“That resonated with me. He was just so mature, not just on the ice but off it as well.”
Lalonde also wasn’t worried about the physicality or the skill level overwhelming Ekblad. After all, Ekblad’s biggest strength wasn’t his body, but rather his mind. He didn’t overpower opponents. He nullified them by playing textbook defence. “I remember saying to his dad that there’s really zero risk to this,” said Lalonde, “because even if we overshot his skill level, his commitment to getting better would narrow that gap.”
With Dave Ekblad on board, the next hurdle to overcome was convincing Lisa Ekblad that sending her youngest son away was the best decision for him. As big and mature as Aaron was, he was still her baby. The youngest. It’s not easy letting a fourteen-year-old leave the house and live with another family, potentially hours away or in another country. At the same time, she didn’t want to stand in the way of an opportunity that could determine his future.
Like any rational mother, she got out a sheet of paper and drew a line down the middle and started to list the pros and cons. “I wrote it all down, the things that I thought would be a potential impact on him,” she said, still choking up with emotion while remembering how difficult it was to make the decision. “He and I sat down and I had tears in my eyes as I ran through everything: what about this, what about school, what about your friends, what about loneliness, what about not seeing us and not seeing your brother. And yeah, he convinced me that those were all of my forty-year-old worries, and certainly not a fourteen-year-old’s worries. I was just really sad to see my baby go.”
As for the actual vetting process, Hockey Canada spent six weeks scouting, interviewing and putting Ekblad through psychological and physical testing. He passed with flying colours. As Branch joked, echoing a familiar comment on Ekblad’s maturity: “He probably could have played in the OHL at age fourteen.”
* * *
The man-child would get a bodyguard. At least that was what Dale Hawerchuk had promised Aaron’s mom. “We’ll protect him,” he’d said. “Don’t worry about a thing.” So the Barrie Colts traded for Reid McNeill, a 6-foot-4, 215-pound defenceman who was three years older than Ekblad and who had a reputation for dropping the gloves at a moment’s notice. The two became defence partners and the message to opposing players was clear: Mess with Ekblad and you’ll have to mess with McNeill. Or was it the other way around?
“It was quite evident that he could handle himself,” Hawerchuk said of Ekblad. “He was big and strong and just had that look to him. We were like, there’s no way this guy’s fifteen years old. It was like Aaron was handling Reid and insulating him. If things got out of hand, Aaron would stand up and say, ‘That’s enough.’ And he liked to mix it up too. I think his first fight was with an over-age player and I was thinking, ‘Oh boy, here we go.’ But he handled himself pretty well.”
* * *
The first time Jason Ford heard the name Aaron Ekblad, he reacted how most people would when being told about a twelve-year-old who was going to be the next Nicklas Lidström: he rolled his eyes and didn’t give it another thought. After all, this Ekblad kid was simply that—a kid. And besides, even if he turned out to be something special, he wasn’t going to be draft-eligible for another four years. “I heard about him, to be honest with you, through a guy who was working as a Rogers play-by-play guy,” remembered Ford. “He was no dummy when it came to hockey. He was calling a game with Ekblad and the only thing he said to me was, ‘There was this kid I saw and he never left the ice. He was on the whole game.’”
Two years later, Ford heard Ekblad’s name again. This time, he actually paid attention. Just as Ekblad was jumping through the hoops required for exceptional status, the Barrie Colts were preparing for a rebuild after missing the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. That meant nabbing the first overall pick.
“At that time, from our staff, it was a pretty easy consensus that he was going to be the guy,” said Ford. “But he still had to go through the exceptional status thing. So we had to keep a pulse on that to see if he was going to be allowed. It was between him and Nick Ritchie. If Aaron didn’t get in, Nick was the next best player.”
By mid-January, Ekblad’s application was accepted. At about the same time, Barrie’s rebuild suddenly got serious. The Colts traded their captain, their starting goalie and one of their top scorers all in a matter of days. The moves allowed late-blooming forward Scheifele to get the ice time necessary to score 75 points in 66 games and finish second overall in rookie scoring. But that was about the only bright spot in a season where the Colts managed just fifteen wins—five fewer than the next-worst team—and ended up dead last in the standings. Well, that and picking first overall in the OHL Priority Draft.
“I remember watching [Ekblad] at the Silver Stick in November,” said Hawerchuk. “We were a pretty decimated team. It was my first year. We had lost [Alex] Burmistrov and [Kyle] Clifford to the NHL, so we didn’t have a lot. I remember thinking, ‘That kid could be our best defenceman right now.’ And he was fourteen.”
Ekblad came into camp looking less like a barely legal rookie and more like a grizzled veteran. “He had a beard,” said Ford. “His ‘Welcome to the OHL’ period? It was like a week.”
“He was a man at fifteen, which was crazy,” said Scheifele. “But honestly, he was huge for our team.” He was also huge for Scheifele. The first time Scheifele met Ekblad was on the first day of training camp, when the players had to compete in a five-kilometre run. They might as well have been the only two players on the track. That was how focused they were on each other. The two took off from the starting line, legs churning around the track with one eye pointed forward and the other eye looking at the person beside them. Neither wanted to give.
“We were neck and neck,” said Ekblad. “I think he ended up winning. But that’s when I knew he was in good shape. When I saw Mark’s work ethic off the ice, it was something I wanted to look up to and follow.” It was the first of many one-on-one battles between the two alpha dogs. And it was all in good fun. In Scheifele, Ekblad had found someone who had the drive and determination to get better. They pushed each other constantly, whether it was in the weight room or on the ice.
“He sought out Scheifele,” said Hawerchuk. “He wanted to go up against the best all the time. There was a burning desire to be the best and get better every day. Having two guys like that is a coach’s dream. You don’t have to bark. They push the pace on their own. You just sit back and smile. They made a lot of people better hockey players.”
“He was one of the best players in the league,” Ekblad said of Scheifele, “so if I could stop him then my thinking was ‘how is anyone else going to get around me?’ It was my motivation for getting better. I tried to line up against him all the time.”
In his first season in the OHL, Ekblad led Colts defencemen with 10 goals and 29 points. By his draft year, he was voted “best shot, hardest shot, best offensive defenceman and best defensive defenceman” in an OHL coaches’ poll. “I think the best way to describe him is he’s like a general back there,” said Hawerchuk. “He wanted to be the general. If things didn’t go his way or he got burned, he wasn’t happy about it. When you think about it, a guy like Ray Bourque was very similar. He was very good at supporting the puck, had a good shot from the point, was just very solid. Those are guys you build around for a number of years.”
* * *
Boxers or briefs? Florida Panthers GM Dale Tallon isn’t seriously interested in what you’re wearing underneath your suit. He’s just trying to throw you a curveball, make you laugh, see how you can think on your feet. He asks the question of all the players who seem a little too nervous, a little too polished, as if they’ve memorized all the things they are going to say in the interview. But Ekblad, with his hair styled just so and his suit hugging his impressive frame, was different. He didn’t get that question. After all, there was no question as to his NHL potential. “He was pretty cool,” said Tallon.
“He had the hair and the look. Some kids come in and they look like kids. But Aaron looked like a pro already.”
* * *
The pause. It… nearly… killed Tallon. When he walked up to the podium to make the first overall pick at the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, Tallon had known for a while what name he was going to say. But he couldn’t help but make the prospects—as well as a sold-out crowd that had lustily booed during NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s introduction—sweat a little. “That was more of a shot toward the Philly fans, like let’s slow down here and enjoy the process,” said Tallon. “What are you doing here? This is supposed to be fun and entertaining, so that’s why I kind of did it that way. I’m a smartass.”
“Hundred per cent I was left in the dark,” said Ekblad, who might have sweated through his suit that day. “There was no way in hell that I knew he was going to pick me. Not until that moment when he said my name.”
In his first season in the NHL, Ekblad did what he had previously done in Sun County and in the OHL: he played beyond his years. He scored 12 goals and 39 points as a rookie, logging nearly 22 minutes a night while recording a plus-12 rating, to beat out Gaudreau and Mark Stone for the Calder Memorial Trophy.
“It wasn’t like he was great one night and so-so the other night, like most young kids are,” said Tallon. “He was good all the time. I think that in itself was exceptional. Not many kids are grounded with a two-hundred-foot game. In every zone, he was in the right position.” By the time he was twenty-one years old, Ekblad was already an alternate captain and had logged 227 games.
“They say three hundred games,” Tallon said of the amount of time it takes for a defenceman to get comfortable in the NHL. “It’s probably true. He’s got a chance to be [Shea] Weber-like, that type of player who plays quality minutes, is a reliable guy. That’s why he got exceptional status. The package is always solid all the time. I think that in itself is exceptional.”
William Nylander
William Nylander (right) races Gustav Nyquist for the puck at the Centennial Classic at Toronto’s BMO Field in 2017. The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn
Toronto Maple Leafs
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Position
Centre
Shoots
Right
Height
6′0″
Weight
191 lb
Born
May 1, 1996
Birthplace
Calgary, AB, CAN
Draft
2014 TOR, 1st rd, 8th pk (8th overall)
William Nylander
The kid was a legend even before he stepped on the ice. In some ways, he was a legend even before he got out of the car. Picture that you are twelve-year-old Zach Pard as he arrives at hockey tryouts for Team Maryland in the fall of 2008. As you’re getting your equipment out of the trunk, a luxury SUV pulls into the parking lot beside you. The driver’s side door opens and out walks Michael Nylander. You know who this is because your family has owned season tickets to the Washington Capitals for almost ten years and you were just saying that getting a veteran like Nylander was going to make the Caps a real Cup contender.
But wait—who’s that coming out of the passenger side door? Is that… No way, it can’t be… Holy crap, it is… Nicklas Backstrom?!? He was the Caps’ fourth overall pick last year. He’s a rookie, but he’s supposed to be really, really good and will help turn Alex Ovechkin—who is your favourite player, by the way—into a sixty-goal scorer. Then the rear door opens and you see this short, skinny kid with clear blue eyes and floppy blond hair, who’s clearly younger than you, and you’re thinking, What is going on right now? Who is this that’s trying out for our team?
That was how Zach Pard first met William Nylander. And although Nylander insists getting chauffeured to tryouts by an NHL forward who had played more than nine hundred games in the NHL and another who would become one of the league’s best playmaking centres was “normal,” it was anything but for those around him. After all, it’s not normal that your teammates are asking your dad for his signature. “It was a huge deal to me,” said Pard. “At the end of the year, I said, ‘Mr. Nylander, I don’t usually do this, but I don’t know if I’ll see you again. Can I have your autograph?’”
William Nylander looks like a typical Swede, with blond hair and blue eyes, but as he developed, he became a hybrid player, combining North American and European styles of play. Photo courtesy of Daniel Lackner
There are a lot of those kinds of stories over the years. Like the time when Ovechkin came over for Thanksgiving dinner or when William would play Ping-Pong with Backstrom or when his father would call a few of his NHL teammates if his son was short a few players for a game of road hockey. “Now we understand how special it was,” said William. “Back then, it was just how it was. You didn’t think about it or whether other guys got to see NHL guys or whatever. It was normal. It’s just how we grew up.”
Michael Nylander scored 679 points in 920 NHL games, but he’s logged so many miles that his hockey career is straight out of a road-tripping Johnny Cash song. He played everywhere, man: Hartford, Calgary, Tampa Bay, Chicago, Washington, Boston, New York, Springfield, Mass., Grand Rapids, Rochester, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Switzerland and even Italy. Often, William and the rest of the family went along for the ride. For example, look at William’s place of birth. He is Canadian, having been born in Calgary when his father was playing for the Flames. But he moved to the United States two years later after Michael was traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning. And Michael was playing in Chicago two years after that.
William was brought up in the nomadic lifestyle of a hockey journeyman, packing up and moving at a moment’s notice, sleeping in hotels and with friends of friends, calling parts of the United States and Sweden home, but never really setting down roots in one particular place. “My kids never asked why are we here and not there or anything, they just enjoyed everywhere they’ve been,” said his father. “They got used to it. They were really happy to be wherever we were, whether it was Chicago or New York or Sweden. It was like taking their bag and playing for another team. They saw how it goes in the NHL and were used to that kind of living.”
Two things happened because of that kind of childhood: the first is that Nylander, whose accent is a blend from growing up in New York, Maryland and Stockholm, does not play like a prototypical European or North American. He skates and stickhandles with the patience and precision of most Swedish players. And yet the Swedes have at times considered him too selfish of a shooter to truly be one of their own.
“I think that he’s definitely a hybrid player,” said Anders Sorensen, a close family friend who has coached Nylander in both Chicago and Sweden. “A lot of his skating and whatnot is attributed to playing over there and being taught a certain way. But the mentality is different than the European-influenced player. He wants the puck, he wants to be the guy—where sometimes I found that European players would rather take the back seat and let other people score.”
Another thing that happened: in watching his father experience success and failure at the highest levels, Nylander developed a thick skin that has prepared him for the inevitable ups and downs that every hockey player faces. He has seen his father score 83 points on a line with Jaromir Jagr. But he’s also seen him bounce around from team to team and league to league and country to country looking for his next job. Nylander was fourteen years old when his father went headfirst into the boards and broke his neck in an AHL game.
A year later, he watched his father go through painful rehab from spinal fusion surgery and try out for the Philadelphia Flyers. He did not make the team, but he also did not give up. He just found another place to play, playing hockey wherever he could. The lesson for William was that talent alone takes you so far. To play professionally, it takes hard work and perseverance.
William, who scored 61 points in his first full season with the Maple Leafs and followed it up with another 61 points in 2017–18, is a produc
t of that perseverance. He calls his upbringing normal—and maybe it was for him—but it was also special. “We would be with him in the locker room, so we would see the NHL lifestyle,” William said of him and his brother. “I think I learned a lot through my dad, him being in the league and knowing what it takes. It taught me and my brother a lot, just how to prepare.”
* * *
The hockey game was what you would expect from the mite level. There was no structure, no organization, no positional play. As the puck moved up and down the ice, a pack of six-year-olds moved along with it, a giant blob of sticks and skates. Except for one.
Nylander stayed away from the pack and waited for the puck to pop out his way. It was an unexpected level of hockey intelligence at an age level where some kids were confused as to what net they were shooting on. What happened next was equally unexpected. Once he had the puck, Nylander didn’t skate up the ice—he turned around and started to skate back to his own end. The coaches and parents thought he was confused. “Wrong way! Wrong way! You’re going the wrong way!”
Nylander ignored them. Instead he circled behind his own net and stopped. He then left the puck there and skated up the sideboards, his stick on the ice in a position to receive a pass that never came. “He was waiting for the defenceman to pick it up and break it out, but nobody knows what’s going on so nobody picks the puck up,” said Michael Nylander, laughing. “But that’s what they do in the NHL.”
The problem? He was six years old.
* * *
It started early. Very early, in fact. Some hockey parents like to joke that their kids were skating before they were walking. For William, he practically learned how to walk while wearing skates. “He had the skates on in the house, because we had carpet in some places,” said Michael Nylander. “He would be walking around on them. Where there was hardwood floor, we told him he couldn’t stand there because it would scratch the floors, so he was crawling on the hardwood floors and then walking on the carpet.”
The Next Ones Page 9