Growing up, all William and his brother Alex, who is two years younger, wanted to do was play hockey. Of course they did. Their father played in the NHL, which meant they had the kind of closed-door access that most kids—and let’s be honest, most adults—could only dream about. Their father’s teammates, whether they were Alex Ovechkin or Nicklas Backstrom, were not NHL stars to them. They were friends who always seemed to be at the house hanging out because they were young bachelors and Michael Nylander had a reputation as the best chef in the NHL. Seriously, his spaghetti carbonara was better than his wrist shot.
“He’s a phenomenal cook,” said Backstrom, who was new to the country and still a teenager at the time. “He was standing in the kitchen from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., just cooking all day. I was not living with them, but I was over there all the time, playing Ping-Pong and picking up the kids from practices sometimes. I was playing with the kids and Michael was cooking for us. It was perfect.”
Having a dad who was in the NHL had an obvious effect on William and Alex. The life of an NHLer became so ingrained in their heads that when the boys used to go outside to play road hockey, they would first put on their suits and ties because that’s what their father did when he went to play hockey. “That was their road trip,” said Michael. “Then they’d go and play the game.” Even when playing mini-sticks in the basement, whoever was playing in net would pause the game to squeeze water into his face like the goalies did on their father’s team. “They were imitating us at a really young age in all kinds of ways,” said Michael.
There were other influences. Michael Nylander is the first person to tell you that he wasn’t always around for his six kids. How could he be? Up until 2014–15, when William was eighteen years old, Michael was still playing professionally in Sweden. He was either travelling to games, or because he was a journeyman who never lasted more than four years in one place, he was sometimes playing in one city while his wife Camilla and their six kids lived somewhere else.
“I was on the road all the time,” said Michael Nylander. “I was always away somewhere and [William and Alex] were always playing somewhere else. There was always somebody picking up one of the kids and my wife took the other. There were maybe only five, six, eight times a year where you could watch them play.”
The hockey community is a tight family, no matter what city you are living in. Coaches, convenors and others opened up their homes to the travelling Nylanders. When in Chicago, they spent time with Anders Sorensen, who would become William’s long-time coach. When they moved to Maryland, they lived on and off with Bob Weiss, whose spacious five-bedroom home suddenly seemed cramped after the Nylanders unpacked. “They arrived with something like twenty-four hockey bags full of clothes, if you can imagine,” said Bob Weiss. “My wife will jokingly tell you that one reason she allowed the Nylanders to stay was because he said he would cook every night. My wife said, ‘Done deal. You can stay as long as you want.’”
William never really stayed in one spot long enough to call it home. He was two years old when his dad was traded from Calgary to Tampa Bay. Two years later, his dad was traded to Chicago. By the time he arrived in Washington in 2002–03, the six-year-old was on his fourth NHL city. “He bounced around a lot, so he had to be guarded,” said Team Maryland head coach Dan Houck. “He didn’t know where he was going to be twenty-four hours from the next day. You’re talking about a kid whose parents might not be home for the night or whatever, and Willie would be in charge of his brother and four sisters at age eleven. He was very mature, very responsible.”
By then, Nylander had already begun to cultivate a reputation as a slick-skating forward who was usually playing a year up. “Honestly back then, even at a young age, his puck-handling ability, his skating ability, his compete level set him apart,” said Rob Keegan, one of William’s earliest coaches with Team Maryland. “His skating seemed effortless.”
William Nylander grabs the puck while playing for Team Maryland. Photo courtesy of Daniel Lackner
“I remember I was over at his house one day and we were just shooting pucks and having a good time,” said Pard. “And then his brother came out. We’re all in the garage ripping pucks and they’re going bar down and picking corners.”
Nylander was always good enough to play up an age level. But heading into his first season of full-contact hockey, there were some concerns about whether a player who was so slight and so small could take a hit. Dan Houck had an easy way to answer that. At the start of training camp, the players performed a “gauntlet drill” where the entire team lined up against the boards and one by one a player had to try to skate through the mass of bodies. “One of our players broke his clavicle,” said Pard. Nylander fared slightly better.
“He was tiny,” said Houck. “He weighed like 70 pounds and some of these kids he’s playing against were 130 pounds. And, I mean, this kid would get absolutely flattened and he’d just bounce back up like a rubber band and go again.”
Team Maryland was the 2007–2008 peewee champion. William Nylander is in the front row, second from left. Photo courtesy of Daniel Lackner
Houck was an interesting coach. Pard described him as “hard-nosed,” the kind of person who wouldn’t take crap from anyone and who expected his players to act the same. Houck knew that Nylander was offensively gifted—he scored 25 goals and 51 points in 28 games that year—but he also knew that scoring goals was only a part of what made a player and a team successful. He needed Nylander to play as hard without the puck as he did with it.
And so, following a one-sided loss where the team hadn’t sacrificed their bodies enough in blocking shots, the coach showed up to the next day’s practice with a basket full of tennis balls. Houck stood on the blue line and instructed a player to skate toward him. He then took out a tennis ball and wound up. “Now block it!” he shouted. “If you missed the tennis ball, he used the puck,” said Pard. “He definitely did not like cutting corners in any way.”
While this was going on, Michael Nylander was having his worst season in the NHL. On a Capitals team that was trending young—a twenty-two-year-old Ovechkin had won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the league MVP and Backstrom, who was nineteen, had just scored 88 points—Nylander’s best days were long gone. He finished with 9 goals and 22 points in 72 games. It would be the last time he played in the NHL.
The following season, Washington sent him to Detroit, where he was assigned to the minors in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before leaving to play in Finland. The rest of the family needed more stability, so they moved back to Chicago, where William was reunited with Sorensen. “Anders is a very, very special guy and he’s really knowledgeable,” said Michael Nylander. “Of course, when your kids get to have a coach like that around when they’re so young, it’s a unique opportunity. He’s done so well with my boys.”
Sorensen is a few years younger than Michael Nylander. They grew up not far from each other in Sweden. If Houck was the coach who tried to add a layer of grit to Nylander’s game, Sorensen was the one who tapped into Nylander’s Swedish roots. Don’t worry about dumping and chasing after the puck. Instead, hang onto it; reverse it back to your end if you have to. Control the pace. Don’t be afraid to slow down the game.
For Nylander, it was a dream scenario. Not only was he now playing for a coach who wasn’t blasting tennis balls at his body, but he was also playing on a team where he wasn’t the only player destined for the NHL. Nick Schmaltz and Christian Dvorak were his linemates with the Chicago Mission team that became a powerhouse. “It was one of those deals where, ‘Okay, we need a goal, put that line out there,’” said Sorensen.
Nylander scored 34 goals and 61 points in 29 games and led the Chicago Mission U-14 team to the USA Hockey national championships, where they lost in the final to a Belle Tire team that had Dylan Larkin, Zach Werenski and Kyle Connor. “We lost 6–5,” said Sorensen. “We were down 5–2 and we got two straight five-on-threes. If I remember right, Nick scored and then William scored and we scored an
other to make it 5–5.”
In another tournament, the Mission went up against a Toronto Marlboros team that had Connor McDavid, Robby Fabbri and Josh Ho-Sang. The Mission more than held their own, a sign that Nylander was developing at pace with the best players in his age group. “That was the first time I realized just how good he was,” said Sorensen. “William was every bit as good or even better in my mind. I told Michael, ‘This kid’s the real thing. He is probably the top ten in the world.’” And then, of course, they were on the move again.
* * *
I’ve known him since he was ten or eleven. The talent has been there the whole time. He’s probably the most talented player I have ever worked with. He’s special. William is close to Erik Karlsson. He’s in the same ballpark for talent. It was really interesting to coach him, because his skill level is so high there. When I see a guy like William Nylander, he’s the top, top, top guy in the draft for me. I would have picked him much earlier than eighth. I really like that type of player. They can make a big difference. And people love to pay and go see them. It’s entertainment to see these types of guys. — Anders Forsberg, MODO coach
* * *
In 2011, Michael Nylander had all but decided his NHL career was over, so he returned to Europe where the travel was lighter, the hockey was less physical and there was a spot for him. But really, his two sons wanted to return to their roots. “I think for some reason they wanted to play a little bit in Sweden and try it out here,” said Michael Nylander. “They had a really good time when they came over and played for some good teams and some good coaches as well.”
From a language and cultural perspective, the transition went smoothly. “Home is Sweden,” said William. “That’s where all the family is. We were back there every summer.” It also helped that Sorensen decided to join them, taking a job with Södertälje SK so he could coach William. And yet there was still an adjustment.
With a style inspired by the protagonist in the Zelda video games, the blond-haired and blue-eyed Nylander might look like a prototypical Swede. To the untrained eye, it might even seem like he learned to stickhandle from watching video of the Sedin twins. But when Nylander arrived in Sweden, he was a lone wolf in sheep’s clothing. “He was, like, a shooter and everybody was just like, ‘Who does this guy think he is?’” said Dmytro Timashov.
“The North American part of him was just being selfish, and what I mean by that is he was actually shooting,” said Rikard Grönborg, who coached Nylander at the World Junior Championship. “In Sweden we’re always looking for a pass. If you look at our centres and defencemen especially, we have a lot of good passers out here. Where he would come on the ice and would be thinking shoot first and pass second. To me, it was refreshing to see a player like that who was actually wired a little differently than the other players we had.”
Of course, it must be mentioned that Grönborg went to college at St. Cloud State in Minnesota and spent a decade coaching in the United States before returning home to Sweden. If anyone could see the value in Nylander’s style, it would be him. Others, however, were sometimes confused by it. To some, Nylander was a me-first player, more interested in padding his own stats than playing the team game. He always wanted the puck. He always wanted to be the one taking the shot. Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem had he been born and developed in Sweden. But the perception of him when he arrived was that he was the son of an NHLer acting like he was also a star.
“You know how it is when your dad is playing in the NHL and now you’re good; there can be a jealousy factor from other players there,” said Sorensen. “Personally, I thought he adjusted very quickly. The first couple of games he had a rough time, because he’s sixteen and playing against twenty-year-olds. But five, six games into it, he really started to find his ground. We played Brynäs IF in the playoffs and they had Elias Lindholm [a fifth overall pick of the Carolina Hurricanes in 2013]. Nylander dominated against them to the point where he made Lindholm look like an average player.”
The bigger rink suited Nylander. He was always a terrific skater and loved to hang onto the puck and now he had so much more room to operate. For opposing players, it was like trying to swat at a fly. He buzzed around, darting this way and that, using the open ice like his own playground.
“I know a lot of people in Toronto want to compare Mitch Marner to Patrick Kane, but I actually think William is more like [Kane] in how he reads and reacts and changes the pace of the game,” said Sorensen. “It used to drive me crazy as a coach. But he’s just so confident. It’s almost like he’s trying to goad people in. And then when the D commits to him, that’s when he uses a cut pass or blows by a guy. That’s very, very similar to Kane.”
At first blush, Nylander plays like a typical European. He likes to cut back and circle with the puck, taking his time to find holes in the defence. But once his mind is made up, he attacks. “I would say he’s a hybrid for sure,” Sorensen said. “He can break the game open because of his skill and his hockey sense, but you’re never going to ask him to be the first guy in the corner.”
Without the puck, Nylander was like most sixteen-year-old skilled players: invisible. He didn’t backcheck. When he did, he was just going through the motions or delivering an Oscar-worthy performance to show how fatigued he was. “He would fake being tired,” said Anders Forsberg. “In the beginning, he showed everyone, ‘Oh, I’m too tired to do this backcheck or do this thing.’”
Forsberg still laughs at the memory of a totally gassed Nylander barely making it to the bench as the opposing team was rushing the other way, only to realize that the puck had been turned over. With that, he found a second wind and rejoined the rush, skating at top speed. “He would look totally dead on the backcheck—skating like he would hopefully get to the bench—and then all of a sudden he is 100 per cent fresh?” said Forsberg. “As you stand there on the bench, you’re like, ‘What is this!?!’ A normal coach would be freaking out. But afterward you’re laughing because he scored.”
Although Forsberg saw the potential in a player like Nylander, he was realistic about having a sixteen-year-old in the lineup. “He was the most skilled guy on the team right from day one,” said Forsberg. “The biggest problem was that we weren’t so good as a team. We spent too much time in the defensive zone. So that was a problem. And he wasn’t strong enough for it at the time. If we were a better team, it would have been perfect for him.”
Nylander scored only 1 goal and had 6 assists in 22 games for MODO in 2013–14. The lack of offence was mostly due to ice time. He couldn’t be trusted to play top-line minutes. “I was like, ‘Oh, boy, this is not a guy that follows the system,’” said Forsberg. “A couple of the older guys were irritated and some coaches too. If he had a chance to get the puck, he would put in 100 per cent effort. But if it was an ordinary backcheck or a battle along the boards that he had no chance to win, he put in 60 per cent effort and he would wait for someone else to do the job there.”
The one-sided effort was a reason why Nylander was loaned to Rögle BK and Södertälje SK, which at the time were playing in a division that was lower than MODO. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t play. It was that the coach wasn’t using him the right way,” said Sorensen, perhaps ignoring the fact that the coach was trying to win games and not develop junior-aged players. “It happens a lot with younger players. You have this ultra-talented player and you’re using him on the fourth line? I remember telling Michael to bring him [to Södertälje]. He can play and be the guy.”
With Södertälje SK, Nylander showcased the skills that have been on display ever since he made the jump to the NHL. Playing on a team with David Pastrnak, Nylander scored 11 goals and 19 points in 17 games. “I remember our coach came to us one morning and said a player from MODO was going to be loaned to us and his name was William Nylander,” said Dan Iliakis, a defenceman with Södertälje. “You didn’t know what to expect, but there was definitely a buzz around him. He was a huge boost for us.”
; Still, it was a weird season. The constant moving around—Nylander played for three different teams in his draft year—and complaints about his defensive game and perceived selfishness earned him some harsh criticism heading into the 2014 NHL Entry Draft. Red Line Report, a North American scouting service, described him as the “most skilled player in the draft, but a massive diva.”
The Maple Leafs selected Nylander with the eighth overall pick, which today looks like a steal. “I was afraid that he was not going to be there,” the Leafs’ European-based scout Thommie Bergman told Postmedia News. “I thought he was going to go at five. He’s extremely talented. He has to be a little bit stronger, but his hands, his skating, everything is high level.”
The following year, Nylander returned to MODO, where he scored 8 goals and 20 points in 21 games. But by January, the team was on its way to a losing season and relegation to Sweden’s second division. Forsberg was fired. Not long after, Nylander joined the Maple Leafs’ AHL affiliate for the second half of the season, finishing with 14 goals and 32 points in 37 games.
* * *
William: “I was open—how come you didn’t give me the puck?”
Michael: “I had the better handle on the puck and you weren’t really open.”
William: “Then why didn’t you score? You had an open net. Score a goal.”
* * *
There are signs all over the hockey arena warning parents to not get too involved, reminding everyone that this is a game and that these are kids. Watch. Be respectful. Most importantly, Keep your distance. It’s a familiar message to any hockey parent. But Michael Nylander wasn’t just any hockey parent. He couldn’t just watch. And he certainly couldn’t keep his distance. With his oldest son playing in a men’s league in Sweden, Michael Nylander had to live out a dream and make a comeback.
The Next Ones Page 10