She says this with a hint of pride. After all, each hole in the drywall, each puck mark, is a reminder of how much work her youngest son put in to achieve his dream. “It used to bother me a little bit, because I’d be in the kitchen and there would be all this banging going on,” said Kelly McDavid. “Bang! It would hit the door. Bang! It would hit the wall. And I’d be a little worried, like the boys are destroying the house. But Brian was happy about it. ‘Shoot away,’ he’d say.”
* * *
Small areas are the name of the game. It’s all about overloading your motor skills, by stickhandling and skating on your edges. Small touches. Most guys can’t do it. They just can’t. With Connor, everything is so synchronized. All his motor skills work so fluidly together, so when he cuts left or cuts right, he doesn’t have any drag and he’s not losing any speed—he’s actually getting faster. He can handle the puck at high speeds because he’s been doing it his whole life. — Joe Quinn, skills coach, Power Edge Pro
* * *
It was Brian’s idea that Cameron and Connor take one hundred shots each and every day. Not 50. One hundred. Every day. No days off. He said it would make them great, putting it in their heads that it was their path to the NHL. “Brian would say you have to shoot one hundred pucks a day,” said Kelly. “And if you don’t shoot one hundred pucks a day, it’s up to you. But if you want to be successful, this is sort of what you have to do.”
“We took that pretty seriously,” said Cameron. “Connor more so, obviously.”
Brian McDavid, who coached both of his sons, is a big proponent of the 100 per cent rule when it comes to effort. “There’s no substitute for hard work,” he said. If you wanted to be successful at something, you had to dedicate yourself to it. All the time. No exceptions.
“That’s something that I say too,” said Cameron, an accomplished musician who became an investment banker at UPS. “Once I decided that I wasn’t going to pursue hockey and I went to school, I didn’t do that well and then I sort of applied his philosophy and worked as hard as I could in this business program I was in. I’d go to the library every day for hours and study my ass off. The hockey training is definitely applicable.”
Connor McDavid (left) and his brother Cameron receive hockey-themed gifts on Christmas morning. Both boys were crazy about hockey and shot a hundred pucks a day in their garage. Photo courtesy of the McDavid family
Whereas Cameron’s brother applied it to hockey. Connor was in the garage every day taking his one hundred shots. It was more work than fun. A hundred of anything is a lot. You get past the twenty-five-shot mark and you’re still feeling good. Once you pass the halfway mark, you start feeling it in your hand and wrist. At seventy-five, it becomes a mental and physical grind. You want to get to the end so badly that you stop concentrating, start flubbing the puck. By the time you get to one hundred, you just want to drop your stick and go do something else.
“I’d go out there with him and we’d both be doing the drills,” said Cameron. “I think I’d give it an hour, an hour and a bit. He’d stay out for two or more.”
Whereas Cameron couldn’t wait until it was over, Connor loved the rhythmic motion of shooting pucks. He went into a zone, hearing nothing but the sound of the stick scraping against the cement followed by the swish of the puck getting caught in the netting. Even the misses held an appeal—thanks to a father who rewarded the boys for their ability to shoot so hard that pucks went through the drywall. That’s how the challenge started.
“My dad went to Home Depot and bought these really thick plywood boards and said, ‘All right, if you guys can put it through this, I’ll call the NHL scouts,’” said Cameron. “Sure enough, a couple of months later, one of us put a puck through and we went running to our dad like, ‘Dad, come see!’”
At first, the boys were in their running shoes when they fired their one hundred pucks. Then they strapped on their rollerblades to make it feel closer to actual hockey. They hung targets. They came up with competitions, like who could hit the most posts, or played games of “horse” like other kids. Then they got really creative.
It started with a couple of leftover paint cans, which the boys set down like pylons that had to be weaved through before shooting. Slowly, they started adding more obstacles. A skateboard that you had to put the puck underneath, a stick resting on two more paint cans that you had to hop over, a shoe you had to wheel around. It kept evolving. “At one point, we decided to take it out of the garage and take over the whole driveway.”
“It was a different way to train,” said McDavid. “I was always a little inventive. I was always trying to be on my skates as much as possible. You’re in the garage and you’re trying to do things, but it’s very small, so you create obstacles. It was a tight space. That’s how hockey is today. It’s tight spaces.”
Said Cameron, “It was really the most ridiculous thing ever.”
For neighbours, it was also ridiculous. The McDavids became that family with the two crazy kids who were out on their driveway every day, jumping over hockey sticks and deking around paint cans. Even when the garage door was closed, the sound of pucks hitting posts or plywood echoed down the quiet street. The intensity with which McDavid went through the drills—along with the “goalie graveyard” of broken nets resting against the side of the house—gave the impression that he was being coached into training like this.
“I saw him every day when I was coming home from work,” said Martin Harding, whose son is a friend of McDavid. “He’d be playing in the driveway and I’d come inside and see my kid and he was playing Xbox. I’d be like, ‘Do you see what Connor’s doing out there?’ My kid did his fair share of playing hockey, but Connor was ridiculous. He was in the driveway jumping over paint cans, honing his craft. And he loved it. It wasn’t like his dad was out there cracking the whip.”
“As time went on, once he got into peewee or bantam, you’d hear people say, ‘Oh, his dad’s pushing him. Brian’s making him do this, Brian’s making him do that,’” said Jack Doak. “But you know what, the exact opposite was true. For both Brian and Kelly, they were both trying to keep him grounded and maybe trying to pull him in from the garage. They weren’t forcing him to do anything. The kid just ate it up.”
When McDavid began to train with skating coach Joe Quinn a few years later, the driveway obstacle course didn’t seem so ridiculous.
Quinn, who is the creator of Power Edge Pro, littered the ice with spare tires, auditorium chairs and long four-by-fours with notches so that pucks could slide through them. With the exceptions of a couple of paint cans and a skateboard, it was pretty much what McDavid had been doing all along.
“It was a little bit of a variation of what I was doing,” said McDavid. “You don’t know what you’re doing is going to make you accomplish something one day, you’re just having fun training.”
“Our stories are very similar,” said Joe Quinn. “Obviously I was put on the path to meet Connor. He was already doing the paint cans and stuff like that in the garage. And I started the same way Connor did, in small areas, but with chairs and wood and tires and anything else I could find.”
Training in a small area, said Quinn, is the key to what allows McDavid to play at a pace previously unseen in the NHL. Aside from a breakaway, there isn’t a whole lot of sprinting up the ice with the puck. Players take quick bursts of speed, manoeuvring in and out of traffic, executing tight turns, evading bodies and sticks, stopping and starting, cutting left and right. And you’re doing all this while stickhandling and keeping your head on a swivel. It’s like a juggler on a unicycle or playing the drums while singing. You’re constantly multi-tasking, asking your hands and feet to work in sync. That takes muscle memory and it takes years and years of practice—the kind of practice McDavid was doing every day inside his garage and out on his driveway, where there wasn’t a lot of space.
“You think about it now and it’s genius,” said Harding. “He’s doing all that in a double-car driveway, where
he’s running out onto the grass if he can’t make the turn. It’s what everyone wants their kid to do and what they should be doing.”
Ask Quinn why McDavid is so fast with the puck and he doesn’t mention his edges or balance or coordination. Instead, he talks about his work ethic. Learning how to play at a fast pace does not come naturally to anyone. It’s teaching your mind and body to do things that they inherently don’t want to do. It’s not a fun way to spend the day.
Even with his base training of stickhandling on his driveway, McDavid was still five years younger than the other players Quinn was teaching, many of whom were elite hockey players who had been drafted in the first round and were on their way to an NHL career. At first, he wasn’t the best. Not even close. But he was the most determined.
“I always tell this particular story of this one drill that we call ‘edge control,’” said Quinn. “You’re going over an apparatus that is six inches high and we want [you] to land on the inside edge of your back foot. People who watch it are blown away.
“Well, he’s not getting it because the co-ordination it takes to go from [his] strong side to his weak side is unnatural and he’s not landing on his inside edge perfectly. No one’s getting it. And everyone else wanted to move on and go scrimmage, but he said no, he wants to keep at it because he hasn’t mastered it.”
This isn’t a story of how McDavid mastered the technique later that day. Or later that month. “We did this drill for three years,” said Quinn. “These were difficult repetitions and we gradually increased higher levels of difficulty because when you overload most players can’t do it.” Think about that for a second: McDavid practising a drill for three years, pretty much failing every time, until he finally mastered it. By then, he could have got his PhD in edge control, except he was on to the next challenge.
“I remember Connor saying to me after a game, ‘I feel I have so much space when I come out of the wall in the cycle,’” said Quinn. “He feels like he has so much room because he’s been practising in what feels like high traffic.”
* * *
Jeff Jackson’s phone rang and Sam Gagner was on the other end. Gagner, an NHL forward, had just come back from a summer skate in Toronto and couldn’t believe what he had seen. There was this kid on the ice. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, but he didn’t play like any twelve-year-old. “You have to find this kid,” Gagner told Jackson, an NHL player agent. “He’s doing stuff that I can’t even do and I’ve been in the NHL for five years.”
“What’s his name?” asked Jackson.
“I think his name is David O’Connor. I know he plays for the Marlboros.”
So Jackson called the Toronto Marlboros and said, “Who’s this David O’Connor kid you’ve got playing there?”
There was laughter on the other end. “You mean Connor McDavid?”
* * *
Connor McDavid plays for the Toronto Marlboros. Photo courtesy of the McDavid family
Often, parents can be guilty of thinking their children are much better than they really are. Their son, the piano player, is going to be the next Mozart. Their daughter is going to the National Ballet. Kelly McDavid is the opposite. Her husband would tell her and everyone else that Connor was not only special enough to make the NHL, but to make it and be a star, and Brian would sound like another proud father pumping up his son.
“I was very careful,” she said. “I didn’t want to jump too far ahead. You hear these stories about kids who were really good hockey players and how they’re going to go to the NHL and then you never hear from them again. I was always, ‘Just wait, relax, it’s still early.’ It wasn’t until he was playing for the Toronto Marlboros when I’d see him do things and be like, ‘Oh my God, did anyone else see that? That was unbelievable!’”
McDavid, who scored 79 goals and 209 points in 88 games, was named the player of the year in the Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL). Still, Kelly McDavid tempered her expectations. When her son applied for exceptional status in 2012—a year after 6-foot-4 defenceman Ekblad had received approval—so that he could enter the OHL a year early, she wasn’t sure he would be accepted. After all, how many exceptions to the rule could there be? “I thought they’re not going to give exceptional status two years in a row, because it’s exceptional.”
Sherry Bassin, however, had no doubt McDavid was ready for the OHL as a fifteen-year-old. “Our scouts came to me and said, ‘What do you think?’ I don’t want to sound demeaning or be disrespectful, but my comment was a blind man could pick him out just by listening to him skate. It was just so obvious.” Bassin was so impressed by McDavid that he went back to Erie and started stripping the Otters of anything valuable. He wanted that first pick. “We had a team that was good enough to make the playoffs, but we’d be out in the first round or something,” said Bassin. “I wasn’t interested in having that. I remember our head coach came up to me and said, ‘Well, you don’t want to win.’”
“We had a good team the year before and then we got off to a bad start and began shipping guys out,” said Greg McKegg, who was traded to London. “It was wholesale. Basically everyone was gone.” It worked. The Otters won just ten games that year—nine fewer than the next-best team—and finished dead last. McDavid was theirs. Now they just had to figure out how to use him properly.
It was a learning process, both for the team and the player. At first, they sheltered him. A 6-foot-3, 215-pound forward named Stephen Harper had been hand-picked by Bassin to play older brother for the fifteen-year-old rookie. They shared a billet family and were linemates in McDavid’s OHL debut. “He could have easily had four or five points if I could’ve put the puck in the net,” said Harper.
“It was interesting, because I had him on a line with guys that weren’t overly offensive but were physically strong,” said Robbie Ftorek, who coached McDavid for his first year and a half in Erie. “Had he been with some offensive players, he would have had three or four assists on his first night. Connor was already developed past other guys and they weren’t expecting him to pass to them when he did. It was a bit humorous and I felt bad for Connor not getting what he deserved, but that was part of the deal.”
McDavid eventually started to pick up points, finishing with 66 points in 63 games as a sixteen-year-old. But those were lean days. The losses started to pile up again for the Otters, who missed the playoffs. “I remember that year was ridiculous,” said forward Connor Brown. “We lost like thirty-five games by one goal or something. We weren’t getting blown out like the year before. They were close games. And then the switch flipped when we had fifty-three wins a year later.”
For McDavid, the losing was something new to adjust to. He had practically never lost while playing for the York Simcoe Express and the Toronto Marlboros. And now he was losing just about every other night. As the first overall pick, a player everyone expected to come in and be a saviour, he took it personally.
“It was early November and we got beaten something like 5–3 on an empty-netter,” said Bassin. “He had two or three breakaways and hit the post once and missed on another. I happened to be walking out to the bus, just me and him, and he apologized sincerely, said, ‘Mr. Bassin, I’m sorry for letting the team down. If I had done my job we would have won the game.’ And this was with nobody around. This wasn’t something he was trying to make a big show of it. That’s the kind of kid he was.”
It was around that time that McDavid was starting to lose some of his confidence. During a game that went into an overtime shootout, Ftorek tapped McDavid on the shoulder and said to get ready, he would be going first. “Pick someone else,” said McDavid, who didn’t think he could win the game.
“Listen to me,” said Ftorek. “You’re going to be taking shootouts for the rest of your life. You will take every shootout and you will not worry about it. Just be yourself.”
It was part of the growth process, said Ftorek. For the first time in McDavid’s life, he was being challenged. “He ended up t
aking them and I think he missed his first three,” said Ftorek. “But I kept putting him out there because I felt that was something he needed to overcome and be comfortable with. He had such a long range side to side that he could change the angle of the shot very easily. And he needed to develop calmness to deke around the goaltender. I hope he doesn’t hold it against me. But for his development, I felt that I needed to do that for him.”
There were other things McDavid learned while in Erie. With every game that passed, his popularity grew. As well, the target on his back got so big that it could be seen across the country. Teams slashed and hacked and tried to get him off his game, knowing that McDavid was a huge part of the team’s success. Usually, there was a teammate who took care of things for him. But during a game against the Mississauga Steelheads in November 2014, McDavid had enough and fought Bryson Cianfrone. In the process, he broke his hand with an errant punch that hit the lip of the boards. “When I saw him going off the ice holding his hand—even though I had just turned seventy-eight—I felt like I had turned ninety,” said Bassin. “I was in the hospital with him and I looked at him and said, ‘Mac, why?’ And he said, ‘I can’t have everybody else fighting my battles.’”
McDavid’s hand healed in time for the World Junior Championship, where he tied for first in scoring with 11 points in 7 games to help Canada win its first gold medal in six years. He then returned to Erie, where the Otters won their division with 104 points but lost a best-of-seven series 4–1 in the OHL Final to the Oshawa Generals. By then, McDavid mania had reached peak level.
“By the third year, it was pretty crazy. We really couldn’t go anywhere,” said McDavid’s billet host Bob Catalde. “We were getting all sorts of mail. My dining room table was like our holding spot for all the stuff that needed to be signed and read and everything else. It was just piles and piles of stuff.”
The Next Ones Page 14