The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  The story that friends and family like to tell is about the time when Murray gave up that tying goal on a fluke shot in the dying seconds of the third period and went on to play six overtime periods of perfect hockey. “It was a 6–5 game and I said, ‘Oh, Matt, how are you feeling?’” said Murray’s mother, Fenny. “And he was like, ‘We won, didn’t we?’ That’s all that matters to him. He’s got his dad’s calmness going through the world, but he’s got my drive, which says I didn’t sign up to lose.”

  From age eight, Murray knew he wanted to be a goalie. There was something about how cool the equipment looked. But at that young of an age, he had to wait. Thunder Bay wouldn’t allow full-time goalies until they were older, so every team rotated their players in net based on whoever wanted to volunteer. Murray was a quiet kid. He waited until the final game of the season before putting his hand up. Once he did, it never went down.

  Murray was a natural in net. He had always been a gifted athlete—he won Athlete of the Year for his entire elementary school when he was in grade three and played varsity basketball in high school—but his unusually long limbs seemed like an even better fit for grabbing pucks. “A beanpole,” said Evoy. “Straight up and down.”

  Matt Murray makes a save playing road hockey in Thunder Bay. Photo courtesy of the Murray family

  When you are tall and skinny, you can sometimes appear awkward and gawky. Murray moved with the fluidity of a swimmer. Nothing was rushed. There was grace in his movements. “I saw a kid that was smooth,” said Evoy, who coached Murray from the age of eleven to fifteen. “He wasn’t one of those big, flashy, channel-nine saves-of-the-week goalies. He was just steady. I used to say, ‘He’s the most boring goalie you’ll ever watch,’ because he’s never out of position.”

  That boring style was born out of an analytical mind that broke things down into formulas and patterns. Murray’s father, who died of a heart attack in January 2018, was a lawyer and used to always say, “There’s an answer to every problem.” In Murray’s mind, there must be a save for every shot. He was obsessive about it. As a kid, he used to watch pool trick-shot videos. But it wouldn’t be enough to just watch them. Murray had to do them too. So he would practise the shots he’d seen on TV for hours until he could bounce balls over obstacles and bank them into paper bags. It was like that with everything.

  “A friend of mine said to me once that watching him play in net is like watching me play guitar,” said Murray’s older brother, Michael. “I know what he means by that. The calmness and the technical approach and that sort of thing. Matt studies. If you talk to him about the game, he’s like, This is like this and This is like this. He knows what the plays are and who’s supposed to do what.”

  The similarities pretty well end there. Michael is the musician of the family, a talented jazz guitarist who teaches and plays in a band. “You’re not going to find two more different people or lifestyles as siblings,” said Michael, who lives in Toronto and plays in the Ten Meter Band. “We went to the same high school but we’re two years apart and ran with two of the most different crowds you could possibly imagine.”

  Michael was the one who moved to Toronto as soon as he could because Thunder Bay was too small. Matt did the opposite. He prefers the calm of Thunder Bay, a no-frills city of 120,000 that feels even smaller and more rural. The joke here is that the deer look both ways before crossing the road. “It’s a tight-knit community,” said Matt. “Once you get outside the city limits, it’s probably hours before you run into another town. You’re secluded.”

  As a kid, Matt was known for his competitive streak. He was the brother who knocked over the game of Risk if his territories were being conquered or threw the video game controller if he was losing. He was also the brother who couldn’t get enough of the activity he was doing. “He was a passionate learner,” said his mother. “I remember playing catch with him on the front lawn and catch wasn’t good enough for him. It was always, ‘Mom, throw it over there so I can dive for it.’ He just aced every sport that he touched as a kid.”

  Matt and Michael’s parents provided both children with opportunities to play sports or be involved in music. But there was one condition: you had to take it seriously. If you wanted to have fun, play road hockey or fool around on a guitar. But if you expected your parents to devote time and money into whatever you were doing, it came with responsibility—on both ends.

  “We played in the Winnipeg loop,” said Murray’s father, Jim, “which meant we would have to get on a bus early Friday morning, play one team up there on Friday night, another team on Saturday and a third fresh team on Sunday, then get on the bus and come home. That was pretty tough, going there. One thing that Thunder Bay kids have is they learn to travel. It’s a source of discipline.”

  “If you wanted for it to be a dream, go play fun hockey in the non-competitive level,” said Murray’s mom. “If you wanted it to be a goal, then we’re going to work. It could be intense, but that’s how it was going to be. When we went on a hockey trip, it was for Matt’s hockey. We never went shopping. If I want to go on a shopping trip, I’ll go with my friends. I didn’t conflict the hockey trip with something else, because that’s wasting other people’s time.”

  Matt Murray plays for the Westfort Rangers in Thunder Bay. Photo courtesy of the Murray family

  That line of thinking eventually led Murray to leave Thunder Bay. By then, he had outgrown the town and its coaches. Evoy had taught him what he knew about standard positioning and staying calm and collected in the net. But for Murray to reach the next level, he needed to do more than just be calm. The sleeping giant needed to be woken up. That’s where Jon Elkin came in.

  “I always said I found the diamond and Jon put the smoothness on it,” said Evoy. “If there was a work ethic produced, it was from him.” Murray was ten years old when he first met Elkin at a goalie camp in Toronto. The two immediately hit it off, and the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds later hired Elkin as the team’s goalie coach for Murray’s final season in the OHL. In Elkin, who is now the goalie coach of the Arizona Coyotes, Murray found a pro-style coach who “broke down the position into about one hundred drills,” said Jim Murray , who passed away in January 2018. The younger Murray soaked it all up. This was exactly what he had been looking for. There was no more guesswork as to how to stop the puck. Instead, Elkin provided technical answers as to where to be and how to get there in order to make the save.

  In Murray, Elkin found a goalie who had the motor skills and body control to implement everything you showed him. “Goalies can move side to side, can get into the butterfly, and utilize the same technique, but some guys have a certain fluidity, poise, that’s special,” said Elkin. “Carey Price is an example that everyone puts forth, and Matty also has it. Just a natural, almost effortless way of moving around the crease that’s not easy to duplicate.”

  The next year, Murray returned for another March break session with Elkin. He added a week in the summer. Then two weeks in the summer. Eventually, Murray was spending the entire summer with Elkin, as a camp attendee while also acting as a counsellor. The two continued to work together in the summer into Murray’s NHL career. “Jon Elkin’s camp is very tough, it’s very businesslike and not a lot of fun,” said Jim Murray. “You get your money’s worth. I knew Matt was serious when he said to me, ‘Dad, I think I need at least two weeks with Jon Elkin this year.’ That desire had come. He just grew from there to be a kind of aggressive goalie. That was the final piece.”

  Indeed, technique only takes you so far. After three seasons in the OHL, Murray was putting up respectable, but not exceptional, numbers. There was something missing. For all his calmness in the net and his analytical approach to the position, Murray lacked that killer instinct. “From day to day, he’s not overly emotional,” said Elkin. “He’s competitive, but not overly emotional. He’s just very even keel, off the ice and on the ice.”

  That’s not necessarily a negative. A big reason why Murray is able to shake off a
fluke goal or a bad start is because he is the sleeping giant, a goalie who does not feel the crashing of waves when he is not at his best. But if he was going to take the next step and become the type of goalie who won back-to-back Stanley Cups as a rookie—effectively pushing Marc-Andre Fleury to the backup position—he needed to tap into what he did when playing board games as a kid and allow himself to smash a stick every now and then.

  “He was a big factor for me coming out of my shell,” Murray said of Elkin. “The one thing that I remember him saying the most was really simple: ‘At the end of the day, the best goalies in the world are the ones that compete and read the play.’ And those are the two things that have stuck with me to this day. I still remember the day when he told me that. It was the year before my draft year. It was a big year for me. He was a huge factor for me, definitely, to come out of my shell a little bit and show that passion.”

  One summer David Clarkson, an NHL forward and Toronto native, came to Elkin’s camp to take shots on the goalies. During one drill, Clarkson cut hard toward the net and Murray backed off and gave up his crease to the older and more physical player. Elkin went over to Murray: “You’re going to let him do that to you? Get angry! This is your crease!” Elkin then went over to Clarkson: “Do that again,” he said. “Go even harder.” This time, Murray held his ground and knocked Clarkson down.

  “In goaltending, it’s not always two plus two equals four,” said Elkin. “There’s a lot of variables that don’t add up and you have to scramble and make it up as you go along and learn to read and react. That part started to click for him as a nineteen-year-old. That was the last essential ingredient he needed.”

  * * *

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Soo, but it’s a great place to work and play if you’re going to go into a high-pressure spot, because it’s the only show in town. It’s sold out every game and every day in the newspaper there’s three or four articles about the team. It’s non-stop. — Kyle Dubas, former GM of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds

  * * *

  Dubas, who was born in Sault Ste. Marie, was hired as assistant general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs when he was only twenty-eight years old, to help kick-start the team’s rebuild. Four years earlier, he had become the youngest general manager in the history of the OHL. Ask him which job put more wrinkle lines on his face and there’s no questioning the answer.

  The OHL’s 2011–12 season had not even started when Dubas got into a public spat with the sports editor of the local paper after he was accused of “stringing along” an over-age goalie who was then placed on waivers. Two months later, Dubas made national news—and earned a reputation as a brash and bold general manager who was not afraid to swing for the fences—by packaging six draft picks and two players in a blockbuster trade for Jack Campbell, who a year earlier was the No. 11 pick in the NHL Entry Draft. “I knew it was complicated and I knew the risks of the trade full well,” said Dubas. “It did not pay off for us.”

  Why did he make the trade? Two reasons: Campbell, who was the best goalie in junior hockey, was available, and Dubas’s other goalie, Murray, was unproven. Human beings sometimes falter under pressure—especially young ones lacking experience. That was what Dubas was thinking at the time of the trade. But he wasn’t necessarily thinking it about himself. That year, the Greyhounds had jumped out to a 10–6–0 record and pushed their way into third place. It was somewhat unexpected for a team that had finished with the third-worst record the previous year. And Dubas, who was an early proponent of advanced stats, was skeptical it could last.

  “I wasn’t really expecting us to be a contending team,” said Dubas. “Everything underlying was pointing to the fact that we weren’t really as good as our record had indicated. We were ranked in the top ten in Canada at one point in November. But we were basically getting outshot every night.”

  Most of the early success that season was due to Murray, the goalie who had pushed over-ager Chris Perugini to the curb and was now trying to position himself as a top NHL draft pick. But Dubas had his doubts. For one, Murray had played just twenty-eight games the year before. Judging by his frail body (“He was the same height as he is now, but even skinnier,” said Dubas. “I don’t even know if he was 165 pounds. I doubt it.”) and the number of shots he was facing on a nightly basis, it was only a matter of time before he caved.

  “So we got off to a good start and we were getting badly outshot and the owner said to me, ‘Can we keep going?’ I said the only way we can keep going is if we improve a lot of facets in our team. But basically, we were going to need to get all-world goaltending throughout. And the expectations on Matt would have been too great. Jack came available and our owners were antsy to keep everything rolling. We had missed the playoffs two of the previous three years. With me being a younger manager, we went for it.” Making the trade was the easy part. Breaking the news to Murray took some finessing.

  Depending on traffic and how efficiently the drive-through at McDonald’s could handle twenty-five or so orders of burgers and fries, the bus ride from Sault Ste. Marie to Peterborough usually took about eight hours. It was during a road trip on November 2 that Dubas called Murray to the front of the bus and told him he was essentially now the team’s backup goalie. That’s not how Dubas actually broke the news, but that’s all Murray heard.

  “I just explained to Matt why we did what we did, that ‘You are probably going to take this as an indictment about you, but it’s not,’” said Dubas. “He was like anybody would be in that case. He was very quiet.”

  “To be honest, I was pissed off,” said Murray. “I was extremely pissed off. But at the end of the day, you’re part of a team and you’re part of something bigger, so I wasn’t going to let any hard feelings linger or anything like that. I knew exactly who Jack Campbell was and he was kind of everything I wanted to be at the time. He was a first-round pick and he had already signed an NHL contract. He was one of the best goalie prospects in the world. I was pissed off. But as a kid, I was fairly quiet and didn’t want to step on anyone else’s toes, so I definitely held my emotions.”

  Jack Campbell was an all-world goalie, someone who had led the US to a World Junior Championship title and in 2011 was considered a top NHL prospect. But Murray also knew that the Greyhounds were winning games and were on track to make the playoffs and it was largely because of him. And now, he was being pushed to the curb for an even better goalie. It wasn’t really fair. Worst of all, Murray was in his draft year. Every team in the NHL was scouting him and would now be wondering why the Greyhounds needed to acquire Campbell in the trade. Would they think Murray wasn’t good enough to be a starter? That he wasn’t a good teammate?

  All these thoughts ran through Murray’s head. But he tried not to let it show. He just sat there, unable to sleep, thinking about what he was going to say to his newest teammate. When the bus finally reached Peterborough the next morning, Campbell was waiting outside. Unprompted, Murray beat his teammates to the front of the bus and was the first to get off. He walked up to Campbell and extended a hand to the player who had come to take his job. “Welcome to the team,” said Murray.

  “I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Campbell. “I just remember how cool of a feeling that was. I knew that he was a highly touted kid and I was taking some of his ice time, and to show the character he had to welcome me to the team, that was really impressive and made me feel good.”

  “He’s waiting for us and you’re thinking how is everyone going to respond to this?” said Dubas. “The team had missed the playoffs the year before and none of these guys have had any success and you’re bringing in this decorated goalie. Everyone knows who Jack Campbell is. They’re kind of excited, but at the same time they’re real tight with Matt. It’s one of those uneasy things. And to Matt’s credit, he breaks the ice by immediately walking up to him and welcoming him to the team. But that’s Matt. Normally, it’s a nineteen- or a twenty-year-old doing that. It’s usually not t
he seventeen-year-old goalie.”

  About a week later, Murray invited Campbell over to his billet’s house. The place had a huge backyard with a barn and plenty of forested area perfect for playing paintball. Campbell had never played. Murray had his own gun. “The competitive side came out and he shot me right between the eyes in my face mask,” said Campbell. “I just remember I was like, ‘I really like this guy a lot.’ He’s like me at heart with how competitive he is. But I learned pretty quickly not to go over to Matt’s and play paintball.”

  Despite Murray and Campbell hitting it off—“Jack happens to be one of the best people you’ll ever meet,” said Murray—the tandem turned out to be a two-headed monster. Part of it was out of their control. All those underlying numbers that Dubas was worried about bubbled to the surface. The Greyhounds lost ten of their next eleven games, were never really able to rebound and finished out of the playoffs. “Mentally, I was a little bit out of it,” said Campbell. “I could’ve played a lot better to help the team to win. And Matt was really young, obviously.”

  “Any of our team’s lack of success that year was not because of our goaltending,” said Dubas. “If you look at the talent of the team, we were not set up to contend.” Worse yet, Murray was not set up for the 2012 draft. In January of that year, NHL Central Scouting had ranked him as the second-highest goaltender in North America. But that was before he finished the season with a 4.08 goals-against average and .876 save percentage, a downgrade from the year before.

  “The big trade was definitely a setback,” said Murray’s dad. “And that’s the difference with his coach right now. [Mike Sullivan] says ‘I think you can do it. I don’t care about your age or experience or whatever.’ Where, when he was playing in the Soo, they traded for a more experienced goalie down there, even though Matt was winning and playing well at the time. That did set him back.”