The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  “That was a fantastic time, of course,” said Michael Nylander. “Playing with your own kids, that was never in my head until I was close to the situation and it happened. Of course, it was a little bit different when you normally drive to the rink and drop William or Alex off. Now, we were there together in the locker room and then on the ice. We had our arguments as teammates do. It was fun. It was great.”

  Michael Nylander never thought he was going to be the Swedish Gordie Howe when he moved back to Stockholm. But he still wanted to play. At thirty-nine, he still felt like he had more to give. He wasn’t capable of playing for MODO, where William started the 2013–14 season. But when the team loaned William to Södertälje and then Rögle, Michael came along for the ride. Quite literally.

  The two drove to practice together, often talking about things that they should do together as linemates in the game. If those conversations were fun, the ones on the ride back home were definitely more interesting. They bickered, not as father and son, but as teammates. Michael Nylander called it the best two years of his career: “To play on the same team, it was pretty special. It was unbelievable to go to practice together.”

  On the ice and off it, they were each other’s biggest supporters and critics. Michael was at the very end of a lengthy professional career, his legs no longer capable of doing what his mind wanted. William was at the beginning of his, all flash and dash but lacking in experience. Chemistry was never a problem. But when things did not go right, they let each other hear it.

  No question, their relationship was unusual. But for William, it was as normal as playing Ping-Pong in the basement with Nicklas Backstrom or having Alex Ovechkin over to the house for Thanksgiving dinner. He was used to it, even if the sight of his father and him side by side on the bench became a photo-op. “It’s funny because at the rink they have all these signs for youth hockey,” said Anders Sorensen. “One said, No Parents Allowed on the Bench. Someone took a picture of it—with the two of them sitting there.”

  * * *

  Today, William Nylander is not his father’s teammate. He is no longer known as the son of an NHLer, but rather one of the league’s rising young talents. He’s paving his own route, becoming his own type of player. And yet he can’t really escape the past.

  At the 2017 world championship, Nylander found himself on a line with Nicklas Backstrom. It was like the old days, except they weren’t using mini-sticks and Nylander was no longer in the back seat of the car. “I knew that I was going to play with him on the national team and that’s actually one reason why I wanted to go,” said Backstrom. “It was great. He’s a great player and we had chemistry right away. It made everything easier.” Nylander led the team to a gold medal with 7 goals and 14 points, earning MVP honours in the process. “When it’s time to shine, he shines. And when it’s time to relax and recover, he’s pretty laid back. He’s going to have a great career.”

  No one called him selfish during the tournament. No one said he was playing like a diva or that he was shooting too much or pretending to be tired on the backcheck—although there were some complaints that he was hitting too hard. After Sweden had won gold in a shootout against Canada, Nylander jumped over the boards and sprinted down the ice toward Henrik Lundqvist. He meant to embrace the goalie in a celebratory hug, but in his excitement he ended up tackling Lundqvist to the ground, injuring him.

  As some joked, that was the North American side of him coming out again. “You see the smile on his face and the pure joy of him playing,” said Rikard Grönborg. “He just loves the game. Everything is so grave these days and there’s so much pressure on these guys. For me it’s so refreshing to see that.”

  Jack Eichel

  Buffalo Sabres’ Jack Eichel prepares for a faceoff against the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2015. AP Photo/Chris O’Meara, File

  Buffalo Sabres

  » № 15 «

  Position

  Centre

  Shoots

  Right

  Height

  6′2″

  Weight

  206 lb

  Born

  October 28, 1996

  Birthplace

  North Chelmsford, MA, USA

  Draft

  2015 BUF, 1st rd, 2nd pk (2nd overall)

  Jack Eichel

  If you want to get inside the mind of Jack Eichel, go to his parents’ home in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where on the back of his bedroom door there used to hang a poster of Tom Brady. When he went to bed it would be the last thing he saw before closing his eyes. Eichel didn’t necessarily dream about playing in the NFL, but he did dream about becoming great. That’s why he put up a poster of a five-time Super Bowl champion quarterback. And it’s why Kobe Bryant and Sidney Crosby and several others later appeared on what would become a revolving door of motivation and inspiration.

  Sometimes it wasn’t an athlete on his door. Sometimes, it wasn’t even someone famous. “Maybe it was a picture of somebody who was the same age as me that I thought was better than me—who I thought I should be better than,” said Eichel. “There were small things that I did to motivate myself. I watched a lot of videos, a lot of things, about other great athletes or great people, whether it was football players or whatever. I think I’m still like that, whether I’m watching a documentary on Kobe Bryant or something on Tom Brady or players in the NHL.”

  Eichel, the Buffalo Sabres centre who was selected with the second overall pick in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, scored 57 points in 61 games in his second season (and 64 points in 67 games in 2017–18). It was a points-per-game pace that put him just outside the top ten in the league. And yet, when he returned home after the season was complete, he went looking for motivation and inspiration. This time it didn’t come from his bedroom door. Instead, he called up Boston Bruins forward Brad Marchand, who had finished in the top five in goals and points, and asked if he could tag along with him to the gym.

  “You’d be pretty surprised at how hard he works,” Eichel said of Marchand, who is eight years older and three inches shorter than him. “It was eye-opening. It pushes you and makes you want to get better and makes you want to work hard. This is my job and I think I have a lot to prove. I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

  Brian Burke, the loquacious speaker and Calgary Flames president, once told USA Today of Eichel, “Even if you were an alien from a spaceship who had never seen hockey, and you watched this kid, you would say, ‘Good lord, that’s a talented athlete.’” The talent comes naturally for Eichel, who learned to skate when he was three years old. But his work ethic comes just as naturally. He has always been a doer more than a dreamer—helped along by that little bit of talent, obviously.

  “A bit of a talent? You knew right away he has a bit of a talent, but you didn’t know any of this other stuff,” said Eichel’s father, Bob. “He wouldn’t go to sleepovers if he had a game the next day. I’d say, ‘Jack, it’s a squirt game.’ He didn’t care. He would come home from school and shoot a hundred pucks, do a hundred push-ups, sit-ups.”

  Bob Eichel said he doesn’t know where his son got his powerful yet effortless stride. It sure wasn’t from his father. Bob played all kinds of sports growing up, including hockey, and considers himself decent enough at pretty much all of them. But he wasn’t a natural. He didn’t play in the NHL or Division-1 on a college scholarship. Growing up in Melrose, Massachusetts, which used to be known as Hockeytown, USA (“before Detroit stole the term,” he said), Bob didn’t even make his high school hockey team. “I played everything: football, baseball, basketball, ran track. But I wasn’t anything special,” said Bob Eichel. “Not like him.”

  * * *

  While his son was at the gym, Bob Eichel was at work, having pulled another twelve-hour shift at F.W. Webb plumbing company in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is the sort of hands-on manager who is rarely at his desk to answer the phone, let alone sit down for lunch. When asked on a July evening if he had been enjoying the summer and taken any tim
e off to go on vacation, he cut the question short and answered back, “What vacation? I work from six to six every day.”

  His wife, Anne, who is a registered nurse at Boston Medical Center, is the same way. She was back at work at 7 a.m. the morning after her son was drafted by the Sabres. She is also not home on this night, because she’s working the night shift this week. In other words, Jack might not have received any natural athleticism from his parents. But there’s no question that he’s wearing their blue-collar genes when it comes to work ethic.

  “That’s why I am who I am right now,” said Eichel. “My mom’s almost sixty and she gets up every day at 4 a.m. and goes to work for twelve hours. She drives into Boston, and it’s not like she does an easy job either. My dad’s the same way. He’s working harder now than when he was twenty, so I think that’s where I got it. It was the kind of thing where your parents come home and you’re sitting on the couch watching TV and you get that sarcastic remark from your dad and it makes you almost feel guilty. I think I started to grow into the type of person where I felt guilty if I wasn’t working hard.”

  It’s funny how it works, but it’s often the students who are already getting an A-plus in class who take advantage of the extra credit assignments. That was Eichel. His mother used to say that as a toddler “he skates better than he walks.” But natural ability only takes you so far. Lots of kids have been naturally talented and lots of kids have looked like they were born with skates on their feet. Some have even coasted by on that natural talent and become good NHL hockey players. But Eichel didn’t want to just become good.

  When he was a kid, he would tell everyone that he was going to play Division-1 in college and then play in the NHL. He told family members, friends, teachers and whomever he happened to be talking to. “He told everybody in the world,” said Bob. “I’ve been in the line in coffee shops and teachers have come up to me and said, ‘He told me in the fourth grade that he was going to play in the NHL. Kids laughed at him’—and the teacher actually said to me—‘but I knew he would.’ She had never seen him play hockey in her entire life.”

  What had the teacher seen in him? The same thing Eichel saw when he looked at the poster of Tom Brady: desire to be the best. As his father said, he did the things that other kids wouldn’t do. Things like going to bed early so he wouldn’t be tired for the game the next day. Things like riding his bike to the gym while others took the car. Things like playing up several levels, even though it meant he didn’t get to play as much or score as often, because he wanted a challenge. He was driven to be the best. Possessed by it. Teachers saw it. So did coaches, scouts and teammates. It was inspiring.

  As a child, Jack Eichel told everyone that he was going to play Division-1 in college and then play in the NHL. Photo courtesy of the Eichel family

  * * *

  Eichel comes from North Chelmsford—not Chelmsford. If you don’t know the difference between the two, there is apparently a local priest who will set you straight. That’s what happened to Bob Eichel when he first moved there. At the time, he and his soon-to-be-wife believed they were settling down in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs north of Boston, where the houses were bigger, the streets were quieter, and the people were more educated and affluent. The good life, he thought to himself. “I told the priest, ‘I made it. I got out of the city. I’m living in Chelmsford,’” said Bob Eichel. “And he goes, ‘Buddy, you live in North Chelmsford. That’s the working-class area.’ Chelmsford was the higher-end area.”

  There are no train tracks separating Chelmsford from North Chelmsford. Both towns actually share a high school and are run by the same government. But there is a divide between the two towns that is apparent to anyone living in either area. It’s not exactly like the Greasers and Socs in The Outsiders, but it’s close. As Eichel’s best friend and Chelmsford native Dan Ferri explains, “North Chelmsford were always kind of the tougher kids.”

  The working-class spirit of the city served Jack well. He was always a little rougher around the edges, a little hard-headed. He was the kid who climbed out of his crib at ten months old, who had so much energy that his parents took literally every knick-knack off the shelves because little Jack would break them. “We could have knick-knacks on the table with our daughter,” said Bob Eichel. “Once Jack came around, everything had to come off. He was a lunatic. He was a good kid, but he just had a lot of energy.”

  When Jack was four, his parents signed him up for a learn-to-skate program. Except Jack didn’t want to learn how to skate. He wanted to learn how to play hockey with the older kids at the other end of the rink. “They told him he had to learn to skate because you had to do that first,” said Bob Eichel. “He was only four. He said no and went right down to the older kids to learn to play hockey. They didn’t kick him out. He was better than those kids anyway.”

  It wasn’t that Eichel was always better than every other kid. He wasn’t. But he made himself better. Eichel once read a magazine story about how Tom Brady did one hundred push-ups and one hundred sit-ups every day. So Eichel did that every day too. He heard that Sidney Crosby took one hundred shots. Eichel did that too. “Before we’d drive to Andover to work out with Mike Boyle, he’d be at home riding the bike for like an hour,” said Ferri. “It was crazy. At a young age, he was just such a workhorse. He was never talking or socializing in the gym. It was work.”

  Eichel and Ferri played hockey together when they were younger, before Eichel outgrew his peers. “He was always a step ahead of kids,” said Ferri. “I think everyone kind of knew he was going places. I remember my dad telling me when I was younger that he was going to the NHL. I remember watching his first game with the Sabres. We streamed it. My dad bought this box, because he knew we were going to want to watch all his games and stuff and we don’t get all the channels out here, but it was terrible quality. Jack scored and it was just so surreal to me. He was actually out there in a Buffalo Sabres jersey and scoring a goal in the NHL. A guy from here.”

  A few years earlier, the same guy had been feeding Ferri passes, making him look good, like he might be joining Eichel in the NHL one day too. A favourite memory when the old friends are together is the “famous” squirt championship final where Eichel won the faceoff in overtime and passed it back to Ferri for the winning goal. “I just let it go and it went in,” said Ferri. “It was nuts. I remember getting absolutely mauled. We still talk about that goal.”

  Several years later, Ferri set up his buddy off the ice when Eichel returned to high school just in time for the prom, but without a date. “He actually went with one of my date’s friends,” said Ferri. “I wouldn’t say growing up that the girls were lining up for him, but the tables have definitely turned around a little since then.”

  Growing up, there were limitations to what Eichel wanted to achieve. As much as he wanted to play and get better, his parents didn’t put him in summer hockey or send him to private skating or skills coaches until he was thirteen years old. There wasn’t any money for it. And even if there was, his parents were careful about giving him too much. Besides, why pay for ice time when there were perfectly good ponds around every street corner? All you had to do was grab your shovel and your stick and skates.

  “We all shovelled,” said Bob. “There was one [pond] in Chelsea where the guy shovelled it and put out two regulation nets. That was one of the nice ones. But there were shit ones too. [Jack] and I would be out there at all hours. It would be a pain in the ass. I remember when he was four years old, we couldn’t even see each other passing the puck back and forth. It was pitch black on the pond. But he wouldn’t go back in. I was freezing my ass off. It was a February day. I’ll never forget it.”

  Jack and his father learned to deal with the cold. And they learned to deal with the poor lighting caused by a rolling mist that usually arrived around suppertime. They even learned to deal with an ice surface that was so bumpy it was like driving on the shoulder of a highway. The shoddy conditions made Jack a better player. He w
as forced to trust his instincts, feeling for the puck rather than looking for it, having to balance more on his edges lest he tripped and fell and smacked his head on the hard ground. “Jack was the best pond hockey player I ever saw,” said his father. “He was skating with all the bumps and everything.”

  In the summer, the routine was different. Eichel lived on a cul-de-sac, which meant he had half a rink just outside his door. Deking a tennis ball underneath parked cars and bouncing it off the curb, he was out there on his rollerblades even more than he was on the pond. “Every time I hung out with him he was doing something productive, like rollerblading or shooting pucks,” said Cameron MacDonald, a childhood friend. “We all knew that he was better than us, but he would never shove it in our face. That one year, nationals were in Buffalo and they did a [shootout] competition afterward. He did a spin-o-rama to beat the goalie and won the competition. That was pretty absurd for an eleven-year-old. Our jaws dropped a little bit. He definitely knew what he was doing. He was confident. He knew he could pull it off. I would never try that. I’d probably fall over or something.”

  “The thing that stood out to me about Jack was really just his unconditional passion and love for hockey,” said Cameron’s father Blaise MacDonald. “He just seemed like this young boy with curly hair and a big smile on his face whenever he could be around his teammates and playing the game that he loved. If given the opportunity, he would play hockey twenty-six hours a day.”