There is a chance that St. Adolphe’s Owen Pickering will become a first round draft pick at the upcoming 2022 NHL Entry Draft. Just a few weeks ago, NHL Central Scouting ranked the 6’4” defenceman twenty-first among North American skaters for the 2022 NHL Draft.
In his second year playing for the WHL’s Swift Current Broncos, the 17-year-old Pickering currently has 23 points in 39 games.
“He looks like a top 20 pick,” one NHL scout recently said. “Pretty rare athleticism and coordination for a player of his age and size.”
“He thinks the game extremely well,” Broncos interim head coach Devan Praught told the Winnipeg Free Press. “He remembers things, whether it’s a game ago or two games ago. He can remember details of play, so he just has that sensibility.”
Pickering credits his family for his hockey development from a young age.
“Hockey’s a big part of our lives, so I was skating pretty young,” says Pickering. “At that point, my parents always asked if I was enjoying it. I said yes, and here we are, still playing all these years later. Being from St. Adolphe helped me because of all the support from the town. It’s a small town, so everyone is rooting for you, which is always pretty cool.”
A lot of athletes nowadays are quick to emphasize how important it is for kids to play a variety of sports while they’re young and not focus solely on one sport, at least until they’re in their teen years.
Pickering is one to agree with this sentiment.
“In my opinion, it’s very important,” says Pickering. “I credit a lot of my coordination to playing other sports. In addition to hockey, I was pretty fortunate enough to play baseball with the AAA Carillon team for four years and also represent Team Manitoba at U13 Nationals.”
Pickering started moving up the ranks of hockey with the Eastman Selects program before transferring over to Winnipeg with the Rink Hockey Academy. He was there for a year and a half before joining the Swift Current Broncos in 2020–21.
“It was a difficult transition at first, but honestly, for me, it was just realizing that it’s hockey,” he says. “It’s the same sport, just a little bit faster, and all I needed to do was trust my abilities and believe that I belonged here. I’ve loved my time here so far. Swift Current is awesome, the support we get is crazy, and my billets are awesome.”
Pickering tries not to think too hard about the looming NHL Entry Draft and doesn’t seem to care too much about which team drafts him. His focus is solely on his team in Swift Current and doing what he can to help them win, developing into the best hockey player he can be, and letting the chips fall where they may.
“My goal for this season is to make the playoffs, and going forward over the next couple of years I want to bring a championship back to Swift Current,” adds Pickering. “That would be amazing!”
