Grand Rapids rookie Brandsegg‑Nygård's five-goal week earns AHL Player of the Week

Five goals in three games — capped by his first two-goal game and his first three-point night — earned 20-year-old Michael Brandsegg‑Nygård the Howies Hockey Tape/AHL Player of the Week honor for the period ending March 1, 2026. Grand Rapids’ rookie finished the stretch with six points, 17 shots on goal and a plus-3 rating over those three contests.

Brandsegg‑Nygård opened the run with the first two-goal game of his AHL career against the Manitoba Moose, then recorded another goal in a later meeting with the Iowa Wild. He capped the week against Iowa with the first three-point night of his career, a 2+1 performance that figures prominently in the league office’s weekly selection. The Griffins’ media page lists a highlight file labeled 2-28-26 I Highlights I Iowa Wild, documenting at least one of those Iowa matchups.

Across the three-game span Detroitnews and The Hockey News reconstructed, Brandsegg‑Nygård totaled five goals and one assist for a six-point week while firing 17 shots. The Original award release described the stretch as containing “a two-goal game, a power-play strike and his first” before the sentence was truncated; the phrase “a power-play strike” appears in that release and is carried in the summary of his week.

On the season Brandsegg‑Nygård has 15 goals and 19 assists for 34 points in 48 games with Grand Rapids, and he sits at plus-21 overall. Detroitnews places him among AHL rookie leaders: goals tied for fifth, assists tied for eighth, points fifth, plus-minus tied for third, and he leads rookies with six game-winners. Those season totals give context to why a three-game burst translated into a weekly award.

Brandsegg‑Nygård’s profile reads like a fast track to pro relevance. The Oslo native was selected 15th overall by the Detroit Red Wings in the 2024 NHL Entry Draft, the first Norwegian taken in the first round, and signed a three-year entry-level contract on July 11, 2024. He made Detroit’s roster out of training camp this season and appeared in nine NHL games, registering one assist, before returning to the Griffins. Team records show he was reassigned from Skellefteå to Grand Rapids on April 15, 2025 and logged an AHL game on April 18, 2025.

Physicals and profile details listed by Grand Rapids and public records show Brandsegg‑Nygård at 6-1 in height, shoots right, born October 5, 2005 in Oslo, and listed weight values of 207 and 210 pounds in different sources. The Griffins’ player page also provides pronunciation as BRANS-egg NEE-gard and notes this is his second season as a Griffin and third year as a pro.

Grand Rapids has now produced four AHL Player of the Week winners this season, tying the franchise single-season mark set in 2005-06 by Jiri Hudler, Valtteri Filppula, Clay Wilson and Jimmy Howard. With the Griffins already having clinched a postseason spot in February during a record-setting campaign, Brandsegg‑Nygård’s scoring surge adds another wrinkle for opposing defenses as Grand Rapids heads deeper into the final weeks of the regular season.