Kiefer Sherwood spent several nights last spring chasing Quinn Hughes around the ice and generally pestering the Vancouver Canucks. Now the former Nashville Predators winger is wearing a Canucks jersey. After signing with Vancouver in free agency, Sherwood is at training camp in Penticton, B.
C., lining up against the players he frustrated in the first round of the playoffs last season. His former foes have welcomed him welcomed with open arms.
“I try to be hard to play against and try to hate the other team and play with that hate and that fire. But at the end of the day, it’s a business and it’s a game of respect,” Sherwood said. “You’re not going after guys if you don’t respect them, right? So now that we’re teammates, it’s just respect.
” The 29-year-old Sherwood’s path to Vancouver wasn’t linear. A six-foot, 194-pound forward from Columbus, Ohio, he went undrafted before signing with the Anaheim Ducks as a free agent in March 2018, and played 50 games for the team during the 2018-19 campaign. But Sherwood struggled to stick in the NHL, bouncing back and forth between the minors during stints with Anaheim, Nashville and the Colorado Avalanche.
Eventually, he realized that to cement his spot, he needed to find what made him special — and he landed on speed. “It’s definitely something that I had to learn and kind of ingrain in myself and train. I think the saying is adapt or die,” Sherwood said.
“At the end of the day, you can light up the mi.