Without a doubt, the Penguins' best defense prospect is Pierre-Olivier Joseph.
And without a doubt, the first weakness most people will mention when talking about Joseph's game is his size.
Joseph, listed at 6-foot-3, 175 pounds in September's training camp, is slender. That's been the case throughout his career, before he made his professional debut this season in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. His head coach and general manager in the QMJHL, Jim Hulton, once joked that any time he saw Joseph, he would have "three or four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in his hand."
Joseph made significant gains last summer when he began training with his older brother, Lightning forward Mathieu Joseph, and his trainer in Tampa. Joseph was able to go from about 165 pounds to 175 pounds before training camp, a product of "a lot of good food and regular workouts," as he told me in December.
Six games into this season, Joseph caught mononucleosis, lost those 10 pounds, and was out of Wilkes-Barre's lineup for a month. Not ideal.
But when I spoke to Joseph last season a month after returning to the lineup, he told me he was back at the weight he was entering training camp.
“I worked my entire summer for putting 10 pounds on, and a month in I lose my 10 pounds,” Joseph laughed. “But I gladly put it back, I’m happy to be back at the weight I was before."
I caught up with Wilkes-Barre head coach Mike Vellucci in March, and we chatted about the performances of all of Wilkes-Barre's rookies this season. When I asked about Joseph, Vellucci could not have made it more clear that Joseph's weight is of little concern.
"One of the conversations I’ve had with him is that everyone always wants to talk about his weight," Vellucci told me. "To me, some people are never going to have weight. But what he can have is strength. He gets stronger. There are guys who don’t weigh a lot who are wiry strong. I told him early on in the season that I really don’t want to talk about his weight at all, I’m tired of everyone talking about his weight."
The reason that Vellucci isn't concerned with Joseph's weight is because the organization has ways of measuring a player's actual strength in different areas, and they take those measurements in training camp and at the middle of the season. Joseph didn't put on the pounds, but he made more progress than anyone when it came to actual strength.
"Let’s talk about his strength," Vellucci said. "Has that improved? We did midseason testing and his leg strength showed tremendous growth, more than anybody else. That, to me, proves that it didn’t matter that he was the same weight as he started, because he got stronger.”
Throughout the time the AHL season shut down in March, Joseph was playing on Wilkes-Barre's top defense pairing. He finished the year with three goals and 14 assists in 52 games:
Joseph's strength was just fine when he went one-on-one with his 6-1, 190-pound brother during one of Mathieu's stints in the AHL in one of the final games of the season:
If the NHL resumes this year, Joseph is a candidate to be on the Penguins' expanded roster, likely just as a Black Ace. With the progress that Joseph made throughout the year, Vellucci said that he believes Joseph could see real NHL time next season.
"I believe if he’s called upon he will do a good job, for sure," he said. "I even thought this year, with the strides he’s made, he could be a call-up. I’m not trying to rush him to the NHL, but can he fill in for games? Since Christmas on, I think yes, he’s shown tremendous growth.”
