Matt Brown already looks capable of carrying the first-line centre role without needing to win the scoring title. The hockey brain is there. The pace is there. The grit is there. Most importantly, he looks like a bastard who wants to win. Give him the right people and that goes a long way.
Danny Dzhaniyev has been quieter through parts of preseason. You can still see why IK brought him in. There are things in his hands and his head that you do not manufacture during one August week. When it clicks, it could get very good very quickly.
What that pair could use is a big, strong, leading player who already knows how to get out of this league. Enter Miks Indrašis. Six-foot-four, 198 pounds. He finished second in HockeyAllsvenskan scoring in 2023/24 with 58 points in 52 regular-season games for Brynäs, then reached 70 in 65 including the playoffs as Brynäs went straight back to the SHL. One year later he put up 29 points in 48 SHL games. This is not a name pulled from an old hockey card. He recently wrecked the exact league IK are trying to escape.
And the situation is interesting enough to pick up the phone. Prešov thanked Miks and the rest of the group that kept the club in Slovakia’s top division last season. He is not listed on their official 2026/27 roster. That does not tell us what his next contract will be. It tells us there is a phone call worth making.
Then there is the Oskarshamn logic. Miks is from Riga. Put him at the end of the harbour, let him squint across the Baltic and he is almost looking home. Latvia also knows, in a very real historical sense, what it means to stand up to a much bigger power: the country was occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union and restored its independence in 1991. Oskarshamn against the rest of Sweden is hockey, not history. But the instinct that bigger does not automatically mean better? We can work with that.
Put Miks on a real first line and the rest of this IK roster gets to be what makes it interesting. Filiph Engsund can be Filiph Engsund. Manne can enjoy being back home at Be-Ge. Calle can keep taking steps. And Joel Svensson, whose development we noticed last season and who has kept moving forward through preseason, should not have to drive the whole team. Let him play freely, drive a line and keep getting trust on the power play. That gives him every chance to have his big breakthrough. If he then grows into IK’s outright carrying player during the season, that is a huge bonus. The homegrown players do not have to carry everything every night. Depth gets better when the top gets heavier.
IK have not had a true first line with this kind of weight since the penultimate SHL season. Brown in the middle, Danny with that something still waiting to explode and Miks as the big, experienced, skilled bastard next to them? It makes far too much sense not to try. Arsi – or Miks’s agent – somebody pick up the phone. This could turn an already fun winter into something much bigger.