Latvia\u2019s win over Germany<\/a> in the preliminary round. Vilmanis said when he was not with the team, he spent his time with family members who made the trip to Milan.<\/p>\n\u201cI think it definitely helped me,\u201d Vilmanis said. \u201c\u2026 Even the last year in the AHL helped me a lot to develop for this year. I feel a lot more confident. And of course these last months, spending time with the NHL players here in the locker room, yeah, it\u2019s just been a really good learning period for me, too. And just seeing what they\u2019re doing and trying to learn every day and putting that out there in the Olympics was really good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vilmanis played with fellow Panther Uvis Balinskis on the Latvian team. Balinskis was an assistant captain for his national team, and he praised Vilmanis\u2019 performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did great,\u201d Balinskis said. \u201cI think the call-up before (the) Olympics, a little time in the NHL, helped him a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maurice said Vilamanis is \u201cquite a bit ahead of the curve\u201d for a player his age.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of hard parts to the game that seem to come natural to him,\u201d Maurice said. \u201cHe is physical, but he can hang on to pucks, stop pucks, win puck battles. We were talking about it after (with) one of the coaches: He can see the game in the practice drills. So whether you\u2019re running a three-on-two or it\u2019s a five \u2014 whatever it is that you\u2019re running, he can run his routes as he would in a game, even in the drill. I think he\u2019s fairly advanced at that for a young guy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT LAUDERDALE \u2014 The Panthers\u2019 youngest Olympian returned to South Florida beyond thrilled after his latest journey saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5102],"tags":[62,57,5141,5,1180,4,63,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-471910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-florida-panthers","8":"tag-florida","9":"tag-florida-panthers","10":"tag-floridapanthers","11":"tag-hockey","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-nhl","14":"tag-panthers","15":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116133730992562097","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}