It was the prospect of playing top-line minutes that meant more to Scheifele. Hawerchuk didn’t make any promises. He told Scheifele that nothing would be given to him. This wasn’t Junior B. He would have to improve his skating, would have to get stronger and be more responsible defensively. But, as Hawerchuk said, “If you come in here and work hard and you listen to me, I’ll get you places.” To a workhorse like Scheifele, that was as good as a promise. Said Ford: “[Mark and his parents] thought about it for a day or two and then said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’”
As promised, Scheifele was given a chance to play on the top line. But it came with a cost. Barrie was awful. “I got to go to a team where I got lots of ice time. I got lots of opportunity,” said Scheifele. “We had an unbelievable group of guys who all wanted to push each other. We knew our team wasn’t great, but we were all going to work hard, whether it was in the gym or on the ice. We would be down 7–1 and no chance against the good teams, but we would battle and be blocking shots until the final second. It was pride. In our minds we didn’t want to be embarrassed.”
“He really did pay his dues,” said Hawerchuk. “A lot of people would say, ‘Oh man, the Colts are going to be bad for a while.’” In Hawerchuk, Scheifele had a coach who tapped into his inner hockey nerd. As a former top scorer, he showed Scheifele the black arts of the game, things like how to purposely get lost in the offensive zone to get open for a scoring chance or why you should practise shooting pucks with your head down.
“Everything he said was magnified, because it was Dale Hawerchuk saying it,” said Scheifele. “That first year for me—him teaching me little skills, him being on the ice with me each and every day—was huge for my development because it got me to think a different way. It got me to think about the game in new ways and in practice. That was a huge stepping stone for me.”
The Colts still struggled and finished with the worst record. But Scheifele was the team’s lone bright spot, finishing second in rookie scoring with 75 points in 66 games, behind only Sarnia’s Nail Yakupov. By the end of the year, the late bloomer who got cut from his junior team was now considered a first-round prospect.
“It took him a while to get the hang of things, but you look at his game-to-game, I think he had 75 points that year and I’m going to say that 45 of them came after Christmas,” said Ford. “If Yakupov wasn’t in the league, [Scheifele] would have won rookie of the year easily. And then he just kept moving up the draft rankings. He worked himself up from being on nobody’s NHL radar to by the end of the year almost every team thinking he was a first-rounder.”
A year earlier, there were questions regarding Scheifele’s skating and strength. Now, the questions were about how this kid could get so good in such a short time. “When you meet Mark, you realize that he’s only going to get better because his passion for the game is so strong,” said Hawerchuk. “I don’t know what to call it, but if you’re trying to find the right attitude for a hockey player, he’s that guy. He’s ultra-competitive with everything. When Winnipeg were thinking about drafting him, they called me after the interview and said, ‘Is this kid for real?’”
* * *
“Make the show.” That’s what they used to say to motivate each other when they were tired. If you don’t do fifty push-ups, you’re not going to make the show. If you don’t take one hundred shots, you’re not going to make the show. It didn’t matter what it was. For Scheifele and Ekblad, everything revolved around making the show—playing in the NHL.
If Scheifele had been a late bloomer, then Ekblad, who was the OHL’s first overall pick in 2011, was the exact opposite. But while their paths looked different, their work ethic was the same. In drills, Ekblad sought out Scheifele—two alpha dogs fighting over the same bone. “I didn’t find out until halfway through the year. I was like, ‘Hey, let’s go against each other,’” Scheifele said to Ekblad. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been doing it the whole year.’ I didn’t even realize it. But it made sense. If you want to challenge yourself, if you want to be the best, then you have to go against the best.”
* * *
On May 31, 2011, the Atlanta Thrashers were sold to True North Sports & Entertainment and relocated to Winnipeg. Two weeks later, Kevin Cheveldayoff was hired as the team’s new general manager. The Jets weren’t an expansion team. They were inheriting a decent roster consisting of Blake Wheeler, Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd, Evander Kane and Bryan Little. But they had made the post-season only once in their eleven-year history and had not won a single playoff game during that time. A rebuild was necessary. The way to do that was by finding a franchise player with the seventh overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft.
It was an important pick. Cheveldayoff knew whoever the Jets selected would forever be tied to version 2.0 of the Jets. At the same time, he wasn’t necessarily looking for someone to plaster on billboards or help sell tickets. He just wanted someone with character, who could grow and develop with the team, and make a long-term impact. In some ways, they were looking for a late bloomer.
“I think that the biggest thing we had going for us was when I sat down with [owners] Mark Chipman and David Thomson about the direction of the team when we first took over, we said this isn’t going to be a short-term fix type of thing,” said Cheveldayoff. “We’re going to draft and we’re going to develop and by drafting we have to be prepared to send players back to junior if they are physically not ready. Their talents are probably there, but they’re physically not. One thing we stressed right from the moment that we took over is that this was going to be our draft list. It wasn’t going to be a list of what would have consensus potentially throughout the National Hockey League by the different pundits or the different reporting agencies or anything like that. As we continued to go through the process, Mark’s name kept coming up.”
Scheifele was still flying a bit under the radar at the time. The Hockey News had him forty-first overall in their pre-draft rankings, calling him an “interesting case study” because he had put up big-time points—albeit on the worst team in the OHL. “He wasn’t that prototypical, you know, exceptional kid that was petitioning the OHL to play at the elite level at a super young age,” said Cheveldayoff. “He took different steps along the way, including going to Barrie and having a very good first year and getting on everyone’s radar.”
Once they picked Scheifele, the bigger question became what to do with him. In his first training camp, he had played well enough to stick with the team. But Hawerchuk convinced the Jets to send him back. It wasn’t for selfish reasons. Hawerchuk had scored 183 points in his final year of junior before jumping to the NHL and scoring 103 points as a rookie with the Jets. That wasn’t a fluke, he said. You can’t expect to score 100 points in the NHL if you haven’t first learned how to score 100 points in the level below.
“The whole premise on that was to develop dominance,” said Hawerchuk. “I said, ‘Look, you want him to be dominant in the NHL, he’s got to learn how to do it here first, because if he doesn’t do it here he’s not going to understand how to do it against men all the time. He needs to learn how to be dominant, and it takes success and it takes a mindset and then when you have success, your mind says, ‘Oh yeah, I can be that dominant guy.’ When you become dominant at a level, you learn to kick it in gear all the time.”
The following season, the Colts drafted Ekblad with the first overall pick and Barrie went from bottom feeder to legitimate contender. Scheifele and Ekblad were perfect for each other, constantly raising and re-raising the bar. Scheifele scored 63 points in 47 games in 2011–12. The next year, with the NHL lockout cancelling the first three months of the season, he spent a third year in Barrie, scoring 79 points in 45 games.
“I definitely wasn’t ready for it yet,” Scheifele said of waiting two years before playing in the NHL. “I definitely had some growth I needed to do. I kept working at my game, working at my game, inside and out, each year I grew more and more, both physically and mentally; that’s just the per
son I am.”
“It just really underscores that when Mark Scheifele was physically ready to play, he blossomed,” said Cheveldayoff. “You really can’t underestimate the work that Mark put in. He invests in himself, whether it’s physically or nutritionally, and he’s a hockey nut. He literally loves the game. Watches it, dissects it, talks about it, laughs about it, gets angry at it. It’s a real pleasure to have players like that in the league.”
In 2013, long-time coach Paul Maurice was in between coaching jobs and working as a TV analyst for TSN in Canada. During one segment, a question was posed: “Is Mark Scheifele a bust?” At the time, Scheifele had twice been returned to junior and was on his way to an average rookie season with the Jets in which he scored 13 goals and 34 points in 63 games. For a player who had been drafted seventh overall, the fans were already giving up on him before his career had a chance to take off.
“I remember thinking, ‘He’s going back to play junior because he’s supposed to,’” said Maurice. “The pressure these guys are under to come in at eighteen, nineteen, and be great is huge. And if they’re not, it’s ‘What’s going on here?’ But Mark has had a very consistent level of progress. And boom, he gets 82 points and it’s a breakout year, but if you watched, he just got better every day. That’s been the story of his whole career.”
Johnny Gaudreau
Johnny Gaudreau (left) sprints for the puck in a 2017 game against the Maple Leafs. The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette
Calgary Flames
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Position
Left wing
Shoots
Right
Height
5′9″
Weight
157 lb
Born
August 13, 1993
Birthplace
Salem, NJ, USA
Draft
2011 CGY, 4th rd, 13th pk (104th overall)
Johnny Gaudreau
It started with candy. Skittles, to be exact. Some kids first learn to skate by putting their hands on the seat of a chair and pushing it around the ice. Others simply grab hold of their mom or dad’s hands for balance and away they go. Johnny Gaudreau got started by literally chasing after a sugar high. Forget a chair or his parents’ hands. For a kid with a mighty big sweet tooth, what got him up and moving were the candies his dad scattered on the ice.
Johnny was eighteen months old when his dad first put him on skates. Initially, Johnny sat in one spot and refused to move. “I don’t think he’s going to make it here,” Guy Gaudreau said to his wife. She replied, “Why don’t we see once he has his diapers off?” The next time out, Johnny’s dad came prepared with a bag of Skittles. He put Johnny on the ice and then put one of the candies just out of reach of his son. At first, Johnny crawled to it on his hands and knees. Hmm, his dad thought, this isn’t quite working.
Other kids were also on the ice learning how to skate. So Guy Gaudreau, who was the hockey director at Hollydell Ice Arena in Sewell, New Jersey, poured the entire bag into his hand and with a sweeping motion scattered the brightly coloured candies like chicken feed all over the ice. Johnny still crawled. But this time the other kids—who could skate and had just discovered that the ice was littered with sweet candy—were beating him to the Skittles. So Johnny eventually did what Charles Darwin had predicted prehistoric sea creatures had done so many years and evolutions ago: he got up on his feet and tried to walk.
“After a couple of months, I’d start skating around the other kids,” said Gaudreau. “It’s a pretty unique story.” That’s the story of how Gaudreau learned to skate. The story of how he got to the NHL is a bit more complicated. It involves a father-coach-counsellor who should have been an NHLer if he were two inches taller, a college coach who emphasized skill over size and strength, and countless other coaches, scouts and general managers who believed in him. But mostly it involves rejection—lots and lots of rejection.
After all, Skittles might coax you onto the ice, but they can’t make you taller. While Gaudreau’s sweet tooth got bigger over the years (“When it came time to cleaning my room, the Skittles were huge,” he said. “Every Christmas or any holiday, I’d get bags of them as presents.”), his body never really caught up to his peers’. He was always the smallest player on every team he played on. When he played in the United States Hockey League (USHL), a teammate jokingly made him a stepstool so he could get his equipment off the top shelf in the dressing room. He was so small that he was constantly mistaken for the stick boy or someone’s younger brother, and routinely got cut from teams before even stepping on the ice.
Johnny Gaudreau learns to skate. Photo courtesy of the Gaudreau family
“There were many times when I had to talk him off the ledge,” said Guy Gaudreau. “Telling him, ‘It’s okay, just have fun and play. Good things will happen. You’re going to be a late bloomer like me.’ He never bought into all that stuff. It was hard for him.” It was frustrating and infuriating, but it was part of what made Gaudreau so great. Two things can happen when you face adversity: you can pout and accept that the world is conspiring against you, or you can adapt and evolve. Gaudreau chose the latter. He accepted that he was never going to be the tallest or strongest, so he attempted to use his size to his advantage. His journey from being passed up for the World Junior Championship team to becoming Johnny Hockey involves hockey smarts and hours of bag skates, a junior coach who gave him a chip on his shoulder and a college coach who believed undersized players had a place in the sport.
But mostly, it came from Gaudreau deciding that if he wanted to get more Skittles than the bigger kids, he was going to have to get up off his hands and knees and skate for them. “I definitely got cut from festival teams. I mean, I don’t know if I should say I should have been put on that team. Everyone has their own opinions. But I personally thought I should have made teams. That’s part of the game. Sometimes you get cut and it shows you a little of adversity and makes you a better player. Maybe it’s good that I got cut.”
* * *
You cannot tell the story of how Johnny Gaudreau got to the NHL without first telling the story of why his father did not get to the NHL. Guy Gaudreau was born on a dairy farm in Beebe Plain, Vermont, a small town of about five hundred that extends into Stanstead, Quebec. There’s no gas station. But growing up, Guy had a backyard rink to skate on every winter.
Like his two sons, he was a natural athlete growing up. It didn’t matter what the sport was, Guy would excel at it. As a soccer player, he led North Country Union High to back-to-back state championships and graduated as the school’s all-time scoring leader. He then enrolled at Norwich University, where as a senior he was named to the All–New England team and graduated as the school’s all-time scoring leader. But hockey was his passion. His high school didn’t get a hockey team until his second year, but Gaudreau quickly turned them into a state powerhouse, scoring 118 goals in his three years and leading the school to a 15–0 record and a berth in the state final as a senior. The success continued at Norwich University, where he was the team’s MVP as a senior and graduated in the top five in scoring with 88 goals and 144 points. “Guy is a natural athlete,” said Mike Green, a family friend. “There’s nothing surprising that his boys are terrific athletes too.”
* * *
I knew that he loved the game. His passion for the game was probably more than I’ve ever seen and his competitive drive was more than I’ve ever seen. I’ve coached a lot of years and coached a lot of kids and I don’t know if I know anybody who loves the game as much as him. He’s happiest when he’s on the ice, whether it’s a practice or a power skating class or a big game or scrimmage. — Guy Gaudreau
* * *
In 2017, Guy Gaudreau became the first student athlete to be inducted into the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame. By all accounts, he probably should have played in the NHL or at the very least should have played pro somewhere. But no matter how skilled he was or how fast he could skate, it took a long time
for the hockey world to catch up to forwards who were so small that they could barely see over the boards. “I was always considered a small hockey player, a small athlete,” said Guy. “Plus, I was brought up on a dairy farm in Vermont, so I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to be showcased or to be seen. I think I lost out on a lot there. If I had more opportunities, I might have had more success with the game.”
Instead, Guy went into the family business. By then, his father had set up a five hundred–acre spring water facility and Guy was charged with expanding the company and setting up distribution in South Jersey. It didn’t last. His heart was still in hockey. When Hollydell Ice Arena was built about seven years later, Guy volunteered his time, teaching learn-to-skate clinics and running the men’s league. There was always something new to be done and Gaudreau always seemed to be the first one putting up his hand to do it, to the point where it was becoming a full-time job for him. So he figured why not make it official? Gaudreau sold his part of the water business and went into the ice business. “This fell into what I really like to do,” Guy Gaudreau said of running a hockey rink. “It was a lot more fun than peddling water around and having people destroy your vans and people not showing up for work when they were supposed to.”
For Johnny and his younger brother Matt, having a dad who ran a hockey rink was better than having a dad who played in the NHL. Guy not only knew the game, but he was around to teach it. And when he was too busy to play, Johnny and his brother and their friends were welcome to hop on the ice. “It was great for me. I had ice time whenever I wanted it,” said Johnny. “I played for three or four different teams, was on the ice for every single practice. I was on the ice for four hours at a time. I think it helped me get to where I am today.”
The Next Ones Page 3