from Shannon Proudfoot of Sportsnet,

If you picture a towel tossed aside while you’re running late for work, that’s about the configuration in which the best defenceman in the world has draped himself over a grubby white sofa in a photo studio in downtown L.A.’s Fashion District. Erik Karlsson is jet-lagged and very hungry, but he’s doing his best to explain what hockey looks like inside his head and how split-second choices twitch instinctively from his muscles when he’s on the ice.

His game is all about projection, he explains. It’s predicting what will happen three or five seconds into the future—where is this guy headed? Where will the puck end up?—and figuring out where he needs to be to capitalize on it. After all, when your GPS warns you a left turn is coming up, that makes driving your car a lot easier, Karlsson points out. OK, but in a game, how does he know there’s a left turn coming? “Yeah,” he says with a grin, his voice an audible shrug—this is what’s so hard to explain. “That you can never know—you’re playing the odds.” But he doesn’t mean it’s a roll of the dice; for Karlsson, it’s more like counting cards.

Every team plays a system, and they all play similar systems. So when the puck lands on his stick or he’s trying to find an exit lane from the defensive zone, Karlsson knows where everyone around him should be—and also that they might not be where they’re expected. With 20,000 fans screaming in an arena that echoes like an empty garbage can, sound is of little use to him, so Karlsson’s hearing falls away and his vision takes over as he takes stock of all the other bodies on the ice.

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