Minnesota Gophers’ Josefin Bouveng Headlines NCAA Rookies

Arguably the top women’s ice hockey conference in the NCAA, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) is about to showcase one of the world’s best hockey players. Josefin Bouveng is finally crossing the pond to play in North America.

How do you better a program that has lost only 57 games out of 918 and won seven national championships? Gophers head coach Brad Frost didn’t have to ask himself that at the end of his 15^th season at the University of Minnesota. He already announced the answer on Jan. 24 when he introduced Bouveng among the newest class of Gophers for the 2022-23 season.

Bouveng Has An Invisible Ceiling

Since playing her first professional game at age 16, the 21-year-old native of Uppsala, Sweden, has developed into an offensive dynamo in the Swedish Women’s Hockey League (SDHL). Her 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons were nothing short of incredible. At ages 19 and 20, she racked up 48 goals in just 64 games for powerhouse Brynäs IF in the regular season. In the playoffs over the past two seasons, she’s posted 20 goals in 17 games, including leading all skaters in points for the 2020-21 playoffs.

It’s hard to score goals in any league; and each league has a certain goal target that intrigues the top snipers more than others. In the SDHL and NCAA there are arguments for both 25- and 30-goal seasons being set as a bar for the top-tier scorers. If she continues the rate at which she scores goals — even at her recent two-year average of 0.762 — she would be on pace to score 30 goals over a 40-game NCAA season. It’s easier said than done, though, considering scoring 30 goals in a season has been done only 10 times in the last five full seasons of NCAA play. Five of those were in the 2017-2018 season.

Her point production could best that of international sensation Stalder when she came to North America to play for Minnesota-Duluth at age 20. Bouveng has already discovered scoring consistency at a high level, whereas Stalder’s goal renaissance didn’t begin until her third and fourth years in the NCAA. It’s a lofty comparison, but one that Bouveng has to the tools to live up to.

Expectations will be high after back-to-back seasons scoring north of a point-per-game in Europe, but high expectations and Bouveng are about to become commonplace in the hockey world. Whichever way the lines shake out for coach Frost and the Gophers, Bouveng is an elite hockey player that’s going to make huge waves in the NCAA as early as her rookie season.

*stats from eliteprospects.com and stats.swehockey.se