OTTAWA — Sawyer Mynio showed up to the Seattle Thunderbirds’ 2021 training camp with a backpack full of clothes not expecting to make the team.
When he did, his parents had to make the five-hour drive (or six depending on construction, weather and traffic) from Seattle to Kamloops — and back — to pick some more up for him.
A little more than three years later, Mynio is participating in a different camp, this time in Ottawa.
His expectations for himself have changed. This team — Team Canada for the 2025 World Juniors — he plans to make.
That Mynio was a third-round pick of those Thunderbirds, taken No. 63 in the 2020 WHL Bantam Draft. He was coming off a lost season of minor hockey due to the pandemic.
This Mynio is a third-round pick of the Vancouver Canucks, taken No. 89 in the 2023 NHL Draft. He’s coming off a grade 2-3 AC joint sprain in his shoulder — the first shoulder injury of his career — which sidelined for him a month. He got just three games in following the injury before being invited as one of 10 defensemen Hockey Canada selected to compete for seven jobs for this year’s tournament.
On a phone call before the camp, the under-20 team’s new head scout, Al Murray, a two-time Stanley Cup champion and former director of scouting with both the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Los Angeles Kings, called him “the most improved player in junior hockey over the last two years.”
His Lightning, Murray said, “didn’t have him ranked anywhere near high enough” at the time.
“We liked him but we weren’t sure what part of his game would stand out,” Murray told The Athletic. “Usually a guy needs one part of his game to really pop and have an NHL chance or a World Junior chance. But in his case, every part of his game is very good. I don’t know if any part of his game is elite except for his hockey sense. He’s really smart, he’s competitive (and) he doesn’t make mistakes which coaches love.”
Part of the reason he has improved so much in the last two years is because his first two were atypical. When Mynio made that Thunderbirds team as a 16-year-old, they went to the WHL final and he played on a blue line that included four older, drafted or would-be drafted players in Kevin Korchinski, Tyrel Bauer, Jeremy Hanzel and Samuel Knazko. In his own draft year the following season as a 17-year-old, they went back to the WHL final and won it with a blue line that again featured Korchinski and Hanzel, but also Nolan Allan and Luke Prokop. Weeks before the Canucks took him in the third round, he was playing in the Memorial Cup.
“It was a big eye-opener to make the WHL at 16,” he said. “And then when I was 17 I was playing good minutes but I was the fifth defenseman. I just made a name for myself there on the penalty kill and now I’m developing into a two-way guy.”
Last year, in his draft-plus-one season, the Thunderbirds began a post-championship rebuild and Mynio finally got to be the guy, playing “close to 30 every night” ever since.
So when Murray talks about him as one of junior hockey’s most improved players, that’s why.
“It’s a lot on my body but it definitely gets me to improve myself,” Mynio said of the huge minutes. “Last year was big for me. I was on the first power play, so that really opened it up for me to show my offensive instincts and the numbers that I can put up.”
In that increased role, he registered 16 goals and 53 points in 63 games, second on the Thunderbirds in both categories. This season, despite the injury, he entered selection camp with 19 points in 18 games.
Today, Thunderbirds general manager Bill La Forge calls him “an elite CHL defenseman.” Getting there, La Forge said, started by playing “behind some really good defensemen” in those first two years.
“What happened to Sawyer is he learned how to penalty kill, he learned how to defend, and he’s really developed a complete game because of that,” La Forge said. “And then obviously last year and this year’s he’s a horse offensively as well, so I think the fact that he got to come up with a really good team and learn the style of game that maybe most young defensemen don’t learn right away, he got a chance to do that playing behind the guys that he did.”
What’s followed doesn’t come as a surprise to La Forge for that reason. He believes the Canucks got “one of the steals of the draft when they selected him in the third round” specifically because he wasn’t featured prominently on their team.
“We always knew that there was offence there because he’s got a cannon of a shot and he can really skate, so you could see the offence but he just wasn’t put in those positions,” La Forge said. “I mean his skating is elite. He can play special teams very well, both penalty killing and on the power play, he eats shots. I mean he blocks more shots than you probably want him to sometimes because he has to limp around. And then just the ability to defend speed and skill. With his movement and his hockey sense, he can really defend high-skill players.”
Matt O’Dette, the Thunderbirds’ head coach, said Mynio was quietly “a really key member” of the team that won the WHL title in his draft year.
It didn’t go unnoticed, either, even if he wasn’t viewed as a top two-round pick (NHL Central Scouting ranked him 63rd on their final list of North American skaters, up from 111th at midseason that year).
“At the time a lot of teams were very high on him and thought they could get him in a steal type of area and I know when Vancouver picked him that there was a lot of teams that were disappointed that they didn’t get him because they were very high on him and felt he was somewhat under the radar,” O’Dette said.
The high-leverage games and situations he played in for that team, O’Dette believes, have prepared him for the World Junior stage, too.
“Not everyone can play on the power play so I think it’s important to have guys that can do a bit of everything and he’s one of those guys that can do that, can play against other teams’ top lines, can penalty kill and skate and move the puck really well and provide some offence as well,” O’Dette said.
It’s Mynio’s “elite” skating, in particular, that O’Dette believes separates him.
“He has no trouble skating with anybody,” O’Dette said. “And for a very skilled guy, he has an edge to him. He’s hard to play against. He doesn’t back down from physicality. He maybe toes the line as far as chippiness. So there’s a lot to like about Sawyer.”
Hockey Canada seems to agree as well. Murray lauded Mynio’s positioning, his defending and the effectiveness of his game.
“(His game) just continues to get better in a real simple, understated, competitive way. You may not notice him over the course of the World Juniors and he could be one of our most valuable players,” Murray said, though he also insisted that he’s “not a lock to make to make the team and (he’s) competing for spots.”
If he does make Team Canada, both La Forge and O’Dette said Mynio — who was named co-captain in Seattle this season — would bring more than just what he offers on the ice as well.
O’Dette refers to him as a lead-by-example guy who is on the quieter side but one that “players look up to and want to be like.” La Forge talks about him as a mature kid who is good with the Thunderbirds’ young guys and respected by their veterans alike.
As for what it would mean to him?
Well, Kamloops is home and while he grew up an Oilers fan and not a Canucks fan, he’s one of the only players at camp who has never played for Team Canada.
“I think they know that, too,” he said of the Canucks, laughing. “But I don’t really talk about that anymore.”
In fact, he didn’t even really consider that he could make hockey his career until he decided to move away from home to attend the Yale Hockey Academy in Abbotsford when he was 14. He said he has “been living with a different family except for mine” ever since, so another holiday away wouldn’t be anything new.
If he gets the call — or the knock on the hotel room door, rather — with the good news, he’ll think first of his parents (his mom works at a senior living facility and his dad runs a paving company and “never misses a game in Seattle”).
On Wednesday night at TD Place in Ottawa, he began his pursuit of that call in Canada’s camp-opening red-white scrimmage on a pair with Oilers prospect Beau Akey, scoring in the shootout portion of the skate.
If he makes it, he believes he can be an important two-way guy for Canada.
“I like playing defense, playing hard out there, and I can play a lot of minutes,” he said.
(Top photo: Steven Ellis / Daily Faceoff)
