Montreal Canadiens Top Prospects Countdown: #20: Joni Ikonen

Montreal Canadiens general manager has compiled a long list of prospects. We are counting down the top 30.

Montreal Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin has been building through the draft for the past three years. It has resulted in the Habs having one of the deepest group of prospects in the league.

So, we have been counting down the Canadiens Top 30 prospects.

This started on November 1 with the 30th spot going to Jack Gorniak. The 29th spot went to Jacob LeGuerrier, the 28th place was taken by Otto Leskinen, 27th went to Rafael Harvey-Pinard, 26th was Jack Smith, 25th was Jacob Olofsson, 24th was Lukas Vejdemo, the 23rd spot went to Alexander Gordin, Blake Biondi came in at 22nd and Rhett Pitlick was 21st.

Now, we continue our countdown and enter the top 20 with a prospect who has all the tools, but can’t stay healthy at all. That player is Joni Ikonen. He has a lot of talent, but has barely played hockey in the past two seasons and to make matters worse, it doesn’t look like he will be playing any time soon.

The Finnish centre was a second round pick of the Habs back in 2017. He had just scored 22 goals and 41 points in 40 in Sweden’s top Junior league. He had also played a leading role for Finland at the Under-18 tournament, wearing an A on his sweater and scoring four goals and four assists in seven games. He helped Finland take home a silver medal and was named one of the top 3 stars for Finland at the event. He just edged out a fellow Habs prospect for that recognition as Jesse Ylonen scored nine points in eight games but didn’t crack the top 3 that was taken up by Ikonen, Kristian Vesalainen and Miro Heiskanen. Jesperi Kotkaniemi also had a strong tournament as an underaged player that year with six points in seven games.

After being drafted by the Canadiens, Ikonen returned to Finland to play for Kalpa in Liiga, the top men’s league in the country. Ikonen scored four goals and 14 points in 52 games as an 18 year old rookie. He also headed to the World Juniors where he had a goal and an assist in five contests.

That set Ikonen up for a much stronger 2018-19 season. He had a year of playing with Kalpa under his belt against tough competition. He had experienced a World Juniors and should have been taking on a leading role at the next one.

It stated off so well, too. He had five goals and five assists for ten points in his first 13 games.

Then he was injured. And injured again. And again.

Ikonen hasn’t played a game since an early season knee injury in 2018. He would miss the rest of the 2018-19 season and then would be hurt again as he prepared for the 2019-20 campaign. He would be out for the entire season. Once again, he attempted to come back for the 2020-21 season, switching teams to join Ilves in Liiga, but he suffered yet another setback.

Ikonen has now missed more than two consecutive years of game action.

He is a decent sized, two-way centre at 5’11” and 178 pounds. He possesses a great shot and was scoring at nearly a point per game pace in Liiga as a 19 year old. The potential for Ikonen to turn into a really solid second line centre was quite high at that point.

But having missed two straight years of hockey is going to have an impact. When, or if, he ever gets back to playing, it is impossible to tell how effective he will be. He is still just 21 years old, but it will take a long stretch of actual healthy hockey before he can claim to be back on track.

It was announced in early October that he would be out another 8 to 10 weeks. That was about five weeks ago, so if we are lucky, he could be back in action sometime in December.

The Canadiens have to make a decision on whether to sign him or lose his NHL rights before the 2021 NHL Draft. At one time, we would have expected him to be playing for the Laval Rocket by now. Now, it is hard to believe he will be playing at all this season.

Had Ikonen stayed healthy, he would have been much higher on this list. However, two full years without playing a game takes its toll on a young player’s development. If he gets back on the ice this season, maybe he can stay on this list next season. Although, there is a chance the Habs just choose not to sign him and he’s not in the Canadiens plans anymore.