Wood has learned 'quite a bit' at UConn ahead of 2023 NHL Draft

The 2023 Upper Deck NHL Draft will be held at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville from June 28-29. The first round will take place on June 28 (7 p.m. ET; ESPN, SN, TVAS), and rounds 2-7 will be on June 29 (11 a.m. ET; NHLN, SN, TVAS). NHL.com is counting down to the draft with in-depth profiles on top prospects, podcasts, and other features. Today, a look at University of Connecticut forward Matthew Wood. NHL.com's full draft coverage can be found here.

Convincing Matthew Wood to enroll at the University of Connecticut might have been one of the easiest things Mike Cavanaugh has done during his 10 seasons as Huskies coach.

Cavanaugh and his assistant at the time, Joe Pereira, first noticed Wood while scouting another player in the British Columbia Hockey League. They were so impressed that rather than just recruiting Wood through video chats and phone calls during the summer of 2021, they flew to Seattle, took the ferry to Vancouver, cleared the laborious COVID-19 protocols to enter Canada, and made the nearly three-hour drive west to visit Wood and his family in person in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Cavanaugh felt the meeting went well, but he's been around long enough to know that you never know for sure.

And then his phone rang.

"We were on our drive back to Seattle and he says: 'Yeah, I don't want to go through this recruiting process. I like you guys. I want to be at UConn,'" Cavanaugh said. "So I was like, OK."

The decision worked well for Connecticut and Wood (6-foot-4, 193 pounds), who led the Huskies with 34 points (11 goals, 23 assists) in 35 games as a freshman last season. He is No. 4 in NHL Central Scouting's final ranking of North American skaters presented by BioSteel.

"I kind of decided that I wanted to know where I was going before I started my 16-year-old year (2021-22) because I didn't really want to be dealing with that while I was playing," Wood said. "So I kind of just took the summer to kind of see what was out there. I talked to [Pereira] a lot and talked to [Cavanaugh] a lot. I really liked them as people and as coaches. Once [Cavanaugh] came to my house and I was able to meet him in person, it just felt like the right place for me. I didn't really want to waste any time, so it was just like, that's it."

Wood had other options, though, including playing for Regina of the Western Hockey League, which had selected him in the second round (No. 41) of the 2020 WHL bantam draft. Regina had used the No. 1 pick in that draft on Connor Bedard, who is one of Wood's closest friends and the projected No. 1 pick in the 2023 NHL Draft.

Bedard and Wood played spring hockey together with the Vancouver Vipers program for five years (2015-19), and Wood lived at Bedard's house for a year when they were 14. As such, it was a tough decision to pass on the opportunity to play with Bedard, but Wood felt the college schedule was more of what he needed to help develop his game.

"It was definitely a hard decision," he said. "Kind of just had to set my mind on my own path. I felt like college was going to get me personally ready for when I had to make the next jump up. Obviously, Regina is a great franchise and they had a really good team this year, and obviously Connor's an unbelievably special player and it was a really great opportunity for me. But I ended up choosing to go to UConn, and I'm really happy with my decision, for sure."

Although Wood was the youngest player in NCAA men's ice hockey last season -- he turned 18 on Feb. 6 -- he got off to a quick start with Connecticut, scoring in each of its first two games. However, the adjustment from the British Columbia Hockey League, which he led in 2021-22 with 45 goals and 85 points for Victoria, was harder than it might have looked.

"Obviously, I started off pretty well with our first weekend in Vermont, and then kind of started struggling after that," Wood said. "I definitely feel like I had to learn quite a bit about just playing the right way, managing the puck and not trying to do too much and not cheating for offense. So, [Cavanaugh] did a really good job teaching me all that stuff.

"I feel like by the second half of the year and towards the end of the year, I was a lot more responsible, and you could see a lot of growth in my game and maturity in my game."

NHL scouts certainly noticed Wood's season-long upward trend.

"His development from the first half to the second half was startling," Central Scouting vice president Dan Marr said. "There are certain things we look for in a player. ... We felt his skating needed a bit of an upgrade, more so him improving his skating habits as far as keeping his feet moving, having a better stop-start game just to keep himself on top of the play. He improved in that area greatly where skating wasn't even brought up in the second half.

"He just showed how well he was able to read the play at that level, create the offensive chances for his team. Down low in the offensive zone he's one of the best players in this draft class."

Wood capped off his season by leading Canada with seven goals in seven games at the 2023 IIHF Under-18 World Championship. In the bronze-medal game, he had a goal and three assists to help Canada rally for a 4-3 overtime win against Slovakia, including scoring the tying goal with 1:10 remaining in the third period.

"I think I had a pretty good tournament," Wood said. "Obviously, that's not the best that I'm ever going to be. I feel like I've improved quite a bit over the summer since then already. I think for right now it was a good last impression (on NHL scouts), but there's still lots of work to do."

That includes continuing to improve his skating, with a focus on his acceleration and separation speed.

"I feel like that would really help my game and allow me to get a lot more space and time with the puck," he said. "Once I can do that, have time, see the ice well, I think I can make a lot of plays and be a lot more dangerous, for sure."

How much longer he'll continue to be dangerous in college remains to be seen, though Wood said he plans on playing at least one more season at Connecticut.

"I don't want to rush myself out of college by any means," he said. "No team ever said that they left a kid in college too long. Whether it's one or two more years, I think that's probably my timeline in college. I'm probably leaning towards two more years at this point, but you never know what's going to happen after next year and you never know what's going to happen after the year after that."

Photos: UConn Athletics

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