Kotkaniemi Hitting His Stride To Start The Second Half

RALEIGH, NC. -Jesperi Kotkaniemi etched his 11th goal of the season Sunday, matching his single-season career-high with 33 games left to play.
It's been quite the season for the 21-year-old already, having to handle the spotlight that came with the offer sheet, playing Montreal early in the season, and starting the year as the club's fourth-line left wing.

With the hysteria around the transaction having mostly subsided, the meeting against his former teammates out of the way, and a little bit more comfortability within the team, Kotkaniemi's play as of late has appeared to hit a new gear.
"I just try and do the same thing every night, work as hard as I can. Whatever my ice time is, I just try and use it as best as I can," Carolina's #82 said with a smile post-game in Pittsburgh. "It's been fun to get a couple of goals, always brings the confidence up."
The game-opening tally came just two days after Kotkaniemi led all Canes forwards in ice time in a win over Nashville, executing on his biggest assignment of the campaign. An injury to Vincent Trocheck left the team with just three centers in the lineup, and the Finn was tasked with centering both his line that he began the game with, as well as Trocheck's spot, between Steven Lorentz and Martin Necas.
"I thought he was really good. I just basically put him in that spot and doubled him up when we had to. He was really good. He had a really tough matchup and I thought he was solid," Rod Brind'Amour said of the evening, one which turned out to be the kick-starter of Kotkaniemi's back-to-back set of markers. "That was a big goal. When I've asked him to step into these other roles, he's been great. I think he's just going to get better and better. He's getting more comfortable with how we want to play and he's got a lot of talent."
As Brind'Amour often preaches, there's more to the game than just point production though. His teammates around him have also noticed the elevated play and also believe that they'll see him hit a new level here in the second half.
"[The Nashville game] was a physical game and the juices were flowing. When those games happen, 'KK' kind of rises and that's something that you want, because come playoff time those games get tough and they get tight," Jordan Martinook complimented over the weekend. "That's what [Friday] was. You see him get better when those games come around and that's something that's going to be big here down the stretch."

"He's a player that's been in a few different roles and he's continued to find ways to contribute," team captain Jordan Staal also praised. "We saw a piece of it Friday] and we're hoping that he can continue to be the player that we know he can."
Now with 22 points on the campaign, Kotkaniemi's current career-high is 34, which came during his rookie season with the Canadiens. Having only missed three games all year, which were because of COVID-19 earlier this month, it feels as if there's a real chance for him to hit 35 over the next nine weeks.
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