Murray’s stats didn’t tell the entire story. But because he played in only half the games that year, stats were all scouts had to go by. NHL teams who should have been clamouring for a wiry yet athletic 6-foot-4 goalie with a huge wingspan were now unsure of his potential simply because they didn’t get to see him enough. When they did, he was getting pummelled. In the 2012 NHL Entry Draft, Murray was selected in the third round, eighty-third overall, behind nine other goalies.
“That draft year, I was working as a scout with the Buffalo Sabres and I was a little surprised he wasn’t more highly rated as a goaltender compared to other goalies in the same birth year,” said Torrie. “But he got stuck in a backup role as a seventeen-year-old so teams had a hard time seeing him play. I thought he played good at the U-18s that spring. It just seemed that there wasn’t a lot of traction. We brought him into Buffalo at the time, but the decision-makers didn’t really feel comfortable—they didn’t feel they got enough views of him. They had my opinion on him, but they hadn’t seen him enough. I’m sure there were a lot of teams thinking that way.”
After the draft, Murray returned to Sault Ste. Marie. Campbell was now gone and Murray finally had the net to himself. Well, sort of. The team got off to another hot start, with Murray posting even better numbers, but then he went into a rut and temporarily lost the job to Justin Nichols. By the time the playoffs arrived, Dubas was being stopped on the street by fans wondering who was going to start: Murray or Nichols.
The team went with Murray, who played well against Owen Sound, but the team lost in the first round. Some fans blamed Murray. So when the Greyhounds traded Nichols at the start of the following season, it wasn’t met with overwhelming support from the fan base. “The day that we traded Justin Nichols was two or three days before the season and we always introduce our players to the season-ticket holders and then I have to do this town hall where they ask me questions,” said Dubas. “And I remember that year, one of the most prominent fans who never missed a thing, said ‘I see you’re missing a goalie.’ The trade had not been approved yet, but there were rumours, so he said, ‘If you’ve moved Justin Nichols, then I’m curious why you’ve moved the wrong goalie.’”
Murray was on the stage. Dubas did his best to fan out the flames and answer the question without losing his temper. He then looked over at Murray. The goalie smiled at him and stood quietly. The sleeping giant doesn’t get bothered by waves.
“His ability to deal with crap and to push through and come out on the other side better is outstanding,” said Dubas. “It’s like, the team wasn’t very good and then the next year we go out and make a trade for a goalie, make a coaching change, the fans want the flavour of the day, and then as a nineteen-year-old that year he was outstanding. He should have been on the World Junior team.”
* * *
I don’t want to say I’m surprised, because I knew he could do it. But to do it that quickly was really impressive. It was almost one of those things where you’re surprised but not surprised. When he was in a zone and it was looking like he was going to win every game he started, we were like, “Ok, we might have to make a decision late in the year.” — John Hynes, former head coach, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins
* * *
Murray’s record-breaking shutout streak in the AHL lasted an entire month. But talk to his former minor-league teammates and they’ll tell you that was nothing. Murray used to go even longer without allowing a goal in practice. And he faced three times as many shots. “When he was a rookie, we used to play this game of four-on-four at the end of a practice and most goalies hate it, because they just get shot at all the time and they give up lots of goals,” said Tom Kostopoulos, who was the captain of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. “But he didn’t complain. He just battled for every puck. He played every puck to the death, like it was the last puck in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final.”
When Murray arrived at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in 2014, the expectation was that he was going to have to battle for ice time. Marc-Andre Fleury was already entrenched as the Pittsburgh Penguins’ No. 1 goalie and the team had just signed Thomas Greiss to be Fleury’s backup, pushing Jeff Zatkoff back down to the AHL. The question was whether Murray, who was twenty years old, would benefit from playing behind Zatkoff in the AHL or whether it was better for his development to get starting goalie minutes in the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL).
Murray answered that question early on. No one could see that this was someone who in another year would be hoisting the first of two Stanley Cups in the NHL, but there were signs that Murray was ahead of the curve. He wasn’t a typical AHL rookie. He had a level of professionalism and maturity that belied his age. He practised hard, played even harder and didn’t take any nights off. His teammates respected him almost instantly.
That last part should not be overlooked. The goaltending position takes a long time to master at the top level. Most goalies don’t become NHL starters when they are twenty-one years old. Even fewer win championships as a rookie. It takes time to master the finer arts of the position. How did Murray get so good so fast? According to his teammates in Pittsburgh and in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, he earned their respect.
The best example of this is the four-on-four mini-games that concluded every practice. Minor-league practices are longer than NHL practices, because AHL teams load up their games on weekends, allowing coaches to spend twice as long on the ice during the week. By the end of a practice, players are exhausted. At the same time, the best time to work on individual skills is when the coaches are off the ice and you can fool around and try different breakaway moves or one-timers from positions that you might not dare in a game-like setting.
The problem is that you need a goalie to shoot on. And whereas the veteran—or starting goalie—usually is allowed to hit the showers early, the backup typically has to stay and play the role of the “shooter tutor.”
“In those kinds of games, you’re not really defending too hard,” said forward Conor Sheary. “You’re working on your skills and there’s a lot of breakaways and two-on-ones. And here’s Murray, making all these huge saves. It was fun to watch, but annoying as a player because you’re like, ‘Hey, let me score.’” It was annoying to have a goalie rob you of your confidence in practice. But the flip side of that, said Wilkes-Barre/Scranton captain Tom Kostopoulos, is that you wanted to battle for the goalie who was willing to battle every puck to the death to make you better.
“I was just amazed by how competitive he was,” said Kostopoulos. “Any time he got scored on in practice, he’d get so upset. I liked to always shoot on him, because you knew if you ever got one by him, it was a good shot. It made you better.”
When Zatkoff got hurt, Murray made a seamless transition into the top spot. That’s when the shutout streak started. From February 8 to March 8—exactly 304 minutes and 11 seconds—Murray stopped every shot he faced and recorded four consecutive shutouts. For nearly six games, he was perfect. Breakaways, two-on-ones, deflections, rebounds, one-timers from the slot and knucklers from the point—Murray saved them all. It was magical. And yet, like any good illusionist, the best part about the trick was that he made it look so easy.
“He would make all the easy saves and make the hard saves look easy and a couple of times a game he would make an incredible save where he reached back and threw his pad across,” said Kostopoulos. “If you didn’t practice with him, you’d say, ‘My God, how did he do that?’ But for us guys who practiced with him, he was doing that ten times a day in practice. We’d seen it before.”
Murray treated the streak similarly. He broke an AHL record, a heck of an achievement for a rookie. When the streak finally ended, Murray didn’t take a moment to celebrate what he had done. With 1:11 remaining in the third period of a 4–1 win against the Springfield Falcons, he simply focused on stopping the next shot.
“It was funny, because the incredible thing about it was his demeanour never changed,” said John Hynes, who was then the head coach
of the team. “He was like the same guy every day. It was like it was an exhibition game for him. That’s when we were all like, ‘We might have something special here.’ It was almost like he was a ten-year veteran, a true professional. Even now, I watch him in the playoffs and he’s the same.”
When the season ended, Murray led all goalies in the AHL with a 1.58 goals-against average, a .941 save percentage and 12 shutouts—five more than the goalie with the next highest total. Not surprisingly, he was named the league’s top goalie and top rookie. The Pittsburgh Penguins tabbed him as the goalie of the future. The only question was how far in the future that would be.
* * *
Murray began the following season in the AHL, because the Penguins still had Fleury as their No. 1 goalie and Murray was better off playing games in the minors than sitting on the bench as an NHL backup. “The plan was not to keep him in the AHL all year,” said Penguins GM Jim Rutherford. “The plan was to bring him up at the deadline.”
That being said, the plan was still for Murray to back up Fleury—not take his job. But plans change. By the time the playoffs began, Fleury, who had been out with a concussion, was now back but no doubt rusty. Murray took advantage of the opportunity. Despite playing in only thirteen regular season games, Murray outplayed the New York Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist and the Washington Capitals’ Braden Holtby, and led the Penguins to their first Stanley Cup championship in seven years. “We felt pretty strongly that he was ready to go at that time,” said Rutherford. “As it turns out, he definitely was.”
A year later, Murray was injured at the start of the playoffs but returned to the net for Game 4 of the Conference Finals and once again led the Penguins to the Finals, where they won back-to-back championships. And he celebrated too. But he did it in typical Murray fashion: understated and without much fanfare.
Aaron Ekblad
Aaron Ekblad and Vancouver Canucks’ Thomas Vanek fight over the puck during a 2018 game. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
Florida Panthers
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Position
Defence
Shoots
Right
Height
6′4″
Weight
216 lb
Born
February 7, 1996
Birthplace
Windsor, ON, CAN
Draft
2014 FLA, 1st rd, 1st pk (1st overall)
Aarin Eckblad
Exceptional. At one time, before every top-three draft pick was deemed a “generational talent,” the word exceptional still meant something. To be exceptional was to be truly special, different from the rest, extraordinary. The great Bobby Orr was exceptional. So were Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby. In 2005, after John Tavares had scored 91 goals and 158 points in 72 games in minor midget, he became the first player granted “exceptional status” so that he could join the Oshawa Generals at fifteen years old. By definition, he was literally the first exception to the rule.
Six years later came another exception. But first, Ekblad had to answer an essay question: “What Attributes Do You Possess that Will Make You Capable of Playing in the OHL?” In other words, what made him exceptional? Ekblad wrote the entire essay on his phone. Seriously, he did. He would type out a paragraph while in class at school and then come home and edit it for spelling and grammar at night. It took him forever—it’s not easy typing with only your thumbs, especially with the autocorrect function turned on. “You have to write essays, have psych evaluations and have all that kind of stuff,” said Ekblad. “The hoops are crazy, there’s no doubt about it.”
Looking back, he probably could have written the thing in crayon and been accepted. That’s how easy a decision it was. “There were never any doubts, never any questioning. Never,” said CHL president David Branch, who developed the criteria to determine whether a player is granted exceptional status. “He was just so mature, not just on the ice but off it as well.”
At the time he applied, Ekblad was a 6-foot-2 and 205-pound “man-child,” as one coach called him. He was already playing a year above his age group with the Sun County Panthers, with whom he had won a league championship, and was named to the All-Ontario All-Star Team. He wasn’t just the biggest and best player in his age group, he was the biggest and best among kids who had a year on him. Getting exceptional status seemed nothing more than a formality. After all, Bauer had already sent him sticks with his name engraved on them and teammates were already calling him “First Ovie,” in reference to his destiny to be the first overall pick in the OHL Priority Draft—as well as the NHL Entry Draft that was still years away. “It’s hard to say in four years that kid’s going to be the first overall pick in the NHL,” said Barrie Colts general manager Jason Ford. “But with Aaron, you just knew that he had all those qualities.”
Typing during the day and editing at night, Ekblad listed the many reasons why he could handle the OHL a year early, everything from his imposing size and skating ability to how he could fend off an attacking forechecker when going back in the defensive zone for a puck (“It’s about angling, proper angling and my game is getting the puck and turning it from south to north as quickly as possible”). On and on he went, talking about his maturity and leadership skills, his grades and hockey IQ, his family support, his slapshot, his two-way game…
He could have listed even more. He could have said he was so strong that once, when playing barefoot hockey in the basement, he accidentally broke his older brother’s foot—“Toe,” said Ekblad, interrupting. “It was just his big toe”—with a particularly hard pass. He could have mentioned that it wasn’t just hockey that he excelled at, that “he was known as the eighth-grader who could dunk,” according to childhood friend Brandon Lalonde.
He could have said that he was already shaving, but never swore, that he was always the first to a post-whistle scrum but the last one to fight. If he’d wanted to save some time typing, he could have simply snapped a photo of his class picture, the one where Ekblad is two feet taller than some of the other kids—“It was kind of comical at times,” said his mother, Lisa—or offered the phone number of his hockey agent, Bobby Orr, who many years earlier played in the OHL as a fourteen-year-old and told Ekblad that he could handle it.
“The tipping point was Bobby Orr was an advocate for it,” Ekblad said. “At first, he was like ‘maybe you shouldn’t do it, [but] because you’re a big fish playing in a small pond with kids your own age, I think that will be good for you.’ [My family’s] question to him was, ‘You did it—do you have any regrets?’ And he was like, ‘No, not at all.’ So we kind of ran with that. If he could do it—and obviously I’m not comparing myself to Bobby Orr, he’s the best defenceman that ever played—but if he could do it, and it was good for him, then maybe it could be good for me. And it was.”
Ekblad, who was the first defenceman granted exceptional status, was the first overall pick of the Florida Panthers in 2014. In his first season in the NHL, he won the Calder Memorial Trophy as the league’s top rookie, having scored 12 goals and 39 points in 81 games while averaging nearly 22 minutes a game as an eighteen-year-old. It wasn’t particularly flashy. Others scored more goals, produced more points and found their way onto more highlight reels. But Ekblad, whose most exceptional quality was his maturity, was exceptionally consistent.
“If you look back at guys who are high-end NHL defencemen, it takes a few years,” said Bob Boughner, Ekblad’s head coach in Florida and a friend of the family. “The uniqueness of Aaron is with his strength and his skating and how big he is; I think he can play a hard-nosed defensive game down low. But I also think he can run a power play up top. He’s a new-aged two-way defenceman. I had the pleasure of coaching Brent Burns for the last couple of years in San Jose and he’s got an unreal shot and he’s unreal offensively, but I don’t think Brent gets enough credit for how good he is defensively. I see a little of that in Aaron. Obviously, he’s a lot younger and lot more inexperienced, but
he can be that fourth forward that jumps up and is that offensive guy and also plays against top offensive guys.”
* * *
They needed a goal. There were only about thirteen seconds left in the game and the Sun County Panthers were trailing by one. The coach called a time out and pulled the players toward the bench so that they could plan their attack. “Ekblad,” said head coach Todd Lalonde. “I want you to play wing.”
Ekblad, who had been a defenceman his entire life, was hesitant. “What do I do?” he asked.
“Listen,” said the coach, “you’re a big guy, and I need to move you to the front of the net because you’ve got great touch.” Lalonde then got out a black marker and started scribbling furiously on a small whiteboard, drawing arrows that pointed toward the net. He looked at Ekblad, who seemed even more confused. “Where do you want me to line up?”
“All I want you to do is score,” said Lalonde. A few moments later, the players lined up for the offensive-zone faceoff. Ekblad, who was the biggest kid on the ice even though he was also a year younger than everyone, lined up on the wing and took a look at his surroundings. “Just score,” he said to himself. Okay, he could do that.
“So they won the faceoff and immediately he runs the defenceman over,” said Lalonde, remembering the play like it was yesterday. “Then he grabs the puck and takes about two steps to the middle of the ice and puts it under the bar. At the end of the day, we needed a goal and he just did it.”
The Next Ones Page 7