson said.

Without a doubt, Raymond made a big impression in that gold-medal game. Red Wings director of amateur scouting Kris Draper said it meant a lot seeing what Raymond had done on that stage, raising his level of play as the moment called for it.

“That puts a smile on your face when you’re watching it,” Draper said. “You love seeing real good young hockey players kind of rise to the occasion, and that’s exactly what Lucas Raymond did that game.”

Hugo Raymond said Lucas’ draft night is the proudest he’s been of his brother, simply because it’s something they had talked about since they were young boys.

The day arrived in a much different manner than they likely would have pictured it, sitting at home instead of at Montreal’s Centre Bell, and with the draft not beginning until 1 a.m. Swedish time.

When Raymond spoke with media that night, he said he had “kind of an idea” Detroit might pick him, but he tried to stay neutral, not wanting to get his hopes up on any one team. Certainly, with the bevy of teams picking in the top 10, there were all kinds of potential outcomes for him.

As it happened, he went to the league’s reigning last-place team, in a market desperate to see winning hockey again. The accompanying pressure of that situation could, and maybe should, be daunting for him.

“Actually he has said all this time that he wanted to come to a town that breathes hockey, if you know what I mean,” Cecilia Wosse Raymond said. “A hockey town.”

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In Detroit, Raymond will certainly get that. From nearly 4,000 miles away, the city’s Red Wings fans are rabidly following his SHL campaign, where he’s already surpassed his scoring totals from last season. Sjöström said he’s seen “a big step” from Raymond already this season, and noted how good it must feel, after all the hype, “that you get to deliver and show everybody that.”

One recent evening, on a road trip with Frölunda, Raymond hops on the phone to answer a couple of final questions. One of them is what he’s looking forward to about the NHL, whenever that day finally arrives.

“I think it’s something that you’ve dreamed about since you were a little kid,” he begins, talking about finally being able to compete against players he grew up idolizing, and doing so in “those extremely huge arenas with a lot of great fans.”

Then, he says the magic words.

“And also competing and having the chance to win the Stanley Cup. I think that’s, of course, something that is the main goal.”

Raymond, after all, loves a happy ending.

(Top photo: Jonas Andersson / Courtesy of the Frölunda Indians)

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