PENTICTON — When you sit down for your first full-on NHL team meeting, it’s almost a certainty you’ll be star struck.

Braeden Cootes is in good company in that regard.

After the Vancouver Canucks , the team that drafted him this summer, settled into their hotel on the Penticton lakefront on Wednesday, they gathered for a season-welcoming meeting.

Cootes looked around the room and it all finally hit him. Guys he had seen on TV, whose game he admired, were just over there. Quinn Hughes . Jake DeBrusk. Evander Kane. Elias Pettersson .

He’d arrived. He was, he admits, a little star-struck. How could he not be?

“It doesn’t even feel real,” he said of what was going through his head. “It was so cool.”

Then he got himself settled and got down to business. It’s what he’s always done. T

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