Andersson staying calm while playing on the edge to lead Flames

The word runs through Rasmus Andersson’s head, a blade slicing through the noise.

Sinnesskarp. Sinnesskarp. Sinnesskarp. Sinnesskarp.

He repeats it over and over, a mantra that settles his nerves and resets his brain and brings him back from a bad shift. There is no easy translation and, when Andersson tries to find one on a recent afternoon, he stumbles as he tries to distill the Swedish into English.

“It’s just, ‘Stay in the moment,’ pretty much,” he said. “Be mentally aware and be in the present, if I try to translate it.”

His aunt, Susanne Pettersson, offers another option, that it “means to be sharp in your senses, to be focused when you need to.”

It is working.

Andersson, the defenseman and alternate captain for the Calgary Flames, has had other words over the seasons, other mantras, other ways to calm his emotions and find the knife’s edge between over the line and on the line. For this season, in which the 28-year-old seems to be blossoming, Sinnesskarp is working, alongside another, "Var lugn,” Swedish for “stay calm.”

It is the continual refinement of a process that Andersson began when he was 15, starting to study mental skills under the tutelage of Pettersson, his mother’s sister and a mental skills coach in their native Sweden. She works with two other current NHL players, a few with NHL contracts, and is the mental skills advisor for the Malmo Redhawks and Frolunda HC, among other elite athletes in other sports.

“I have a few key words I try to remind myself of,” Andersson said Nov. 7 after practice in Boston. “I try to repeat them quite a bit in my head. I notice when I go off in my own head. … So I just try to remind myself sometimes on the bench or if you’ve had a bad shift, try to remind myself of those words and I usually reset and take it from there.”

It is paying off. Not only has Andersson taken on the mantle of leadership this season, but he has contributed offensively and defensively for the Flames in his ninth NHL season. Andersson has 11 points (four goals, seven assists) in 15 games, tops on the team in scoring, and a number he will try to add to when the Flames take on the Los Angeles Kings at Scotiabank Saddledome as part of “Monday Night Hockey” on Prime Video in Canada (8:30 p.m. ET; Prime, FDSNNW).

But at the same time that Andersson is using his mantras, calming his mind and his body, the often on-the-edge player doesn’t want to calm himself too much. He knows what helps his game, what keeps him sharp, what has contributed to his uptick this season.

“Excuse my language, but just trying to play with a little bit more F-you,” Andersson said.

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This was not supposed to be a particularly good season for the Flames (7-5-3), who were expected to continue their rebuild and live near the bottom of the Pacific Division. Instead, they are holding their own, sitting fourth, between the Vancouver Canucks and last season’s Stanley Cup finalist Edmonton Oilers.

Part of that is Andersson, who is on pace to shatter both his NHL career high in points, 50 in 2021-22, and his NHL career high in goals, 11 in 2022-23.

“Just trying to play my style and contribute both ways with the puck,” he said. “Just trying to play with a little more bite and be more active in the games, try to join the rush as much as I can, always kind of push for the next one. That’s what’s been my mindset to start.”

He has been, always, an edgy player, one who tests the limits, one who took too many 10-minute misconducts when he was younger and yelled at referees. He recalled a game in the bubble against the Montreal Canadiens, one where he was screaming at players, chirping them over and over throughout the game, so much so that then-Flames captain Mark Giordano looked at him and said, “Are you OK today?”

Andersson’s response? “No, I’m pissed off.”

He had a meeting that day with then-coach Geoff Ward, who told him that he liked when played on the edge, when he was vocal with opponents, but that it was too much. Conversely, there have been times when Flames coach Ryan Huska has found that he doesn’t have enough pushback in his game and has had to encourage him to find it.

“For Ras, sometimes that means he’s in people’s faces, he’s talking on the ice,” Huska said. “That’s one of the things that I think gets him going because it drags him and his teammates into it.”

There was a line to be found.

“I think that’s always been my game and I kind of got away from it a little bit last year,” he said. “I can be a pretty emotional player. When we started losing last year, just more like pissed off. But when I get too pissed off, I get pissed off, and it’s not good.

“So I’ve got to try to find that balance.”

That search started way back when he was 15, long before most kids considered mental skills, thought through the emotional side of the game and engaged help in using it to their advantage.

There, Andersson had a big leg up, in Pettersson.

“I’ve been working with him since he was very young,” she said by phone from Sweden. “When he was very young, we worked with goal-setting. It’s one thing to be good in your sport, to be good in hockey, which he has been since he was very young. But another thing is to add mental parts.”

He had to know what he was aiming for, first.

Then came the rest.

“We started working to control your emotions, to have a strong, winning mindset,” said Pettersson, who has been a mental skills coach for more than 30 years. “When he was younger, he had ups and downs with his emotions, but as the years went by, he needed to add, to control his emotions and to handle the emotions so the emotions would be part of your success.”

They wanted him not only not to be controlled by them, but to use them to his benefit. They empowered him with the tools to do so.

Enter the words, which Pettersson called a “trigger,” words that “make the brain and the body work together.”

It’s like pressing a button for him, on and off.

“In a split second, you have to be focused,” she said. “Then if you use these words, for him, it works very fine, to go out there and he knows exactly what to do.”

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It has been a road to get here for Andersson, through conditioning challenges when he was in Stockton in the American Hockey League, to refining his game on the ice, to conquering the mental side, to discovering his voice.

“Once he got his chance to be in the NHL, I think he understands that he can be a really good player as long as he does things the right way,” Huska said. “He’s turned himself into a leader for us now. We use him in every situation. He’s a guy that I look to and rely on for a lot of conversations about our team and the game. He’s grown a lot.”

Selected by Calgary in the second round (No. 53) of the 2015 NHL Draft, Andersson has learned how best to shut down opponents, especially the top players, to force them to play in their own end, when their goal is to have the puck as much as possible, when their weakness is often in defending.

“He definitely doesn’t lack [confidence], even when things aren’t going well,” defenseman MacKenzie Weegar said. “It’s his defensive game that he’s really focusing on, which is translating to more opportunities offensively for him. He’s capitalizing on it.”

With Andersson’s hot start, the defenseman has done his best to possibly play his way onto a stacked Swedish defense for the 4 Nations Face-Off in February. It’s has been there, all season, at the front of his mind, a lure and a motivation.

“It’s one of those things where I put the pressure on myself to make it as hard as possible for them not to select me,” he said. “I would love for it to happen, but that D corps is tough. I’m doing everything I can to be on it.”

He is defending. He is leading. He is scoring.

And it’s when he’s scoring that he has garnered the most attention. There is a puckish side to Andersson, a playful aspect that has peaked out this season, has emerged as the “Razzy Death Stare.”

It’s something he first did back in Vancouver when he scored his 100th NHL point, on March 19, 2022, at Rogers Arena, when he hit on a shot from Matthew Tkachuk, skating over to the glass for a brief stare through at a fan.

It has grown.

After goals, as a celebration, he has located an opposing fan, a wrong-colored jersey, and simply stared. And stared.

“If people know me, they laugh about it, right?” Andersson said. “But the same way, it’s a little f-you to the world sometimes. But I like it and it creates something to talk about too. We always ask hockey players to be more personality-wise, so it’s just along with that.”

Not that everyone is entirely in favor.

“I had mixed feelings because the first time he did it was in Nashville and he just let me be by myself, he didn’t celebrate with me, so I looked kinda silly,” Weegar said. “But now it’s gaining some traction. It’s been fun to see.

“I get a good laugh out of it. As long as he keeps scoring, he can do whatever he wants.”