Nino Niederreiter: "I don't belong there"

It sounded more in the context of him trying to hit to show he belonged, but then realizing his game requires both ends and he’s not supposed to be a 3rd-line guy.

His perspective at such a young age sounds great. I’m sure that’s a credit to him, but I have to believe the coaches and maybe Weight have also communicated well with him.

Kirill: “You are saying I need to be in by 11 in the morning? That I can do.”
Host Family: “Uhhhh…”

that might help.

I’ll get back to that – it’s pretty interesting and a useful piece to learn a bit about the Swiss hockey culture, mentality in general, and how Nino indeed can benefit there from another year in the juniors in my opinion. However, Francesca’s translation is perfect – that’s really what it says there in that interview in German.

First a premise:
Swiss-Germans don’t speak German; they speak a Dialect that differs from region to region. This leads to a unique case: spoken and written language are not the same. A word for word transposition is not so easy and not always possible.
So, it’s an interview with Nino, but there is a chance he didn’t say exactly all the same words as written.

Of the whole interview, the sentence about the passes was the hardest to translate.
The original quote is:
“Wenn man Tore erzielen kann, braucht man die Mitspieler, die einem die Pässe dazu spielen”.
I had to reread the sentence several times before I could understand what he meant to say and I don’t know who is to blame: Nino or the journalist.
Something sounds “wrong” in the sentence. I wasn’t able to make a literal translation,so I just wrote my interpretation.
My reasoning was: He needs passes that allow him to score → good passes
As you pointed out, my word choice was not the best. With more time to think about it, I would now write: “When you can (have te skills to) score goals, you need line mates who can make passes that allow you to do so (score goals)”. It’s an odd sounding literal translation, but hey, that’s what he said!
Different words, but the essential point is still the same: a goalscorer needs line mates who can feed him the puck.

About the “diplomatic issue”:
Swiss NHL players are very careful about what they say in the US. In Switzerland? Not as much. They tend to give more sincere answers.

he IS going to have to play on the same with these thrid and fourth line guys who are apparently not "guys who can give good passes"

I’m a bit cofused: do you really think Nino will play in a line with Konopka and Hunter next year?

As Francesca added, not sure who to blame more – Nino or the journalist. But it definitely smells like Swiss people talking about NHL hockey. Most of the people around hockey in Switzerland still believe the NHL consists of like 100 really good players and the rest of the guys would be inferior to Swiss players in terms of skating, shooting, passing, etc. and would be on the rosters just to hit and fight. And not many journalists manage to get away from this thinking when talking with NHL players. At the same time they love to ask suggestive questions over here in all kind of interviews and I’m pretty sure it went something like: “Nino, you played on the 3rd line, huh? No wonder you didn’t score more often – how did you feel playing with these technically limited guys?” And then the athletes, typically Swiss, trying to be polite in every situation, answer like “oh, yeah, that was tough, etc.” In this case, I’m sure Nino extended a little bit, tried to talk about the different roles there are on an NHL team and maybe added he’d envision obviously a top-6 role later in his career and finally it got all mixed up and came out as something Nino never actually wanted to tell in this way. So, blame on journalist mostly, although the interview does consist of some good work. The title is rather misleading, too, though – “I don’t belong there” doesn’t refer to “playing in the NHL right now”, but to “playing on a 3rd/4th line”. I guess most would read it as Nino feeling not being ready to play in the NHL at this point – he doesn’t say this anywhere in this interview, though. It’s really “I don’t belong to the 3rd/4th lines”.

So, after all, despite things getting mixed up, if the journalist puts that in the title, Nino must have mentioned it rather concretely at some point. That’s a bit surprising and let’s remember that Nino certainly didn’t play on a typical 3rd/4th line. He mostly played in offensive situations, with Doug Weight, who’s probably the best passer on the team and indeed made happen Nino’s two scoring points with two fantastic feeds. Grabner, Bailey, JT, Moulson were his other more frequent line mates – not exactly offensively uncapable guys, either…

However, I know that Nino highly respects Weight and didn’t mean to insult any of the 4th line players for example. But still, I’d take this as an additional example of why Nino still needs to adjust to North America. He needs to learn some stuff, also maybe get away from that “at the end I just want to be a goalscorer” talk he’s repeated so often since the draft. Even Kovalchuk, one of the best scorers in the game – and Nino’s favourite player… – seems to struggle a bit in that role of a pure goalscorer. That role just doesn’t really exist (anymore) in today’s NHL, does it? Or at least is reserved to some few generational talents and I’m not quite sure Nino “belongs there” – to use his own words…

In Switzerland, there are like 5 pure goalscorers at least on every team – not because everyone of them is highly talented, but because there’s so many guys lacking a complete game… And that’s obviously the reason why Switzerland still hasn’t produced a single NHL regular forward. Now, this is an individual thing and Nino is certainly more promising and more mature than any Swiss talent before, and a problem with his head should never get in the way of anything I guess. But we still should never forget where he’s coming from. He wasn’t born in Toronto and hasn’t played 5 years of junior hockey on a competitive level. That doesn’t mean he can’t have an excellent NHL career, but he’s got some work to do, more perhaps than any kid ever drafted as high as #5.

….and you’re English is terrific. You obviously weren’t educated in Philadelphia.