The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  Hollydell Arena has two ice rinks, a snack bar and an arcade filled with eighties-style video games. It’s Chuck E. Cheese’s, except a lot colder. Upstairs, where one of the offices has been transformed into a sort of thrift store for hockey players, is undoubtedly the coolest. Practice jerseys in every imaginable colour are hanging from hooks. Equipment in all shapes and sizes is scattered on the tops of lockers and overflowing out of bins. On any given night, Guy Gaudreau is the behind-the-scenes stylist. A team needs a sub? “Here, grab this red jersey.” A player forgot his gloves? “Pick a pair from the pile and go. C’mon, get out there, there’s hockey to be played.”

  “I’m a school teacher and I admire all the people who aren’t above doing whatever needs to get done,” said Mike Green, who has known Guy since Green signed his son up to play hockey and was roped in by the full-of-energy rink manager to help coach. “Guy is in charge of hockey operations, but he’s also the guy who made sure that the locker rooms were clean by cleaning them himself. If you’ve ever met his wife, Jane, she is also like that.”

  Everyone around Guy Gaudreau is like that. His enthusiasm is irresistible. With Guy, you can’t say no. So Green learned that sometimes it’s best to arrive to the rink incognito. After all, a one-hour practice for your son can turn into a three-hour night if one of the men’s teams is short a player and Guy catches you walking around. “You get there and there’s a game going on and Guy would say, ‘We need you for this men’s league game!’ And you’re like, ‘I can’t, my equipment’s at home, another time.’”

  Guy’s response: “Don’t worry. There’s stuff upstairs!” That’s Guy. He’s a hockey lifer. He lives it, breathes it and has such an infectious personality that he makes you want to live it and breathe it also. He coaches multiple teams, plays on multiple teams and is involved in every facet of the game, from creating the skills programs to organizing the men’s leagues to driving the Zamboni. Up until 2017—long after both his sons had moved on to college—he was the head coach of Gloucester Catholic, where both Johnny and Matthew had gone to school. “He still plays in the alumni game for my high school,” said Green. “And he didn’t even go to my high school.”

  The first time Green met Johnny Gaudreau’s dad, Guy took a look at Green’s beat-up skates and concluded he was the person to help coach the kids’ hockey team. They were beat up just enough for him to trust that Green had been a good player. “Whenever he was looking for guys to coach, he used to say that the guy who came in with new skates was the one he was always worried about,” said Green. “The guys who had skates like mine used to play some place.”

  Johnny Gaudreau plays for Gloucester Catholic High. Photo courtesy of the Gaudreau family

  Coaching was easy with a player like Johnny Gaudreau. He was a natural, a little water bug who whirled around the ice as though he were running on batteries. He never wanted to come off the ice after a shift, never wanted to leave the rink. Growing up, Gaudreau played two years above his age level, but he played on other teams too—whoever needed a sub, just about every team imaginable that needed a sub. That still wasn’t enough for him. The problem was that there wasn’t a travel team for kids that young, so Gaudreau’s dad and Mike Green came up with an idea: how about a “limited travel” team that would get the parents and kids an introduction to what the next few years would hold?

  The word “limited,” however, was debatable. “We came up with this schedule and the parents were looking at it like, ‘Well gee, this is a lot more than we anticipated,’” said Green. “We’re playing hockey every weekend. We’re going to Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey. And we’re like, ‘But it’s limited travel!’ Guy’s ability to get us on the ice for different things, especially the way he ran practices, was uncanny. He would run a lot of three-on-three. There was so much joy. My memories were of John never wanting to leave the ice.”

  Guy Gaudreau is 5-foot-8. His wife Jane is even shorter. So Johnny and Matthew knew early on that the growth spurt that other kids had already received probably wasn’t ever going to come. They were always going to be the smallest players on their hockey teams, the kids who are inevitably put in the front row on picture day. At times, it was a frustrating plight. Had Gaudreau been just a little taller, just a couple of inches really, he might have been looked at differently, might not have had to jump over so many hurdles and deal with so much rejection.

  Johnny Gaudreau was always the smallest player on every team he played for—but he could skate like no one else. Photo courtesy of the Gaudreau family

  Even his father believed Johnny would hit a wall someday—the same wall that had put a stop to his own dreams. “It’s tough for a parent when your son wants to be a Division-1 hockey player and a pro hockey player and you know he’s not going to be very big,” said Guy Gaudreau. “You know they like guys who are 6-foot-1 or taller and there was no way in hell that he was going to be that tall, so it was hard as a parent whenever he got cut from a team.”

  If Johnny wasn’t ever going to be the biggest player, then his father made sure Johnny was going to be the best skater. “He skated the crap out of us when we were younger,” said Johnny. “Anytime we lost, the next day the first thirty-five minutes of practice there wouldn’t be any pucks. We’d be skating the whole time. By the end of practice when we did get pucks, we’d be too tired to shoot them. Yeah, I hated them. If we lost on the weekend, I dreaded Monday practice. That was just his style. You were going to skate. That helped me out a lot, just being conditioned from skating all the time.”

  It wasn’t just that Johnny skated. It was how he skated. Guy Gaudreau was a big believer that you should skate from the waist down and play hockey from the waist up. It was something he learned while attending one of former NHLer Howie Meeker’s summer hockey camps as a kid and the technique stuck with him and made sense, especially as an undersized player who relied heavily on his mobility. “When you skate, your arms, shoulders and upper torso should be quiet,” said Guy Gaudreau. In other words, don’t swing your arms by your side. Don’t pump your shoulders like pistons. Instead, let your legs do the work and reserve your arms and hands for stickhandling and manoeuvring.

  “If you watch John skate or my other son, Matthew, skate, they do skate from the waist down pretty well, so it gives them an opportunity to shoot and pass and see the rink a little better than when your arms are moving and your head is moving,” said Guy Gaudreau. “It helps you succeed, especially if you’re a small player.”

  One thing Guy couldn’t teach Johnny was how to think the game. When most kids—or NHL players, for that matter—have the puck behind the net, they skate to try to stuff it into the far side. If they’re quick enough, they might beat the goalie and the defencemen and score. Johnny looked at the problem differently. “He’d go behind the net, turn one way and then stop and turn the other way and be able to come out the other side where no one is there and put it in the net,” said Guy Gaudreau. “Kids wouldn’t even think about that. He did things that you can’t coach.”

  And yet at times, he was a player that coaches didn’t want. It wasn’t because of a lack of skill. As a thirteen-year-old, he tried out and made a festival team that cobbled together the best kids in his district. The next two years, he was cut. It didn’t take long for Gaudreau to realize why. The body does a lot of its growing from thirteen to fifteen and while the other kids had become taller and stronger, Gaudreau remained the same size. Gaudreau was deflated. If he wasn’t big enough to play on a rep team in New Jersey, what chance did he have at playing in the NHL?

  “I remember his first year of bantam; he might have had 93 points in like 35 games and was the highest scorer on the team and he went to a district tournament and got cut,” said Guy. “And there’s kids making it who I thought weren’t even close to his calibre, but they didn’t want him because he was so small. I was so mad.” Guy never made a stink about it. He’s not that type of person. Plus, he didn’t want to fight Johnny’s battles. Better that his
son realize what obstacles were in front of him so that he could figure out a way around them by himself. All Guy did was tell Johnny that if there was something worth fighting for, then he better get back on his hands and knees and crawl for it, one more Skittle at a time.

  “If it’s meant to be then it’s meant to be,” said Guy. “You just keep working harder and harder and either it’s going to happen or it’s not going to happen. But there’s a lot of people who were a part of that who now won’t look me in the eye. So I got the last laugh.”

  * * *

  The pain was intense. Cramps like he’d never imagined. Gaudreau thought his appendix had burst or worse. Eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore. “Coach, my stomach is killing me,” he said in the middle of practice.

  “What’s wrong, Johnny? Do you need to go to the hospital or something?”

  “I don’t know, coach.”

  So they took him to the team doctor, who asked Gaudreau if he had eaten anything differently. Maybe it was food poisoning. It wasn’t. Well, not exactly.

  “I find out he’s been trying to put on some weight and that he loves chocolate, so he’s pounding Nutella right out of the jar,” said Dubuque head coach Jim Montgomery. “It was binding him up so bad that he couldn’t go to the bathroom.”

  * * *

  First impressions are always the same. Someone takes one look at Johnny Gaudreau and automatically assumes he cannot actually be a hockey player. He must be the stick boy or someone’s kid brother or a young fan that snuck in the dressing room somehow. No one thinks he belongs on the ice, much less that he can play. The first time Jiri Hudler met Gaudreau was during the Calgary Flames’ final trip of the 2013–14 season. “I remember him walking onto the plane and I had no idea it was him,” said the 5-foot-10 Hudler, who played on the same forward line as Gaudreau during his rookie season in Calgary. “This kid looks like he was twelve years old—and he still does—so I thought someone from management was bringing their son on the trip. I’m serious. You see the body structure and he’s a little guy.”

  It was like that when Gaudreau joined the Dubuque Fighting Saints in the USHL. The team was an expansion franchise in its first season in the league. So when some of the players saw Gaudreau sitting in the dressing room, they thought this had to be some kind of joke. C’mon now, we know we’re an expansion team and expected to pay our dues, but this is the best we can do? “I swear I thought it was someone’s little brother,” said Shane Sooth. “He could have been in middle school, that’s no exaggeration.”

  And then, of course, came the big reveal: Gaudreau got on the ice and his size wasn’t a detriment. If anything, it was an asset. He did things with the puck that as if he was playing a video game using cheat codes. The puck appeared to be taped to his stick. His skates, which he wore so loose that it looked like his feet were going to pop out of them, seemed to be magnetized to the ice. “We had this guy who was 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds and you just see the difference between them and you think to yourself there’s no way this kid’s going to last,” said Sooth. “But you couldn’t even touch him. It was ridiculous.”

  Gaudreau scored the first goal in the Fighting Saints’ history and finished fourth in scoring, leading all rookies with 36 goals and 72 points in 60 games. “His ability, his hockey smarts, were off the charts,” said Jim Montgomery. “When we did two-on-one drills, I’d let it go an extra rep just to see what he would come up with the next time.”

  It wasn’t just Gaudreau’s coach who was doing a double take. Once, an opposing coach had seen Gaudreau and others on the team playing two-touch with a soccer ball in the hallway before a game. After the game, the coach came over to Montgomery and mentioned how sweet it was of him to allow the equipment manager to take part in the practice sessions. He didn’t realize that the person he thought was the equipment manager had actually scored all three goals in the game—all on wraparounds.

  “Rim it behind the net to Johnny and let him do his thing,” Montgomery shouted to the players on the power play. “He’s probably the best I’ve seen behind there,” said Montgomery, “and the most dangerous and creative player since Gretzky or maybe Doug Gilmour. He would do these little cutbacks and then stuff it into the open side.”

  There were two expansion teams that year: Dubuque and the Muskegon Lumberjacks. Neither was supposed to do much. “I know people at the start of the year were saying if you guys challenge for a playoff spot that would be a really good start,” said Montgomery. But Dubuque finished first in the Western Conference with a record of 37–14–9 and went on to win the Clark Cup. Gaudreau, who scored 5 goals and 11 points in 11 playoff games, was the major reason for it.

  “It was a surprise to everyone. It was really impressive,” said Montgomery. “Even in the USHL today, players don’t put up numbers like they do in the [Canadian Hockey League (CHL)]. And in the playoffs, he was unbelievable, scoring the big goals at the big moments, being the difference maker and separating us from the teams we were playing against. I remember the game-winning goal in Game 2 of the semifinals. We created a turnover in the neutral zone and Johnny had just come off the bench. He grabbed the puck for a partial breakaway. He was clearly not going to get to the net. The defenceman was angling him off and the goalie was in position. But he dropped his shoulder and got the goalie leaning one way and he put the puck on the short side just under the crossbar. We slowed it down afterwards to see what he was shooting at and maybe two pucks could have fit in where he put it.”

  It wasn’t just that Gaudreau was scoring, it was that he was doing it in a league where the players were bigger than he had ever played against. The USHL is a stepping stone for a lot of players on their way to college. But it’s also the last stop for over-agers looking at one last kick at the can. There was one player in the league with 259 penalty minutes. And here was Gaudreau, a player who was so small that Sooth jokingly made him a stool in wood shop—with his nickname “GOO” on it—so he could reach his skates.

  “He was basically like a twelve-year-old playing with men, but destroying them,” said Sooth. “In the beginning of the year, we got into a line brawl. Johnny was on the bench and I actually got beat up pretty good. But we had two of the toughest guys in the league on our team. Everyone knew if they touched Johnny they would have to go through them.”

  Gaudreau was fearless. He didn’t avoid the danger areas and didn’t play scared. Yes, he was tiny. But he never really made it seem like it was a negative because of all the goals he was scoring. “His timing in getting into tough scoring areas was impeccable,” said Montgomery. “When we played the most physical team in the league, that’s when I knew he had a chance to play in the NHL, because he fought through a lot of hooking and whacking and stuff after the whistle and was our best player.”

  Still, Montgomery wanted Gaudreau to get bigger. If nothing else, he wanted him to get healthier. “He’s got horrible eating habits,” said Montgomery, remembering back to when the Fighting Saints held a team barbecue at the start of the season and Gaudreau skipped the salads and went straight for the meat.

  “All he puts on his plate are three hamburgers,” said Montgomery. “Not even cheese. Just ketchup. My three-year-old is eating the same thing. I never cared about [Gaudreau’s] weight. For me, I just cared that he had some muscle definition in and around his joints. At some point, even as elusive as he is, you’re going to get clipped and you just want your joints to be strong enough to absorb the odd big hit. You see his frame right now and you see that he has put in the work and that’s why he’s been able to absorb the hits he has taken at the NHL level. But you don’t want a guy like that taking away even a millisecond or second of quickness, because that’s worse than putting on five more pounds. Let’s put it this way: he was a child and all he would eat would be candy and milkshakes.”

  Eventually, Gaudreau found a way to put on weight without making himself sick—or actually eating anything. A hockey puck weighs 6 ounces. Stack six of them together and you
have 2.25 pounds. Gaudreau knows this because when NHL Central Scouting sent one of its scouts to Dubuque to officially weigh all the draft-eligible players, Gaudreau started stuffing as many pucks into his shorts as possible. It was only a couple of pounds, but when you’re as small as he is, every pound counts. Feeling heavier and more confident, Gaudreau stepped on the scale. As he did, a puck dropped out of his shorts and hit the ground. And then another fell. He looked up, smiling. “The guy was like, ‘It’s okay, I’ll give you two extra pounds for trying,’” said Montgomery.

  * * *

  They were afraid he was going to be off the board. Can you believe it? Gaudreau, who was the smallest player ranked by NHL Central Scouting, was apparently a hot commodity going into the 2011 NHL Entry Draft. Well, lukewarm might be the better adjective. The Calgary Flames wanted him. So did the Bruins—GM Peter Chiarelli was also the owner of the Dubuque Fighting Saints—and the Coyotes and several other teams. It was just a matter of when they were willing to gamble on taking him.

  First round? Second round? Third? By the fourth round, Calgary couldn’t wait any longer, using the 104th overall pick on a 5-foot-6 and 137-pound winger whom NHL Central Scouting listed as the smallest in the draft—whom the Flames didn’t even have on any of their lists.

  “‘Cloak and dagger’ would be a good headline, I guess,” said Calgary Flames’ director of scouting Tod Button, who asked then-GM Jay Feaster to keep Gaudreau off their scouting lists for fear that word would get out that they were interested in him. “We certainly didn’t want to give away the fact that we like Johnny,” said Button. “Jay’s mantra for that draft was we’re going to make our list number 1 to 100 and we’re going to go right off the list. So when a guy’s taken, we’re going to cross him off and pick the next guy on our list. But when we put the numbers up, Johnny should have been in the top twenty on our list. But I also didn’t want to rank and rate him—I wanted to have the leeway where if I thought it was the right time we could pick him. And that’s how it went. For Johnny, it was purely his size. You sit in the scouts’ room and you hear the guy’s a good player, but he’s just too small. We said the same thing. We were worried about his size too. Nowadays people don’t have that concern anymore.”