In his interviews, Giorgos Pantelas is thoughtful, honest, often self-deprecating, and seemingly immune to the cliches that define so much of hockey discourse. So when he says he was surprised to make Team Canada’s roster for the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, it comes off (as most of his quotes do) as very earnest.
“I didn’t think of it too much, I was just really excited to go to the camp,” Pantelas said. “Once I got sent to the camp, everyone there was great and I didn’t think I was going to make it. I knew I had a chance, every kid there had a chance, but there were some really good players there.”
Pantelas just keeps on surprising people however, himself included, and now he’s going to get a chance to surprise his biggest audience yet. Canada’s Hlinka Gretzky Cup team, always one of the toughest teams to make for any young player and usually one of Canada’s powerhouses, will perform on a nationally televised stage and in front of a legion of scouts as the unofficial kickoff to the 2026 NHL draft scouting season.
“They announced we all made it together so everyone was all there and they were all happy,” he said. “It was nothing but smiles.”
If you’re wondering why Pantelas, a first-round pick of the Wheat Kings in 2023 and a smooth skating, right shot defenseman, should be surprised to make any team, it might have something to do with the players he now calls teammates. The blueline for Canada at this event is almost absurdly stacked, including an exceptional status defenseman for the first time ever in Landon DuPont, a contender for first overall in the coming NHL draft in Keaton Verhoef (an old teammate of Pantelas’s at RHA Kelowna) and four players who are listed as first-round picks on preseason lists for the 2026 NHL draft. And those are just the WHLers.
“Our forwards are really good too, but once you make it past our forwards our d-men are all really good,” said Pantelas. “They’re all insanely fast, and getting by them is just impossible. It’s not even that they’re all fast and small, either. We have a really big d-corps. I would consider myself fairly tall and I’m middle of the pack compared to our team. It’s insane.”
Part of what brought Pantelas up to the level of this elevated competition was his skating. It was a noticeable skill during his rookie season with the Brandon Wheat Kings, and it was something scouts remarked on during his camp with Team Canada. Another part comes from the steady, reliable defensive role he intends to play. The team has plenty of offensive catalysts on the back end, and Pantelas is committed to being an ideal partner for them.
“I’m not looking for many goals or assists, I’m looking to lock things down on defense and make sure they don’t score against me,” Pantelas said. “I want to let them know I’m out there, be as physical as I can, block as many shots as I can and do my role as much as I can.”
If Pantelas wants to play a heavier physical game, he’s certainly got the tools. In addition to his skating, Pantelas has had a monster summer in the gym, packing on muscle to the point where he’s now coming in at 6-foot-2 and 214 pounds, a jump of 16 pounds from last season that he says hasn’t affected his skating.
“It hasn’t slowed me down, so that’s good, and most of it has been in my upper body,” said Pantelas. “I’ve just been filling out as much as I can… Trying to move something that’s ten pounds heavier than another object is just that much harder. I mean, the most I could do on the bench press, trying to add ten pounds to that, I’d get stuck under it. So I’m hoping those extra ten or fifteen pounds out there will make me harder to move.”
This Hlinka Gretzky Cup team, as loaded as it is, does have something in common with other iterations of Canada’s squad at this event: they go in as the favorites, and Canada is always expected to win gold at this event. In fact, they’ve won it the last three tournaments in a row and didn’t participate in the tournament before that. The team has done a good job keeping those expectations to the rear of their minds so far.
“The only expectation running through my mind is that we have to battle and compete,” Pantelas said. “If we play our hardest and play our best, we have a really good chance at coming out with the gold.”
Pantelas is already familiar with the expectations placed on Canada at the international level, and familiar with meeting them. He played for Team Canada White at the World Under-17 Challenge last season and won a gold medal there, giving him his first taste of the international style of game.
“I remember how competitive and physical it was out there,” he said. “Every team there was there to play. They all came from Europe so there was long travel, long flights, but they all played really hard. And now that we’re here, we’re hoping we can match that compete or even outdo it.”
Once the competition is done, Pantelas will be just under two weeks from the start of Wheat Kings’ training camp. There have been other Wheat Kings in recent years who have used success at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup as a springboard to a big step forward in WHL action, and Pantelas sees such a step as possible not just for himself but for the Wheat Kings’ entire blueline.
“It’s going to be a really good d-corps,” he said. “I haven’t seen some of the players play, but I’ve heard of all of them and of course most of them were on the team last year. One of the kids coming to camp is from the Island (Vancouver Island) and they’re all big, they’re all strong, I think that’s going to help us especially since we’re all very maneuverable. It’s really shown how the game has evolved. The big d-men are now able to move.”
The Hlinka Gretzky Cup begins on August 11 in Brno, Czechia. Canada starts the tournament against Finland.
