I live in Kitchener and I was at the game. I tried to really focus on Mesar alone.
To start off the game you could tell that he has really, really good skating skills. He looks tiny out there and that is playing with teenagers. Nothing he can do about his height but he definitely needs to thicken up.
The first 10-15 minutes he was really overplaying the puck. When skating with it he was like tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic skating up the ice. His hands were going a hundred miles an hour with the puck. He also was forcing the play a lot and leading to some turnovers or errant passes. He was getting some really nice seam passes through though so I can’t fully fault him there.
Once he settled in he really started to take over. He wasn’t over stickhandling the puck and was using his skating to create offensive chances. He did take a penalty right at the start of the second period. Rangers were on the power play and on the breakout some player made a drop pass that he completely skated by. He took an interference penalty to stop a breakaway or it would have been a two on one.
He played the half wall on the power play and was always looking for that cross crease pass on the back door. He made the pass a few times. He really is an offensive machine.
The game was a penalty filled affair. He got a lot of points on the power play. He plays with Pinelli (2nd round NHL pick) and Rehkopf (projected 1st round pick this year). He is very fortunate that he has solid line mates to work with. So the offence was not only because of him and him alone.
The game got pretty nasty with a Sudbury player getting a match penalty with a head shot. The their was a fight where a Kitchener player got an instigator penalty. With ten minutes left in the game is when the game was really rough. Kitchener was up by three goals and Mesar’s line only had one shift in the final ten minutes. Theoretically if that line would have had a regular turn he would have had a few more shifts and potentially gotten more points.
