In years past, the Penguins would round out their development camp roster with a few undrafted free agent invites, players who don’t have any kind of contract but could be signed to one to bolster the pool.

By a “few,” I mean that if they brought anything close to 10 undrafted guys … that’d be a lot. This year? They brought 23 players who weren’t their draft picks and were looking for an NHL contract.

When camp wrapped up on Monday with a four-on-four round-robin tournament, none of the 23 had a better showing than perhaps 21-year-old wing Iiro Hakkarainen.

The Penguins’ development staff and scouts have seen a lot of Hakkarainen over the last two seasons. And it’s hard to ignore that he’s shaping up to be a serial winner.

The 5-foot-11, 180-pound Helsinki, Finland native was a freshman at Western Michigan University last season, where he and Penguins defense prospect Joona Vaisanen helped lead their team to a NCAA championship. The season prior, he won the USHL championship with the Fargo Force, where he was a teammate with one Penguins forward prospect in Zam Plante, and another they’d end up drafting last summer in Mac Swanson.

“Our scouts really liked him throughout the season,” Penguins director of player development Tom Kostopoulos told me of Hakkarainen on Monday. “In the playoffs, he even stepped it up with his team winning the national championship.”

Hakkarainen tied for seventh in points (29) and tied for fifth in goals (13) in 42 games with Western Michigan this season. He had the game-winning goal in the NCHC Frozen Faceoff Semifinal to eliminate North Dakota, and had a goal and an assist in the championship game over Boston University.

Hakkarainen’s hot streak continued into the Penguins’ development camp tournament on Monday. His three goals in three games led the tournament, and was a key part of Team Stevens’ run to the Michel Briere Cup.

Hakkarainen scored the first goal of the day, beating Team Patrick’s Gabiel D’Aigle after D’Aigle made back-to-back saves just before, the start of an eventual 4-0 Team Stevens win. Team Stevens’ next game was against Team Johnston, and Team Stevens was holding onto a 2-1 lead with a minute remaining when Team Johnston pulled its goaltender for the extra attacker, and had a number of opportunities before Hakkarainen put the game away with an empty-netter from a distance. When Team Stevens and Team Patrick met again in the championship, Team Patrick had a one-goal lead with four minutes left before Hakkarainen scored to force overtime, setting the scene for the eventual shootout win.

“It’s a great crowd there,” Hakkarainen said when I asked about his performance. “I mean, it’s a good opportunity for me to stand out here. So it actually feels good. Very good.”

I asked Hakkarainen how he’d describe himself for those not familiar with his game yet, and he said “the most simple way is as a ‘skillful grinder'”

“I like to work hard,” he added. “My work ethic is always top-notch. That’s my rules for my game.”

Kostopoulos pointed to Hakkarainen’s compete level, too, as his greatest asset, among other things.

“His skating, his ability to force defenders into bad plays and force turnovers and then be able to turn those into offensive chances really stood out,” Kostopoulos continued. “It was nice to see him in the four-on-four situation and just hounding pucks. To me, he looks like a puck hound, or someone that defenseman would not like to play against.”

With Hakkarainen only being a freshman last season, he’s not quite ready to turn pro. He’s not really looking to get a contract offer this summer, telling me that he’s “going back to Western, for sure.”

“We have a great group there,” he said. “We have a good development program, just everything’s set up for me there. I have to go back. I want to go back.”

The Penguins will still surely keep an eye on Hakkarainen next season, as he’ll once again be teammates with Vaisanen. If Hakkarainen has a good year, he’d be one to watch as someone who could earn an entry-level contract next offseason.

MORE TAKEAWAYS FROM CAMP

• Required disclaimer and note before reading anything else: This is not an evaluation camp. Nobody should be making any large, sweeping generalizations off of anything shown this week. The tournament was a four-on-four format with the intensity level being below that of a preseason game. A lot of these guys hadn’t even been on the ice for a long time before coming here. What gets shown in the tournament isn’t always anything close to real life. I was reading some of my articles on the tournaments from years past, and in 2019 I praised Jan Drozg’s backchecking in the games, ahead of his first pro season. That might have been the last time in his life he ever made an effort to backcheck. A cautionary tale. That being said …

• I thought Ben Kindel’s shot was extremely noticeable for the good. I also thought that for his size, his speed was way slower than it should be. But then again, it’s a summer scrimmage, and he hadn’t skated in awhile before coming into this camp. I have more on him in a separate story here.

• Will Horcoff is a giant out there. He’s 6-5 and 203 pounds and that alone made him stand out among this group. He was able to use that to his advantage often, outmuscling his opponents. There was a moment in his second game where he easily stripped Harrison Brunicke of the puck, took it to the net and scored. It was his second goal of the day.

• Bill Zonnon, too, looked like a grown man playing against kids out there. He had a goal in his team’s first game.

• Kostopoulos, asked specifically about Horcoff and Zonnon, said he “thought Horcoff and Zonnon both had really good four-on-four tournaments, there’s games and sequences where they really stood out. Zonnon wanted the puck. He was available for the puck. He made plays happen. He was transporting it up the ice on a few occasions. I know he got one goal, it was nice to see. Horcoff, his size, and I thought his skating looked good. He scored a couple of really powerful goals there, one where he took the post, took the puck to the back post, and tucked it in, beating the D. The other was a little change of speed, shaking off the defender in front of him for a big goal for his team. So it was nice to see them throughout the camp in different situations and then watch them in the game situation.”

• Brunicke, other than that moment, had a fine showing. I wouldn’t say he looked miles out of place, like an NHL defenseman playing against a bunch of prospects, but then again, this is a meaningless summer tournament in July. He had some good moments. Broke up a breakaway by outracing AHL forward Nolan Renwick at one point. He scored a tying goal with 8.9 seconds remaining in regulation, then scored in the ensuing shootout to help send his team to the championship before losing to Team Stevens.

• Hard to really judge Mikhail Ilyin for anything on the ice here, given his travel delays causing him to show up a couple days late, and having to battle through the horror of being stuck in Newark, N.J. for a brief period. There’s also a language barrier, he speaks almost no English — I noticed during the drills earlier in the week, he’d never lead off the drill and would try to learn the concepts by watching those in front of them, and even then still a coach would have to explain things more to him using more visual cues. Kostopoulos said that “it was great to get to know him, and I think it was really good for him to be around the other players, and the players were great with him. You can see he makes some really heavy plays out there, just like a couple plays where he didn’t touch the puck and left it for someone, and some really nice passes. Skating is the biggest area that needs to come. I think he can get stronger and really work on that skating. He has his habits of slowing plays down because he’s so intelligent and we want him to play a bit faster.”

• The first game must have felt like deja vu for goaltender Gabiel D’Aigle, who faced more shots than any other goaltender in the QMJHL last season. Play was in his end way more often than not, and he was getting lit up. He stopped 12 of 15 shots in his team’s opening game, then six of eight in the championship, per Nic Lavigne who was tracking the shots by hand for us today. Since D’Aigle’s English isn’t super great, and Lavigne’s first language is French, he helped out today and interviewed D’Aigle in French (then translated it back into English) for this Q&A.

• A couple of guys who were somehow always in good position in the tournament to be getting shots off or setting up their teammates for opportunities: Defenseman and 2025 fifth-round pick Quinn Beauchesne, defenseman and 2024 sixth-round pick Vaisanen, and undrafted Boston College forward Jake Sondreal.

• Kostopoulos was asked who stood out to him among the players he might not have expected to be standouts, and he named two: AHL-contracted forward Aaron Huglen, and Vaisanen: “I thought Aaron Huglen stood out. He’s a guy I would say I didn’t know a ton about coming into this. Our scouts liked him, I’ve only seen him on video and chatted with him a few times, but I thought he made a good impression and played really well. Joona Vaisanen, we all know and expected a lot, and he didn’t disappoint. I thought he looked really well out there and captained his team to the win. So it was good.”

• One notable defense pairing on Team Johnston: Daniel Laatsch-Finn Harding. With both guys signing entry-level contracts to turn pro next season, that could be a real pairing in the minors, and a fun one, too. Both players are physical and pride themselves in their good defense first. Laatsch brings exceptional size (6-5, 191). The 6-foot-1, 205-pound Harding doesn’t have the same reach, but he’s a heavy hitter and brings a lot of offense, too.

• A lot of these kids are exceptional people. Beauchesne made a point to shake the hand of every member of the support staff, and every member of the media (regardless of whether they interviewed him this week) to thank them for their time this week. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.

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