Underrated Guentzel secret weapon for Lightning vs. Panthers 

TAMPA, Fla. -- For a player who may just be one of the more underrated in the game, a player whose statistics and results could add all the way up to a Hall of Fame nod when he’s done, a player who has had success after success in the regular season and the postseason, there are a whole lot of ways to insult Jake Guentzel.

He’s not the fastest. He’s not the biggest. He’s not the strongest. He’s not the most talented. He doesn’t have the hardest shot.

He isn’t. He doesn’t. He can’t.

It’s not like he doesn’t know all this. It’s not that these knocks haven’t been with him since he started in the game, since he learned to eat, breathe and love it, growing up with a coach for a father and two hockey-playing brothers.

He still found a way.

“You’ve got to be good at a lot of things when you’re not good at one thing,” Guentzel said. “You’ve got to make sure to round your game out at a lot of different things -- shooting, stickhandling, just being in the right spots at all times. Just getting your stick loose in front of the net.”

Which might just be how he came to the part of his game that does stick out the most, a part invisible to the eye, but which is so easy to appreciate while playing alongside him.

His mind.

“Just his IQ, I think, is the biggest thing,” Lightning forward Brayden Point said. “He’s so smart out there. He’s in right spots. He makes a lot of good plays with the puck. He just reads the game really well. … You get guys like [Guentzel and Nikita Kucherov] on your line, it just makes the game so much easier because they’re reading the game a couple steps ahead.”

That will be on display on Tuesday when Guentzel takes the ice for the start of his seventh run in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and first with the Tampa Bay Lightning, playing against the Florida Panthers in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference First Round best-of-7 series (8:30 p.m. ET; ESPN, FDSNSUN, SCRIPPS).

Guentzel made the playoffs in each of his first six seasons in the NHL with the Pittsburgh Penguins, winning the Stanley Cup in 2017 in his rookie season, and that pedigree was part of what the Lightning signed up for when they signed him to a seven-year, $63 million contract last July 1.

And though Guentzel could regard all this as insulting -- damning with faint praise, to be sure -- he takes it all in stride. He knows it’s not meant to be offensive, not meant to demean or denigrate, but more to somehow explain what can seemingly be inexplicable about his game.

“For a little guy, he gets in there,” said Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour, who coached Guentzel (5-foot-11, 178 pounds) when he came over in a trade from the Penguins on March 7, 2024. “He obviously can score around the net. He’s just a smart hockey player. He’s not big, he’s not physical, he doesn’t do that, but he’s not afraid and he gets to the areas where you need to score. Obviously he can score.”

Guentzel has scored at least 40 goals three times in his career, including an NHL career-high 41 this season. He had 80 points (41 goals, 39 assists) in 80 games, four points shy of his career high from the 2021-22 season with the Penguins.

In 600 games, over nine seasons, Guentzel has 571 points (268 goals, 303 assists) in the regular season and, in 69 postseason games, has 67 points (38 goals, 29 assists).

It has been a career of overperforming expectations, of ignoring questions -- and then answering them.

When he arrived at the University of Omaha-Nebraska, coach Dean Blais knew what to expect, having known Jake’s father, Mike, a longtime assistant coach at the University of Minnesota. He knew he had two older brothers.

“He’s got a lot of skills. He can think the game, he’s quick,” Blais said. “He works at the game every day. He was the first one at the rink every day and after a couple months, I [asked] Jake, is school going OK? How you doing in school?”

He wasn’t sure how it was possible for Guentzel to be at the rink as much as he was, wondered how he managed his classes.

“He was always there in the morning taping his stick, getting his skates ready, making sure he was ready for practice,” said Blais, who discovered Guentzel was taking a large portion of his classes online. “He wanted to know what we were doing that particular day, who he was playing with. He’s a hockey guy.”

Guentzel played in Omaha for three years, before it was decision time. Would he sign with the Penguins? Would he go back to school? What was the move?

“It was 50/50,” recalled Blais, a member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. “His dad wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure, Jake wasn’t sure. … We all got together and just kind of talked about it. OK, I think he’s ready. Well, he signs with Pittsburgh and I thought, oh, he’s going to be up and down a little bit.

“He won the Stanley Cup and could have won the Conn Smythe. Sidney Crosby won it that year, but Jake was right in there with him (21 points in 25 games). If anyone said they saw that coming, they’re full of beans.”

But, again, it was easy to overlook and underrate Guentzel.

Easy to look past all he offered because of what he doesn’t.

It was honed all those years of being beaten up and picked on by older brothers, all those years of finding his way, all those years of watching hockey and learning and studying the game, all those moments on the ice with his father, who Guentzel credits for getting him to this point.

“I’ve just been around it my whole life,” Guentzel said. “I’m fortunate my dad and brothers played, so I’ve been lucky enough to be around it. … I might not be the biggest, I’m a smaller guy, so I’ve got to try to outthink my way around there.”

He realized it as early as bantams, that this was his path. That this might just get him where he wanted to go.

“He’s got a lot of hockey sense,” Blais said. “He’s got hockey sense like a (Wayne) Gretzky. There’s only one Gretzky but he’s got that type of sense, he knows where everyone on the ice is. His big thing is -- scared me a little bit -- was first in on the forecheck. I always thought he had to protect himself a little more, but he seemed to survive the punishment of the physical defensemen even when he’s the first one in the corner getting a puck.

“I think that’s part of the charm too. He plays with a lot of passion every game. And in the years that I coached him, in the years that I watched him, there was not one time when Jake wasn’t mentally ready -- and that says something about a kid that’s getting a lot of ice time, power play, penalty kill, the whole works.”

It’s what he was built to do, never with any excuses.

It was all the game watching, all the film, leaving Blais without a whole lot of coaching to do. There was always the understanding, the preparation, the mental toughness, all part of what makes Blais call him “a natural.”

But, still, Guentzel isn’t the type of player who can be pinpointed as having the best this, the fastest that, but he is an elite thinker, an elite student of the game. It was exactly what was so easy to see when he arrived in Tampa.

“The one thing about ‘Guenz’ is seeing it firsthand, that he may not be the fastest skater, have the hardest shot, you go down the list of qualities, but he has this ability to play with the best players in the world,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “That really, really came to the forefront, not only playing for us but when I watched him at [the 4 Nations Face-Off]. On a loaded U.S. team, you could make an argument he might have been the best, or if not, like the top two or three performers, and that’s playing against the best of the best.

“So his hockey IQ is probably the thing that watching him from afar, didn’t appreciate til we had him.”

Now, though, he knows. They all do. They can see it every time he takes the ice, every pass he makes, every goal he scores, everything he anticipates and what he has made himself into because of all he isn’t.

“I just love the game,” Guentzel said. “I watch the game. I’m just all around the game -- at night, it’s all I do is just watch hockey. You just try to learn from people and watch and that’s just the biggest thing. I just love the game.”

NHL.com Senior Writer Dan Rosen and NHL.com independent correspondent Corey Long contributed to this report.