The break-in period for Tucson Roadrunners rookie sensation Matias Maccelli is over.
Of course, maybe he didn’t need one in the first place.
On Wednesday, the American Hockey League named Maccelli as the league’s Rookie of the Month for November. The honor came after the first-year forward scored 14 points across eight games while Tucson posted a 4-3-1-0 record — including wins in their last three outings.
Maccelli leads the Roadrunners, who travel to the Colorado Eagles this weekend, in all three major offensive categories with six goals, nine assists and 17 points. The latter number is a top-10 mark across the entirety of American Hockey League — a group that includes 31 teams and more than 750 players.
“He’s such a talented player. Really smart. Sees the ice well,” said Tucson alternate captain Mike Carcone. “He seems to be adjusting well.”
Carcone has seen it up close of late. He is part of a line with Maccelli and fellow forward Cameron Hebig. The trio combined to score five goals and record six assists in the team’s two-game weekend sweep of Abbotsford.
“He’s doing all the right things,” Carcone added of the 5-foot-11, 165-pound Maccelli, a 2019 fourth-round NHL draft pick of Arizona Coyotes who hails from Turku, Finland.
Of the 101 players to skate in at least 10 games for the Roadrunners over the club’s five-plus seasons in Southern Arizona, Maccelli’s 1.21 points per game is second-best in team history.
Yet if Maccelli wasn’t the league’s pick for the November award, it very well could have been his fellow rookie teammate, defenseman JJ Moser.
At 6-foot-1, 172 pounds and originally from Zuchwil, Switzerland, Moser is tied for fifth among all AHL defensemen with four goals, and his 11 points are third among all first-year AHL blueliners. Nine of those points came in November for the Coyotes’ second-round draft pick this past summer, including the game winner Saturday on a blast from the point with Tucson nearing the end of a power play opportunity. The goal came with less than a minute to go in regulation.
Moser credited much of his own success transitioning to the North American pro game to his experience the past three-plus seasons skating in the top professional league in his homeland of Switzerland.
“That’s it. That’s the that’s the biggest part,” he said of his time with EHC Biel-Bienne of the Swiss National League, including last season when he was the club’s captain. “That really helped me a lot. It also helped develop my character, my personality.
“When one day you’re with your 18-year-old friends who you always have been with in school, it’s just different when you have a 40-year-old father of several kids (as a teammate),” he added. “It allows you to just look at things very differently than what your perspective was (previously).”
Moser, Maccelli and a number of the team’s other international imports may be AHL “rookies” in age, but not necessarily in experience.
“When you’re playing pro hockey, you have mentors. You have older people around,” he said, using Maccelli as an example. “Matias is in a locker room (in Europe), maybe the youngest guy.
“But guys all the way up to 36, 38 years old are playing pro in Finland,” Varady said. “So those older players are instructing him on the bench. They’re instructing them in the locker room. They’re instructing him on the ice and they’re helping him grow. He doesn’t even quite know that’s happening.”
Maccelli who carded 28 goals and 69 points in 84 games over two seasons with Ilves of Finland’s top hockey circuit, Liiga, agreed that being in a locker room of older players helped his maturity.
Carcone said it’s still a telling sign how quickly Maccelli and Moser have acclimated to the speed of the AHL.
“I’ve seen I’ve seen it go either way,” Carcone said. “I’ve seen guys come over and the North American game’s a little bit tougher on them.”
In a season that’s already seen a number of Roadrunners players given their first NHL shots via call-ups with the Coyotes, there’s little doubt the numbers put up by Maccelli and Moser to date have caught the attention of the NHL team’s Glendale front office.
Maccelli admitted he thinks about when that day might come.
“I would lie if I said I never think about it,” he said. “It obviously comes to my mind. But I’m just trying to not think about it as much as I can and just come to work every day and just keep working hard and keep doing things the coaches say and I hope eventually it will happen.”
