The Next Ones
Page 13
At the U-18 world championship in Sochi, Russia, the United States lost to Canada in the gold medal final. McDavid was the tournament MVP, scoring 8 goals and 14 points in 7 games. After the tournament, Eichel returned home and trained harder and harder. He enlisted the help of Kim Brandvold, a skating coach, and hit the gym even harder. When McDavid led the Oilers to the playoffs—and won the scoring title and league MVP—and Eichel’s Sabres missed the playoffs once again, he went back home that summer and trained even harder.
If a picture of McDavid wasn’t on the back of Eichel’s bedroom door, it seemed to be plastered on his mind. “I would definitely say he was driven and motivated by [Connor],” said Ferri. “Being his closest friend, I’d always ask him, ‘Do you think you’re better than him?’ He never really said yes or no, he just said it made him work harder in the gym. McDavid was probably doing the same thing. You just use it as a motivation kind of thing.”
Eichel looks at it differently. McDavid isn’t the reason why he works harder. It doesn’t matter who’s on his bedroom door—Eichel is still going to try to get better. He’s a worker, he says. Always has been. It’s what his parents are and what defines him as a native of North Chelmsford. “I just feel good about myself after I work,” said Eichel. “You want to get better, right? You want to be the best. The only way to get better is to work. That’s always been my motto.”
Connor McDavid
Connor McDavid takes a shot on net in a 2018 game against the Vancouver Canucks. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck
Edmonton Oilers
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Position
Centre
Shoots
Left
Height
6′1″
Weight
192 lb
Born
January 13, 1997
Birthplace
Richmond Hill, ON, CAN
Draft
2015 EDM, 1st rd, 1st pk (1st overall)
Connor McDavid
There have been countless stories written and retold about Connor McDavid, the wunderkind Wayne Gretzky said was the best nineteen-year-old he had ever seen and who Sidney Crosby said “reminded me of myself” as a kid.
Sherry Bassin could tell you a hundred of them alone. His favourite is when, as Erie Otters’ general manager, he drove four hours from, Erie, Pennsylvania, to Newmarket, Ontario, to take McDavid out for lunch, only to find out that the teenager had forgot all about him and stood him up. At least, that’s what Bassin thought at the time. The way he tells it, it had been a hot and humid summer day in July—“twenty-eight or thirty degrees”—and Bassin was supposed to pick up McDavid from his parents’ house after a morning workout. Except Bassin couldn’t find him.
He rang the doorbell. Nothing. He called McDavid’s cellphone. It went to voicemail. He looked in the driveway. A car was parked there, but no one was inside. What’s going on? Bassin thought. Eventually he said to hell with it and started to walk away.
“And that’s when the garage door went up,” said the seventy-seven-year-old in a voice that’s become permanently hoarse from a lifetime of shouting in cold hockey arenas. “Mac’s in there on rollerblades shooting pucks and he’s got it all set up with obstacles and stuff. This is in the afternoon! And he’s soaked! And had blisters on his hands and stuff.”
“Give me ten more minutes,” said an out-of-breath McDavid, barely stopping to greet Bassin. “And I remember he says to me, ‘The shot’s got to get better, Bass. It’s got to get better.’ The kid had scored 120 points in 47 games that year!”
Some things never change. Fast-forward a couple of years and the twenty-year-old Edmonton Oilers captain has just wrapped up his second season in the NHL and is now sitting in a luxurious suite inside the Wynn Las Vegas. It’s the morning of the NHL Awards and in a few hours McDavid will have a night for the ages. In addition to being awarded the Art Ross Trophy for leading the league in overall scoring with 100 points, he will also be voted as the winner of the Hart Memorial Trophy and Ted Lindsay Award as the league’s most valuable player as judged by reporters covering the game and the NHL Players’ Association, respectively.
He is literally the best player in the NHL and the face of a future generation of star players, something EA Sports recognized by splashing his picture on the cover of its latest NHL 18 video game. And yet, sitting on a white couch in a plain white T-shirt and denim shorts, he still sounds like a kid who wants the garage door closed so he can continue working on his perceived deficiencies.
“I think I want to get a better shot and want to be more dangerous from the outside, definitely from that half-wall position on the power play,” said McDavid, who in 2017–18 won a second straight Art Ross Trophy and Ted Lindsay Award after finishing with a league-best 108 points. “You have to be able to shoot and score out there. It’s definitely something I’m going to work on.”
True to his word, shortly after returning from Vegas, McDavid was firing pucks back inside the sauna that his mom calls his “shooting range.” It is here, inside a two-car garage with holes in the drywall and puck marks on the plywood his father installed to cover up the holes, where McDavid spent most of his time growing up. It’s here where he and his older brother created what Connor called the “most ridiculous” obstacle course out of empty paint cans, skateboards and extra hockey sticks; where he shot his daily chore of one hundred pucks; where he learned how to take a corner like a Formula One race car; and where he became a player who can stickhandle and skate with the puck faster than most players skate without it. Garage door closed, it became his sanctuary.
“For me, it’s soothing when you’re out there,” said McDavid. “You put your phone away and put some music on and you just get away from it all. I just enjoy that. I like doing it now more than I did before. Back then, it wasn’t a lot of fun. You were out there because you needed to get better. You thought if you did that, you would go places.”
“Generational” players are obviously born with a lot of natural talent, but they are not necessarily born with greatness. That takes work, dedication and shooting puck after puck after puck. You look at McDavid today and just see a kid who has an effortless stride and an ability to think the game at a microcomputer speed, like he’s not even trying. You don’t see what he was doing behind closed doors throughout his youth. And what he is still doing now to become even better.
“I know when one of the guys was picking Connor up for the pro camp in the summer in Toronto, he said they were almost late getting here because he couldn’t find him,” said Joe Quinn, McDavid’s long-time personal skills coach. “And sure enough, he was in the garage. It was one hundred degrees outside and he’s in the garage ripping around in his rollerblades right before the pro skate. I kind of laughed at that.”
* * *
He would come to me some days and say, “Mom, I’m really tired. I just don’t want to shoot pucks.”
I would say, “Okay, don’t shoot pucks.”
Then he’d say, “But I’ll be really upset with myself if I don’t.”
And I’d say, “Okay, go shoot pucks then. But you also have to listen to your body. If you’re tired, listen to your body.”
But he would say, “No, I’d feel really bad.”
Even now, he still shoots pucks.
* * *
Kelly McDavid’s youngest son was different. Even when he was young, she knew that much. Cameron was the laid-back older brother, the one who rolled with the punches and navigated life without a road map or compass. At four years younger, Connor was wound noticeably tighter. He was the kind of kid who needed constant stimulus, the reason why fidget spinners were invented.
“Every day it was, ‘What are we doing?’ What are we doing at this time, what are we doing at that time?’ A few weeks into summer, he’d be a little crazy,” said Kelly. “I’d be like, ‘Oooohkay, we’re just going to hang out today?’ Where Cameron would hang out every day. He would be thrilled by that.”
That didn’t stop Connor. Grabbing as many stuffed animals as he could hold, he arranged his “fans” along the basement walls and pretended he was playing in the NHL. “Mom!” he would yell from the basement. “I just won the Stanley Cup!”
If he wasn’t playing hockey, then he was watching it, either on TV or tagging along to his older brother’s practices and games. When Cameron began playing competitively with the Newmarket Redmen and had to wear a dress shirt and tie to games, Connor did the same. A friend of the family even gave him a used team jacket and matching hat to complete the outfit.
“He would go into the dressing room for the pre-game talk, because they sort of made him the trainer’s helper,” said Kelly. “When you’d talk to the coach afterward, he’d say the only person really listening was Connor. He was a sponge. When he watched hockey, he was glued to the TV. You could tell he was absorbing everything. He could watch a game and he could pick things out. He had really good hockey sense.”
This hockey sense is what carried McDavid through his early days. He was always a good skater, balanced and confident on his two feet, but the thing his parents noticed was how he read the game. When kids are starting out in hockey, they don’t stick to their position because they don’t know what that means. Instead, they move in one large pack toward the puck and fight over it like they are in the middle of a rugby scrum. McDavid was smarter than that. Without being told, he stood just outside the pack and waited for the puck to come loose. He’d then skate up the ice with it and score. “And then the parents would have a fit because then he was a puck hog,” said Kelly, laughing.
Soon, he was putting up ridiculous numbers. Even older kids started to notice. “He played in the early afternoon and we’d play at night,” said Cameron. “And some guys on my team would watch him play and say, ‘Man, your brother’s insane!’ I would be like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ ‘No, he’s going to be in the NHL, for sure.’”
McDavid was so good that playing recreational house league hockey against kids his own age was not benefiting him or the other kids, who were standing around and watching as this six-year-old scored goals at will. The problem was the Newmarket Minor Hockey Association did not allow six-year-olds to play competitive rep hockey until they turned seven, with no exceptions.
“Brian [Connor’s dad] really tried to argue the point that when kids are good at school they skip a grade,” said Kelly. “But they said no.” So McDavid went to Aurora, where the administrators could see that this was a special circumstance—so special that they moved him all the way up to play with nine-year-olds. He dominated, but it was a difficult year for him. It was still house league hockey, where the competition wasn’t great and the games weren’t taken seriously.
One day, Kelly’s youngest son said that he didn’t want to play house league anymore. It wasn’t fun. He only wanted to play rep. She told him to be patient and he’d get his chance to play rep next season. But to Connor, even a few months of waiting was an eternity. So she came up with a solution. Grabbing a pen and a sheet of paper, she drew a picture of a stairwell. On each step she wrote the date of his upcoming games. On the very top step, she wrote, TRYOUTS.
“Every time a game was over, he would come home and cross it off,” she said. “With him, I realized you had to break things down in smaller pieces because he sees this big goal and will get frustrated because it’s not happening fast enough or he’s not getting there fast enough.
“Even when he broke his collarbone a couple of years ago, he was devastated obviously. But when we talked to the doctors, we said that you have to give him things to expect at certain times. You have to tell him that in two weeks he’ll be able to do this and in four weeks he’ll be able to do that. You have to give him milestones to achieve. You can’t tell him that in three months he’ll be healed, because that just won’t fly with him. So when he had those little milestones and he was hitting those milestones before they said he probably would, he was feeling even better. He had control over it.”
McDavid craves control and finds comfort in routines and the feeling that something is being done with a purpose in mind. It is why he didn’t just shoot pucks every day but took at least one hundred shots, because that was the number his father came up with as a baseline for achieving greatness and reaching the NHL. Each day, each shot, was a step in the process.
Sometimes the routines would become silly. On the way to games, his dad always popped in the same mix CD in the car stereo. Track one was “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, followed by Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
“A bunch of random songs, honestly, songs that I would never listen to today,” said McDavid. “They were definitely songs my dad liked. He put together the CD.” Others might have gotten sick of listening to the same songs over and over again. Not McDavid. Part of him believed the music prepared him for the game, was somehow the reason why he was so effective on the ice. “[The CD] got worn out and they had to re-burn it with all the same songs,” said Cameron. “They listened to it once before a game, so then we had to listen to it every time after. I’m sure my dad was super excited that he got to listen to his tunes. Connor had all these weird superstitions.”
“Some call it superstition, some call it routine,” said McDavid. “I don’t know, I think it had a little bit of both in the end. For me, a lot of it was routine. I think it’s important for athletes to have a certain routine and have things that you think will help you perform better. If it works, it works.”
When does routine turn into superstition? McDavid isn’t sure, but it’s probably when a twelve-year-old son gets to sit shotgun on the way to the rink—pushing his mom to the back seat—because the last time he sat up front the team won and he had played a great game. “My mom thought it was ridiculous that she was in the back and her twelve-year-old son was in the front,” said Cameron, laughing.
It was the side effect of having a son who took the sport seriously. Maybe a little too seriously. “If he lost, it would just be the end of the world,” said his mom. “When he was little he would cry and as he got older he would get mad. Cameron and I used to joke that if they lost a game, he and I should just stay in a hotel because they’re going to be miserable when they get home.”
“If they lost, it was just brutal,” said Cameron. “It would be quiet at the dinner table and nobody would say much. He was like that with everything. When he and I used to play card games or board games as kids, if he wasn’t going to win he would say, ‘I’m not going to play anymore.’ And it was frustrating as a brother. You have this buddy that you want to play with all the time, but he’s just too afraid to lose.”
Luckily for Connor’s brother and mom, there wasn’t much losing to go around when Connor was growing up. Once he started playing Triple-A, for the York Simcoe Express, the team was stacked. Sam Bennett, who was selected fourth overall by the Calgary Flames in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, was a long-time teammate. So was defenceman Travis Dermott, a second-round pick of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and several other players who would go on to play college or university hockey.
Connor McDavid plays for the York Simcoe Express. Photo courtesy of the McDavid family
But even on a star-studded roster, McDavid stood out. He was the kid who could slow down the pace of the game or ramp it up to his level, the one who wouldn’t score until he had literally skated around the opposing team—sometimes twice.
Jack Doak, the team’s assistant coach, noticed that it wouldn’t take long for spectators to realize that one kid was considerably better than the others. “His hockey IQ was off the charts from a very young age. He was like a pro hockey player when he was eight years old. His dem
eanour coming into the rink, his demeanour getting ready for a game, how he conducted himself in workouts, how he conducted himself in practices, the kid was just always on. The kid approached things very seriously and with purpose.”
“I remember before every practice and every game, he’d be stickhandling with his dad in the hallway,” said Dermott. “It was unheard of.”
The Express were practically unbeatable during McDavid’s time on the team. They won five OMHA titles and four straight provincial championships. When they did lose, McDavid took it personally. “In minor atom, we lost one game to the Whitby Wildcats during the regular season and we ended up playing against them in the final of the OMHA championship,” said Doak, whose son Aidan was York Simcoe’s goalie. “Mitch Marner was on [the Wildcats] and I will tell you that Connor was hell-bent that we weren’t going to get beat by the Wildcats again.”
With the score tied 0–0 in the final, Marner took a penalty in the second period. Once it expired, he popped out of the penalty box and picked up a loose puck for a breakaway. Aidan Doak made the save. What happened next was a move that has become typical of McDavid. Grabbing the puck below the goal line, he took off, sprinting the entire distance of the ice before deking past a stunned goaltender for the game-winning goal.
“It wasn’t like he was just one of the guys,” said Aidan Doak. “If Connor was coming down on you, you never knew what he was going to do. He scored a beautiful goal. We ended up winning 1–0 and Whitby hadn’t lost a game all year long. The next year we went undefeated and swept the whole OMHA.”
* * *
If you want to know how McDavid became one of the fastest players in the NHL, don’t watch him on an ice surface that is two hundred feet long and eighty-five feet wide. Instead, shrink it down and take a tour of his parents’ two-car garage—what Kelly McDavid calls “the disaster zone.”