Now the 5-10, 160-pound left wing must show he deserves to stay in the NHL. His impressive play during a late-season audition gives him an inside track, but there will be a lot of competition in training camp from the likes of former first-round picks Filip Zadina, Joe Veleno, Michael Rasmussen and Evgeny Svechnikov.

All, including Hirose, can be assigned to the Grand Rapids Griffins without going through waivers, so nobody is going to be handed an NHL job by default.

“Just play my game, keep it simple and not try to do too much,” Hirose said. “Just try to have a mistake-free game and like (coach Jeff Blashill) always says, try to have your positives outweigh your negatives. Towards the end of the year, I might have been a little careless with the puck at times, so just cleaning up my game at both ends of the ice and doing whatever I can to make the team.”

The Calgary native, who at 23 was one of the older prospects at development camp last month, will spend most of the off-season in metro Detroit, training and working on his game and, as he put it, “show them I can play at that level.”

Hirose, dubbed “Taco” by teammates, is trying to be shiftier on the ice.

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