The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  Another seven-year-old was also cut. His name was McDavid. “I was like, ‘Okay, I have to get involved with this,’ because they were two of the best players in their generation,” said Hofford. Hofford can now laugh at the omission, which was sort of like a band manager passing on the Beatles. “You don’t want your name attached to that,” Hofford said of the coach, whom he refused to name in order to save him from further embarrassment. But it just goes to show you the roadblocks that even the most talented players face during their development. “It wasn’t that they weren’t good enough,” said Hofford. “It was that usually [the all-star team] took only one underage guy and the coach had his own team so he probably wanted to take one of his own guys. It was probably easy for him to do it.”

  * * *

  He was rated very low by Central Scouting. Something like third or fourth round or something crazy like that. But after he became the player he was, about one hundred people came out of the woodwork and were like, ‘Oh no, I had him but I got shut down.’ After the fact, everyone supposedly knew. — Lindsay Hofford, Toronto Maple Leafs amateur scout and founder of Pro Hockey Development Group

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  Ask what made Marner so good back then, and Hofford doesn’t talk about his speed, his shot or his jaw-dropping individual skills. Rather, he mentions his smarts. Watching him on the ice was like watching Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting at the whiteboard dissecting a math equation. It was not that Marner solved every problem he faced on the ice, it was how he solved it.

  “I’m watching a player when I’m scouting and I’m always ‘Okay, here’s what he should do in this situation, here’s the right play,’” said Hofford. “With Mitch, even though I’d coached and done a lot of things in hockey for twenty-five years, he would make a different play than I would think he should make and it would usually be a better play than I had seen. I’m like, ‘This guy is not normal.’ It’s not a teachable thing that he’s got. And he was doing it without the physical strengths that a lot of other players have.”

  For a while, Marner and McDavid were at around the same level. Both played up a year and both put up gobs of points whenever they stepped on the ice. “There are a lot of similarities between the two,” said Marner’s agent Darren Ferris, who recruited McDavid to the Orr Hockey Group before leaving to start his own agency. “Both are great players. Different style of players, but both great players and great people. Their intelligence is off the charts.”

  Eventually, the gap between the two players widened. Part of it had to do with size. While McDavid hit his growth spurt and became much faster and stronger, Marner remained the same size. “Mitch was so much smaller that he had to do three strides to Connor’s one at that point,” said Hofford.

  It wasn’t just that McDavid’s skate size changed. In 2012, McDavid applied for exceptional status and entered the OHL as an underage fifteen-year-old. Marner, meanwhile, was too small for that big of a jump. For the first time in his hockey career, he stayed back and played with his age group.

  “We wanted him to stay up and his coach talked us into keeping him down,” said Paul Marner. “In hindsight, I wish I would have had him stay up because that stigma of always being considered too small would have been erased, because you’re not only playing up a year but you’re also dominating a year up. That’s what Connor had.”

  “Once you have that tag that you’re small, it never goes away,” said Ferris.

  Marner did make some changes that year aimed at putting himself in a better light. He moved over to the GTHL and played for the Don Mills Flyers, where the competition was greater and there were far more scouts in the stands. “My feeling is he was a smaller player going into his draft year, so the family wanted to make sure he was seen for the calibre of player he was, as many parents do,” said Don Mills head coach Steve Mercer.

  Playing in the GTHL put more eyeballs on Marner, but it wasn’t exactly a dream scenario. The Don Mills Flyers were a weak team, having rarely made the playoffs. Aside from Marner and goalie Jack LaFontaine, a third-round pick of the Carolina Hurricanes in 2016, there wasn’t much else. Marner had 41 goals and 86 points in 55 games. The team’s next-highest scorer, Liam Dunda, had as many points as Marner had goals.

  “We really only had one and a half lines,” said Dunda, a St. Louis Blues prospect. “If Mitch or I didn’t score, we probably didn’t have a goal that game. He had one goal where he backchecked and stripped the guy of the puck and then went up the ice and beat four guys clean and scored on his knees. We were on the bench like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen that before.’ I have no idea how he did that. We would say that a lot. You can’t believe your eyes.”

  The Flyers lost in the first round of the playoffs, but not going deep might have been the best thing for Marner. Although his season in the GTHL had ended, his playoffs were just beginning for the St. Michael’s Buzzers in the Ontario Junior Hockey League. It might not have been as competitive as the OHL, but Tier 2 hockey provided Marner with experience playing against twenty-year-old men destined for the NCAA. For scouts, it was a chance to see whether Marner could handle himself against bigger and stronger players.

  The Buzzers were a deep team that had played the entire season together when Marner was called up in mid-January. “I think we had thirteen scholarship kids on that team,” said Buzzers head coach Rich Ricci—so Marner spent the first several games watching from the stands. He finally got in after one of the forwards suffered an injury, but at fifteen years old he was a bit player on the fourth line. It was not until the championship final against the Newmarket Hurricanes that Marner got a chance to show what he could do. The Buzzers were down 2–1 in the series when Marner picked up an assist in Game 4 and scored the game-winner in Game 5. But he saved his best performance for an all-or-nothing Game 7.

  “I was excited,” said Marner. “I was going to be playing a lot of minutes, but at the same time, you’re nervous about being out there and making mistakes, because you don’t know the team well and you don’t want to screw it up. But I was a young kid. It was another game. Lucky enough, I was able to help the team.”

  St. Michael’s College School arena, which was originally built as an outdoor arena in 1956, is located in the heart of downtown Toronto. It holds only 1,600 fans, but it can seem like there is a zero added to that number because of how close the seats are to the ice and how the domed wooden roof bounces the sound back down to the ice.

  When the Buzzers returned home for Game 7, the old barn was packed for what would be the biggest game of Marner’s young career. But if he was feeling pressure, he didn’t let it show. A minute and nine seconds into the game, the crowd roared as Marner freed himself from a check at the side of the net and slid in a back-door pass to put St. Mike’s ahead 1–0. “He was giving me looks on the bench like, you know, ‘I want to get on the ice,’” said Ricci. “I said to my assistants, ‘This kid’s a special player.’” Ricci elevated Marner to the top line. With the Buzzers ahead 2–1 in the third period, Marner put the game out of reach by tapping in a loose puck that was lying inside the crease to make it 3–1.

  “He never panicked,” said Ricci. “What really stood out was our building was sold out and here comes this kid and he’s making plays against twenty-year-olds in a Game 7 for the league championship. And he’s being creative. He didn’t change his game at all. He was creative as ever, going to the dirty areas, wanting to score goals. That game propelled him to be a first-round OHL pick, in my opinion.”

  Yes, but it still took some arm-twisting for it to happen. Despite what Marner had accomplished for Don Mills and St. Mike’s, teams in the OHL were still unsure whether it would translate at the next level. Marner had scholarship offers from Michigan and other NCAA schools, but that was because he was still a year away from being eligible for college and would have more time to grow. As for the OHL, nobody was guaranteeing he would even be picked in the first few rounds.

  “I had the guy from the Peterboro
ugh Petes call me and say ‘We’d really like to draft Mitch and can we come meet with you?’” said Paul Marner. “I said, ‘Where do you have him?’ [He] said probably second or third round. I said, ‘Don’t waste your time. We’re not interested. If I don’t get an education package, then we’re not interested.’ So he came to the house and said, ‘What would it take for Mitch to come to the Petes?’ I said first round. They were picking fourth overall and I said that if they pick him fourth, then I have something to be interested in. He literally started giggling in front of me and said, ‘You don’t really believe your kid should be picked not only in the first round but a top-five pick?’ I said, ‘When the NHL draft rolls around in two years, I’ll tell you who was right and who was wrong.’”

  Peterborough ended up drafting Matthew Spencer, a 6-foot-1, 200-pound defenceman who in 2015 became a second-round pick of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Eighteen other teams also passed on Marner, mostly because he was 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds. “A lot of people thought he was trying to get to London, but at the time there weren’t a lot of teams knocking on the door to take him,” said Ferris. “London showed him some love and that’s where he ended up.” Even then, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. “There was obviously some discussion with our scouts about not taking him, because they wanted bigger guys,” said Hofford, then the director of scouting for the London Knights. “There were names batted around that in hindsight would have been disastrous if we had picked them.”

  The Knights are one of the most storied and successful franchises in the OHL. Since Dale and Mark Hunter became co-owners in 2000, the organization has been run like an NHL team, with a pro-style arena and amenities as well as a smart and aggressive scouting staff that year after year seems to attract the brightest stars. From 2004 to 2016, the Knights finished with the most points in the OHL and won five league championships and two Memorial Cups. From Rick Nash and Corey Perry to Patrick Kane and Bo Horvat, the Knights have a reputation for turning out star NHLers. But they also have a reputation for being open-minded when it comes to looking past a player’s physical shortcomings as long as his talent outweighs his actual weight.

  “We tried to find these guys who were late bloomers physically, because we were always finishing near the top in London and picking later in the draft,” said Hofford, who also worked as a scouting consultant with the Knights. “Size was never an issue, as long as they competed and had immense skill. Our thing was always skill.” Marner, whom the Knights selected nineteenth overall, tested just how open-minded they were.

  Mark Hunter, the team’s co-owner and GM, wasn’t the problem. He was not afraid of smaller, skilled players. But his brother Dale, who was the team’s co-owner and head coach, wasn’t so sure. The first time Dale Hunter went to watch Marner play, Marner had been sick with the flu and looked every bit as small and out of his league as you would imagine the smallest player on the ice to look. With London still on the fence, Hofford asked Marner’s parents if they had any game footage of Mitch that they could send to Dale. The parents smiled at each other. “How much do you need?”

  “You’re always worried,” said Dale Hunter. “But when I saw him against twenty-year-olds who were twice his size in Junior B, I was sold. He was a special player. And that was in the playoffs too.” Hunter signed off on the decision. But he also told Paul Marner not to expect his kid to play that season in London. He was still too small.

  * * *

  A day or two after Canada lost at the World Juniors, [Marner] flew back from Finland and had a couple of days off before he had to head back to London. He showed up at the Hill Academy just randomly. I came into the lobby, and when the kids have a break in the action from their workouts they play our version of European handball. Mitch was playing with the younger guys. And this was the day after coming back from a disappointing experience. But he just always saw the ray of sunshine in every opportunity. I think that’s why he has a positive influence on others. Even in the toughest times, he’s having fun. — Patrick Merrill, admissions director, Hill Academy

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  On casual inspection, the game looks a lot like European handball, with a few minor changes. For one, it’s played with indoor soccer nets and there’s no goalie crease. You’re still allowed only three steps before you have to either pass or shoot the ball, but now defenders are allowed to knock the ball out of a player’s hand. But ultimately the thing that makes “Noble Ball” so unique is that hockey players play it.

  “We’ve had a couple of people lose teeth,” said Dan Noble, the athletic development coach at Toronto’s Hill Academy. “We’ve had to dial it back a little bit.” Noble created the game when he started working at the Hill Academy in the second year of the private school’s existence. At the time, there were about twenty kids enrolled at the sports academy and space was limited. He needed a game that the kids could play to break up the tedium of weight training, something that was fun but also beneficial. So he grabbed a rubber dodge ball and a couple of indoor soccer nets and created what he describes as a cross between Aussie Rules football and European handball.

  “It’s pretty hectic sometimes,” said Marner. “But it’s better than working out. When we were younger, we didn’t understand the benefit it had. It was just better to play that than lift weights.”

  “It’s become my barometer, because it demonstrates athleticism or lack thereof,” said Noble. “I’ve always said that our top-ten Noble Ball players of all time are always the most successful athletes who have gone on to do really good things after graduating. Mitch would be top three for sure.” Noble’s favourite saying is “bullets over bowling balls.” He wants players to be quick, agile, light on their feet, but also explosive. “Marner,” said Noble, is an “F1 sports car.” He’s small, but he’s got an engine that won’t quit.

  “People look at his body weight but he’s probably pound for pound one of the strongest guys in the NHL,” said Noble. “Yesterday, he was doing sled pushes of five hundred pounds. He’s phenomenal. Strength is not an issue. If you look at his legs and watch him do a lunge or a squat, his legs are massive. Mitch is an outlier in the way his body responds to external stimulus. He picks things up very quickly and his body adapts very quickly.”

  A Formula One sports car was not the image that came to mind when Ryan Rupert first saw Marner take off his shirt before his first practice with the London Knights in 2013. He was more like a go-kart. “I just remember him coming into training camp and seeing how small he was. I was like, ‘Who is this kid?’” said Rupert. “You could see his ribs and all his bones. I remember he and I used to go to Marble Slab together. We’d be trying to put some weight on him. He was just real, real small. But once you saw him practise and play, you knew he was going to be something special because he was so fast and so skilled.”

  In Marner’s first season in London, the team was hosting the Memorial Cup and therefore loading up with older, more established players. On a roster that included future NHLers Max Domi, Bo Horvat, Chris Tierney and Michael McCarron, Marner wasn’t promised he’d play much. But it wasn’t long before he pushed his way up the depth chart, not only finishing second in rookie scoring with 59 points in 64 games, but also earning the coach’s trust so much that Dale Hunter felt comfortable using him on the point on the power play.

  “I always let the young guys feel their way through,” said Hunter. “He just kept earning more and more ice time. He’s a player. He’s determined. You saw it with the Leafs as a rookie. His work ethic is outstanding, his brain is outstanding; he’s just a hockey guy. He gets it. I’d ask questions to the group, like ‘What happened on this play here, what was the mistake made?’ And Mitch would answer right away. He’s got a great hockey brain. I had to finally tell him, ‘Mitch, let the other guys answer.’ He’s a special, special player. They don’t come around much. I just loved to coach him.”

  Marner finished second in OHL scoring the following season—three points back from Dylan Strome—and was draf
ted fourth overall by the Maple Leafs, behind McDavid, Eichel and Strome. Toronto was in the early stages of a rebuild and would finish the following season with the worst overall record, so Marner was returned to London for a third season where he was told to win a Memorial Cup. “He became a leader. We saw it that year,” said Dale Hunter. “Talking to the guys, he’d be ‘C’mon guys, let’s get it going, we’re down a couple of goals.’ So it really developed his leadership abilities and honed his skills.”

  Marner also became a winner. The Knights won 51 of 68 games in the regular season in 2015–16 and then went on a fourteen-game winning streak in the playoffs, sweeping the Kitchener Rangers, Erie Otters and Niagara IceDogs to win the OHL championship as well as the Memorial Cup. A huge part of their success was the top line of Marner, Matthew Tkachuk and Christian Dvorak, who combined scored a whopping 153 points in 22 games. “There was instant chemistry,” said Tkachuk. “I think we did realize how special of an opportunity this could be and how we wanted it to work.”

  “He can see things out there that no one else can,” said Dvorak. “I don’t think we had to call much for the puck.”

  The following season, the player who had been underestimated for most of his life was a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he exceeded everyone’s expectations except his own and those of his family. “I knew what he was capable of,” said Chris Marner. “I knew he would prove people wrong and always somehow be able to accomplish what he set out to do. I’ve been in many instances where someone has said, ‘Mitch isn’t going to do anything’ and I’ve just bitten my tongue. I let people have their opinions, because at the end of the day I know what my brother is capable of.”

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  Mark [Hunter] and I are pretty close. Will that make a difference when the draft comes around? Hey, there are no guarantees. But he knows my game, he knows what I’ve done and he knows what I can potentially do as I develop and get better… It’s nice having someone up there who really knows you, who has taken a chance on you before and hopefully might again if the opportunity presents itself. — Mitch Marner, Toronto Sun, June 2015