The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  * * *

  Getting into the OHL a year early turned out to be easy. It was playing above his age group in the Sun County Minor Hockey Association that was the bigger challenge. Ekblad was ten years old when his father asked if he could play on a team with the eleven-year-olds. It was a reasonable request. Ekblad was nearly six feet tall by then, easily the biggest kid in his age group. Some kids hit growth spurts early on and can seem gawky, like they are all arms and legs. Ekblad wasn’t clumsy. He was confident in his body, a naturally smooth skater who handled the puck with ease. “Well, he certainly had a size advantage,” said Lisa Ekblad. “He was a big kid. And he was fortunate enough to be fairly coordinated.”

  “I can remember vividly that first workout,” said coach Lalonde. “We did a breakout drill and this kid takes three strides to go and pursue a puck in the defensive zone and I’m like, ‘Wow.’ His first three steps were something else.”

  By ten years old, Ekblad was already becoming something of a known commodity. Part of it was that he was just so big and so talented. The other part was that he was a big fish in a really small pond, having grown up in Belle River, Ontario, which sits on Lake St. Clair on the Canadian side of the US border, about a half-hour’s drive from Windsor. With its population of less than forty thousand, everyone is connected in one way or another. For instance, Dave and Lisa Ekblad were high school sweethearts who were introduced by Windsor Spitfires head coach Warren Rychel, who once coached Aaron at a pro skate with Bob Boughner, who also grew up with Dave and Lisa and later became Aaron’s NHL head coach with the Florida Panthers.

  “It’s a small-town feel,” said Ekblad, who bought a house not far from where he grew up. “My mom’s a nurse practitioner and obviously she’s bound by confidentiality, but a lot of people in the community would be like, ‘Your mom’s my nurse practitioner,’ or ‘I know your dad real well, I play Monday night hockey with him.’ I have a lot of fun with that.”

  Ekblad gets his size and athleticism from his dad, a former goalie who is about the same size as his son, “minus a few extra pounds,” Dave Ekblad joked. His mom said she wasn’t much of an athlete (“Nothing that I would ever want to admit to”), but it’s clear that Aaron got his mom’s humility and thoughtfulness. He was always embarrassed by extra attention growing up, once asking an equipment manufacturer to stop sending him sticks with his name engraved on them because he didn’t want to seem above the team.

  As for the maturity, both parents throw up their hands. That’s all Aaron, they say. He has a quiet confidence about him, as though this is his second go-around in life. As a result, he was also the first person friends would turn to when there was a problem. “My first year of school away at university, we talked for two hours,” said Brandon Lalonde. “He was getting ready for the NHL draft and I was a little homesick and he spent two hours talking to me on the phone. He’s that kind of guy.”

  Sports played a huge role in Ekblad’s upbringing. His older brother Darien was named after Red Wings’ defenceman Darien Hatcher—Joe Louis Arena in Detroit is thirty-four kilometres away from Belle River—and their father used to jokingly tell the two boys they could be two things in life: a lefty pitcher or a righty defenceman, since both were always in high demand.

  Whereas Aaron became the righty defenceman, his older brother opted to be a goalie like their dad. It was a perfect relationship. Darien needed someone to take shots on him and Aaron needed someone to practise his shots on. Sometimes, the practice ended up in the emergency room. “They weren’t too bright,” said Dave Ekblad, referring to the time when Aaron broke his brother’s toe.

  As a kid, Ekblad used to wear No. 19 in honour of Steve Yzerman, before switching to Nicklas Lidström’s No. 5. Not that he even needed a number to identify him. “Everywhere we went, he was the talk of the city,” said Todd Murphy, a former teammate in Sun County. “He had a big reputation. He was a big kid who could move and shoot the puck and he was just so smart. He was already developed past kids who were probably two years older than him.”

  Aaron Ekblad’s 2007–2008 hockey card foreshadowed what was to come for the young defenceman—he was to become a star. Photo courtesy of the Ekblad family

  No question, playing in small-town Ontario added to the mystique. “Playing in Belle River, I remember the most kids we ever had at tryouts was forty kids, maybe,” said Ekblad. “You go to try out and if you’re good enough you make it. I felt a lot of the politics were put to the wayside, because it was a smaller organization.” The lack of nepotism, however, cut both ways. Although Ekblad was clearly big enough and good enough to play up a year (“He always had two feet on some kids—that’s a fact,” said childhood friend Patrick Murphy), the Sun County Minor Hockey Association had rules. And unlike the OHL, the league was not going to make an exception—no matter how exceptional the player was.

  “Ironically, he followed [NHL first-round picks] Matt Puempel and Kerby Rychel through our organization and we were just in a process of dealing with that common issue of parents who want their kids to play up right from the beginning,” said Richard Ofner, the former president of Sun County Minor Hockey Association, who is now retired. “There’s parents who want to move their kids up every year. And it just becomes a big debate. The Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) developed a policy where you have to rate each player and to move up they have to be either a top forward or a top defenceman. And that’s such a difficult thing to do. It’s much easier to flat-out say no. And Aaron was one of those players who was told no.”

  For three years, Dave Ekblad tried to get his son to play up. For three years, the answer was the same. He would have to wait until he was thirteen before he was allowed to move up. Other parents might have raised a stink or moved their kid to another hockey association, where the rules were less rigid. But the Ekblads accepted the decision, trusting that the hockey association had its reasons and was operating with their son’s best interests in mind.

  It was a life lesson for Ekblad. No matter how hard you might try, some things are out of your control. It’s how you respond to adversity that defines the person you are. “Could he have played up? Yeah, he could have. But we didn’t feel it hurt his development,” said Ofner. “We actually felt that dominating at a young age was a good thing. By the time he got to minor bantam it was perfect. He fit right in there and for the first month he was probably their top defenceman. It became a lot easier after that. Whenever parents came forward and said, we want our son to move up, all we had to say was, ‘We turned down Aaron Ekblad and we don’t think it hurt his development.’”

  When he was thirteen, Ekblad was finally allowed to move up. And the timing could not have been better. While Ekblad was finally moving up, Lalonde was moving down. A former junior hockey standout as a two-way centre, Lalonde had spent six years behind the bench of the Sudbury Wolves before coaching numerous semi-pro teams in Texas. Newly divorced and looking for a change of scenery, he had moved with his son to Windsor, where he got a sales job working with Ofner’s wife at a Toyota dealership. “We had a coach back out on us because he got a job with the Leamington Flyers,” said Ofner. “So at the last minute we needed a coach. Todd Lalonde was there and we asked if he was interested and he ended up taking the job.”

  Aaron Ekblad used to wear No. 19 in honour of Steve Yzerman. He switched to No. 5 in honour of Nicklas Lidström, and continues to wear No. 5 with the Florida Panthers. Photo courtesy of the Ekblad family

  “I really didn’t know anyone in Windsor or the Sun County area,” said Lalonde. “What’s interesting is when I was asked to coach the minor bantam team, the convener said ‘there’s a caveat to this story and the caveat is that there’s this kid who we’re going to allow to play a year up, but we want you to tell us based on your hockey background’—and I’d coached major junior for eight or nine years in Sudbury—‘if we’re doing the right or the wrong thing, because we’re not convinced the minor hockey officials are reading this right.’ And I said, �
�Sure, but I’ll be honest with you: why would you rush a kid’s development?’ Without even seeing him, I was conditioned to believe that the kid should just play at his age level and be a star.”

  Of course, his mind changed quickly after meeting the so-called kid, who turned out to be bigger and stronger and faster than Lalonde could have imagined. With just a few strides, Ekblad covered great distances. He made tape-to-tape passes. But it was more than that. Even in the first practice, Ekblad was pushing Lalonde to take it up a notch—not the other way around.

  “Ek would say to me, ‘When you’re dumping pucks in I want you to dump them in right along the boards so it’s really tough for me to get,’” said Lalonde. “And this is a kid who’s twelve years old. But he’s perceptive enough to know that the harder you work in practice, the easier it’s going to be in a game. At that point, I knew there was something really special in this kid.”

  Lalonde was a perfect fit for a player who was playing up a year and would later enter the OHL as a fifteen-year-old. He coached the kids like they were pros, demanding a lot of them both on and off the ice. But he also knew how to keep the mood light, often making himself the butt of jokes when delivering a message on the importance of putting the team in front of yourself.

  A favourite story of Lalonde’s was when he had tried out for Canada’s World Junior Championship team in 1988. He got cut. But as Lalonde tells it, it was really his fault. The coach had put him on a line with a kid who also wanted to play centre. “I can’t play with this guy,” Lalonde had told the coach. “I’ve got to play centre.” So the team sent Lalonde home. The other guy, meanwhile, helped lead Canada to a gold medal and then went on to play twenty years in the NHL. “You might have heard of him,” said Lalonde. “His name was Joe Sakic.” “Todd is very humble,” said Ofner. “Some guys would never admit a story like that.”

  Lalonde added structure to Ekblad’s game. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for coaches to double-shift Ekblad and let him stay on the ice for the entire game. Lalonde taught Ekblad to pace himself, to play hard for ninety-second bursts. He also challenged Ekblad to be perfect in his own end, telling him that there was never an excuse for having a forward deke around him. “He just said to me, ‘You don’t get beat—ever,’” said Ekblad. “‘Two-on-ones, yeah, you’re going to get beat sometimes. Three-on-ones, you’re going to get beat, three-on-twos you’re going to get beat, but one-on-ones you never ever get beat.’ And that’s something that I’ve held near and dear to my heart forever. It’s you against one other person. There’s no edge. You should be better than that person and that’s kind of what I’ve held onto.”

  It wasn’t just technical skills that Lalonde impressed upon the kids. He taught them how to become men. Sure, all hockey players—whether NHLers or six-year-olds playing competitively—arrive at the rink wearing a dress shirt and tie. But that was just the start for Lalonde’s teams. Respect was a word that carried a lot of weight. There was no backtalk, no teasing, not even a curse word allowed—ever.

  “He wouldn’t let any of us swear in the dressing room,” said Ekblad. “If he caught you swearing, he’d put you into the back of the car and send you home. He was a very disciplined guy. Kept us really disciplined and it was very fun playing for him.”

  “I got kicked out of practice,” said Trevor Murphy. “I remember to this day. I made a bad pass and just reacted by swearing out something. He’s like, ‘No, you can’t be doing that.’ You learn. We always learned from our mistakes from him and he always corrected them the right way.” It’s difficult to say whether a swear jar was the reason the Sun County Panthers won the alliance championship. But there’s no doubt that Lalonde’s emphasis on respecting your teammates brought the team together. The players, who came from different schools and had their own circles of friends, started spending more time together while away from the rink.

  “He’s an amazing hockey coach,” Brandon Lalonde said of his dad. “I wouldn’t even say we had the horses. I think we thought we were better than we actually were and that was something that my dad worked to instill in us and something that we talk about to this day. When you compared us on paper to other teams, we shouldn’t have beat them. But we bought in so hard and were so invested in what we wanted to do that no one was going to beat us. We went into every game knowing that we were going to win.” Then again, it’s easy to feel that way when you’ve got a defenceman who is literally exceptional.

  * * *

  The guys needed to check their egos at the door. That’s how it started. That’s why Todd Lalonde shut the dressing room door after a brutal loss and started one of his famous lectures. It was early in the season, but the Sun County Panthers weren’t playing like a team, he said. They were playing like twenty-three individuals who were more concerned about padding their stats and auditioning for the scouts in the rink than actually winning a game. “You know, guys,” Lalonde said, “I know it’s your midget minor year, I know all you guys are thinking about getting drafted…”

  As he spoke, Lalonde started to scan the faces in the room, making sure everyone felt like he was talking directly to them. And then he looked at Ekblad, who was listening but not really paying as much attention as the others, since he was another year from the OHL Priority Draft. “Ekblad,” said Lalonde. “Even Ekblad’s thinking about getting drafted.”

  Suddenly, Ekblad sat up in his seat. “Todd, I wasn’t thinking about getting drafted,” he said.

  “Well, why not?”

  * * *

  He didn’t like the “First Ovie” nickname, by the way, the same way he didn’t like getting sticks sent to him with “EKBLAD” engraved on the shaft. It was another thing that made him stand out above the team. “I was with him one day and he called the guy who was sending him the sticks and was like, ‘You’ve got to stop putting my name on the sticks, because I hate the way people look at me and say how did you get your name on your sticks?’” Brandon Lalonde said of Ekblad. “‘Just send me the regular sticks. Pretend like it’s no one.’”

  Of course, he wasn’t just an average player. That was clear to anyone who had seen him play up that year. “Bigger than most, faster than many, but smarter than all of them,” is how Lalonde described Ekblad to visiting scouts and anyone who asked if the fourteen-year-old was really as good as people were saying he was. It was Lalonde who suggested Ekblad should apply for exceptional status—and then started calling him “First Ovie” because, once accepted, Ekblad was clearly going to be chosen first overall in the OHL Priority Draft. “As a fourteen-year-old, you could have put him in the lineup for Barrie on a Thursday night in Oshawa and he could have done as good as any defenceman any team had,” said Lalonde. “He was certainly gifted, but he had a want and desire to be the best.”

  Aaron Ekblad played for the Sun County Panthers for many years. Photo courtesy of the Ekblad family

  To no one’s surprise, there had been no adjustment period for Ekblad during his year of playing up with Sun County. One month into the season and Lalonde said, “He had already sort of became the Nick Lidström–type defenceman.” The comparison to Lidström was lofty and yet it was also appropriate. Like the seven-time Norris Trophy winner, Ekblad wasn’t particularly flashy. He didn’t rush the puck up the ice, deke through a pile of defenders and then roof the puck over the goalie’s glove. Nor did he put anyone through the boards with glass-rattling bodychecks. He played textbook defence. He was more efficient than energetic, the kind of player who was always where he was supposed to be and who almost always made the right pass.

  “The one thing we stressed for all those kids in their draft year was there’s nothing worse than a defenceman who can’t play defence,” said Lalonde. “And parents at the minor hockey level get caught up in the kids’ ability to jump out and contribute to the offensive side of the game, be it five-on-five or power play. And what I tried to teach these kids was when you learn to play defence positionally inside the faceoff dots, toe caps facing up the ice,
moving your head not your feet, then you’re in a position to play offence whenever you want or when the opportunity presents itself.

  “And Ek was like a sponge. He would instinctively know where he was in all three zones. If he was going to get beat, he was going to get beat on the outside and never get beat to the goalpost. He really understood the defensive principles, which in minor hockey is sort of odd.”

  The first time Lalonde mentioned exceptional status to Ekblad was during that post-game lecture on playing as a team. Afterward, the two talked more about it. “That was the first time it dawned on me,” said Ekblad. “I had heard of the exceptional status rule, but I didn’t think I could do it. And Todd was like, ‘Yeah, for sure you can. There’s a 100 per cent chance you’ll get in.’”

  After Tavares had been granted exceptional status to join the OHL early, another forward had applied and been rejected. Ekblad was the first defenceman to apply and the OHL’s concerns were different. Ekblad was bigger than Tavares had been when he entered the league as a fifteen-year-old, but they played different positions and were different players. As many skilled goal scorers did, Tavares went out of his way to avoid contact. Ekblad’s job as a defenceman was to initiate contact. As strong as he was, he would be getting physical against players who were a lot more physically mature.

  “When I first met him and his mom and dad, I said, ‘Listen, Aaron, one of the concerns that we have is you’ve got to go back to your own zone and pick up that puck and you’re going to have guys at the age of nineteen and twenty coming at you pretty hard. Do you think you’re ready to handle that?’” said David Branch. “And right away he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Branch, listen, first of all it’s all about angling, proper angling, and my game is getting the puck and turning it from south to north as quickly as possible.’