The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

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  Marner wore a blue tie and a blue shirt to the 2015 NHL Entry Draft in Sunrise, Florida. It was his favourite colour, he said. Plus, he wanted to match. At the time, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the Toronto Maple Leafs were going to pick Marner with the fourth overall pick. With McDavid, Eichel and Dylan Strome all off the board, the decision was between Marner and defenceman Noah Hanifin—an undersized winger or a safe and steady defenceman. It was not an easy choice.

  The Leafs’ front office was somewhat divided on who the team should choose. Some, reportedly including head coach Mike Babcock, believed that a rebuilding team was better off with a stud defenceman who could log twenty-plus minutes a night. Others apparently agreed. NHL Central Scouting had Hanifin ranked third among North American skaters, with Marner ranked sixth, right behind 6-foot-4, 212-pound winger Lawson Crouse.

  But something had occurred three weeks before the draft that tipped the scales in Marner’s favour. A day after finishing the season with the fourth-worst record in the NHL, the Leafs purged most of their front office staff, firing general manager Dave Nonis, interim head coach Peter Horachek and his entire coaching staff, as well as sixteen members of the scouting department. Even the team’s video co-ordinator was let go.

  The biggest change? Mark Hunter, who less than a year earlier had been hired as the Leafs’ director of player personnel, was named interim general manager, giving him control of the draft. Others around the league might have been gun-shy about taking a 5-foot-10 winger who tipped the scales at 160 pounds, but Hunter—and Lindsay Hofford, who had been hired on as a new scout—weren’t fooled so easily. After all, when they had first drafted Marner, he was only 5-foot-7 and 125 pounds. “You’ve seen this young man at fifteen and now he’s grown into a man,” said Hunter.

  “He had no doubt in me then and it looks like he has no doubt in me now,” Marner said at the time. “If you would have told me that he would have drafted me in the NHL and the OHL at the same time, I wouldn’t have believed you. But weird things happen like this and it’s a special thing to happen.” You could say the same thing about Marner’s development.

  Auston Matthews

  Auston Matthews (left) and William Nylander celebrate a goal. The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

  Toronto Maple Leafs

  » № 34 «

  Position

  Centre

  Shoots

  Left

  Height

  6′3″

  Weight

  216 lb

  Born

  September 17, 1997

  Birthplace

  San Ramon, CA, USA

  Draft

  2016 TOR, 1st rd, 1st pk (1st overall)

  Auston Matthews

  One night in October, Auston Matthews embarrassed a two-time Norris Trophy winner and scored four goals. It was his first NHL game. And it was equal parts magic and in Matthews’s words, “surreal,” the kind of thing you expect to see in a feel-good sports movie, right down to the shots of Matthews’s mom Ema in the stands, her face a mixture of joy, pride and surprise. The only thing missing was the win, although the fact that a nineteen-year-old rookie scored all four goals in a 5–4 loss was a sure-fire sign that the Toronto Maple Leafs’ fortunes were about to change.

  The rebuild was over. The pain had been lifted. The saviour had finally arrived.

  As Leafs head coach Mike Babcock told reporters, “We were all a part of history. I’ve never seen anything like that.” Indeed, most players’ “Welcome to the NHL” moment involves getting caught with their heads down and receiving a big hit or coughing up the puck and getting burned for a goal against. But in his much-anticipated debut, the first overall draft pick flipped the script. Matthews welcomed everyone to his world and in the process taught the league a few lessons.

  Lesson No. 1: Matthews is fast. On his first-ever goal, the Leafs centre beat a couple of slow-footed Ottawa Senators forwards to the front of the net and one-timed a pass that sailed over outstretched goaltender Craig Anderson.

  Lesson No. 2: Matthews is a thief. After deking past a couple of defenders, Matthews briefly lost the puck to all-star defenceman Erik Karlsson, whom Matthews then hunted down and promptly took the puck back from, before beating Anderson with a shot through his legs for his second goal.

  Lesson No. 3: Matthews can shoot. Parked just below the hash marks in the soft spot of Ottawa’s defence, Matthews took a pass from Morgan Rielly and in one quick motion fired it into the back of the net to complete his hat trick.

  Lesson No. 4: Matthews can do it all. On a play that showcased everything in his tool box, Matthews broke up a shot on the backcheck, used his speed to race up the ice and then played give-and-go with Nylander before scoring his fourth goal with three seconds remaining in the second period.

  “He got four scoring chances and he scored four goals,” Karlsson told reporters in Ottawa afterward. “Two of them, most people probably can’t do. Good for him and good for Toronto for having a player like that.” Even Senators goalie Craig Anderson was impressed. After the game, he asked for one of Matthews’s game-used sticks, which the Leafs rookie cheekily signed, Thanks ‘FOUR’ making the first game memorable. “It’s probably going to be a National Hockey League record for as long as I’m alive,” Anderson told reporters.

  If Matthews’s NHL debut was memorable, his journey to the NHL was nothing short of improbable. Most hockey players are born in cold climates, spend their winters skating on frozen ponds or backyard rinks, and are fed through the traditional development stream of playing major junior hockey in Canada or the NCAA in the United States. But then along comes Matthews. He was born in California and raised in Arizona. He learned how to play hockey in the desert, on a tiny three-on-three rink no bigger than a football field’s end zone. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t play major junior.

  Instead, after shattering Patrick Kane’s single-season scoring record in the US National Development Team Program, Matthews did what no one had done before him and jetted off to Switzerland to play professionally during his NHL draft year. Ultimately, he ended up in Toronto, the so-called centre of the hockey universe, as the first overall pick of an Original Six franchise. “It’s a crazy story,” said Matthews. “I didn’t do it to be a trailblazer or a trendsetter. I just did it because I thought it was the best path for me.”

  * * *

  It speaks volumes of all the people who have put so much work in to developing hockey in Arizona. To have a talent like that come out of here is a credit to them. — David Tippett, former head coach of the Arizona Coyotes, 2016

  * * *

  The extraordinary story of how Matthews became the first overall pick in the NHL began with an uncle who happened to buy a pair of season tickets to the city’s newest professional sports team. The Winnipeg Jets had relocated to Arizona a year before Matthews was born. The first time he went to a game, he sat on his father’s lap for free, paying more attention to the Zamboni, which he called el trucké, and to the remote-controlled balloons that dropped parachuted T-shirts from the rafters, than to the actual players.

  Matthews’s mom Ema grew up in a family of nine children on a ranch in Hermosillo, Mexico. When she met Brian Matthews while working as a flight attendant, she didn’t even know how to speak English, much less know anything about hockey. Matthews’s father Brian was only slightly more interested in the game. He was born in California and had pitched in college before his arm blew out as a junior. He didn’t learn to skate until he was in his thirties. “I got to where I can skate forward and backward, turn, do all that stuff,” he said. “I just fell in love with the game as [Auston] fell in love with it.”

  Matthews was a Coyotes fan at a perfect time, when the buzz around the brand-new franchise was strong and the team was actually winning more games than they were losing. The Coyotes made the playoffs in five of their first six seasons and had star players like Jeremy Roenick and Keith Tkachuk on the roster. Matthews, who rec
eived a Daniel Briere jersey as a Christmas present when he was six years old, was hooked. “It was pretty much the hottest thing,” Matthews said of the Coyotes. “I don’t think we had the NFL and the basketball team was not doing well. To have a new team come in was a pretty hot topic, especially with the players like Roenick and Tkachuk.”

  Auston Matthews and his family attend a Phoenix Coyotes game. At Auston’s first game, he was more interested in the Zamboni and the remote-controlled balloons that dropped parachuted T-shirts from the rafters than the game, but by the time he was six, he was a huge Coyotes fan. Photo courtesy of the Matthews family

  Turning a hockey fan into a hockey player, however, was almost as difficult as growing grass in the desert. Hockey wasn’t baseball, which Brian Matthews understood. And it wasn’t golf, which was literally in their backyard. There was no template, no previous examples of what worked and what didn’t. In some ways, that worked to the Matthews’s advantage. Brian Matthews didn’t feel the same pressure that Canadians feel when enrolling their kids in hockey. He didn’t follow any guidelines, because there weren’t any. Instead, he started writing his own learner’s manual, implementing ideas from other sports and questioning every rule that the hockey traditionalists threw his way.

  “Brian is a smart man and is willing to think outside the box and understand the upside and the opportunities his son is going through and what Auston can bring to the game as well,” said Pat Brisson, Matthews’s agent. “Auston’s fortunate to have such great parents.”

  The first obstacle: cost. Ice was hard to come by in Arizona, so because of that it was really expensive. When Matthews was three years old, his mom pushed back the C-section birth of his sister by an hour so he wouldn’t miss his first hockey practice and essentially toss money down the drain. As Matthews got older and played at higher levels, the costs multiplied. “It’s not like you’re living in Detroit and you’re driving a couple of hours to play somewhere else in Michigan. Or if you’re in Boston or New York or something,” said Brian. “Everything was like an adventure. As you look for better and better competition, you have to head out east. There’s a cost element, there’s a time element.”

  Auston Matthews attends a hockey clinic in Arizona. He had many coaches over the years, including Boris Dorozhenko. Photo courtesy of the Matthews family

  The Matthews family sacrificed. Ema worked two jobs—at Starbucks and as a waitress—to help pay for their son’s passion. But they also found out a way to feed their son’s insatiable appetite for more and more hockey, while at the same time allowing Matthews to practically skate for free. Matthews lived about a ten-minute drive from Ozzie Ice, a dual-rink facility that had one ice pad and one synthetic pad that were about one-third the size of a regulation rink. Aside from games of pickup hockey, Ozzie Ice was mostly used as a training rink. That is, until Brian, who volunteered at the rink, suggested creating a three-on-three league.

  “It exploded,” he said. “I mean, who doesn’t want to play in a league where the score is 48–45?” Since Brian was helping out with the league—running the score clock, and making sure the officials showed up and the teams had a goalie and enough players—his son also hung around and helped out. Inevitably, a team would be short a player and Auston would ask if he could fill in. “Sure,” said his father. “Just grab a jersey and go.”

  “We’d skate all day,” recalled Brian. “It was ideal for me and ideal for Auston. He’d be smoked by the time he got home, but with a big grin on his face because he got to skate all day and score a lot of goals.” The beauty of playing three-on-three meant there were more opportunities to touch the puck and more opportunities to score goals than in traditional games. It was also non-contact, so Matthews could play with bigger and older kids. Some laughed at the type of hockey that was being played, with scores resembling a football game, but for a young player still developing his stickhandling and skating skills, it had obvious advantages over skating up and down a full rink, sometimes going an entire game without actually touching the puck.

  “A lot of the skills I’ve developed today are from that,” Matthews said of Ozzie Ice. “It was my own little backyard rink. I was there constantly. I had every team’s jersey so I could fill in and play for them and have fun. I’d be there all the time.” Two things came out of those on-ice sessions: Matthews developed a knack for scoring goals, and because the ice surface was about one-third the size of a regulation rink, he learned how to stickhandle in an area the size of a phone booth.

  “You watch him in the pre-game skate and he takes the puck and stickhandles just on the faceoff dot,” said Mark Ciaccio, a former skills coach with the Arizona Coyotes. “That’s all he’s doing. He’s doing all these different stickhandling moves on the dot and it’s such a small area. That comes from playing in three-on-three. He was always good at working in tight areas. His stickhandling skills are unbelievable.” When Matthews showed up at tournaments as a fill-in player on the bigger ice surface, the extra space and extra time made him twice as dangerous. It was like taking batting practice against a pitcher who is standing half the distance from home plate and then suddenly having an extra thirty feet to see the ball coming in during actual games. It was too easy.

  “It’s no different than what the Brazilians do,” said Brian Matthews. “They have a small soccer game that they play in Brazil—it’s huge. It forces skill development and it forces [them] to learn how to dribble the ball and all those things. It’s no different than three-on-three. [Auston] had to learn very quickly where to go. It’s not just the skills with the puck, but without the puck, knowing where to put yourself so you can get the puck and where you can put yourself in a position to score. That sort of thing helps. And then when you go to the big ice, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all this space I have now.’ And it just opens up a whole other world for you. I think maybe it helped slow the game down even more for him.”

  Most other hockey parents didn’t think this way, because this wasn’t the way they had learned how to play hockey. But Brian Matthews wasn’t like other hockey parents. There was no blueprint. Instead, he was self-proclaimed “the crazy Arizonian who looked at things differently than everyone else.” That line of thinking is how Auston Matthews ended up with Boris Dorozhenko as a power skating coach.

  Dorozhenko was born in Ukraine and had been coaching the Mexican national team, which is something you don’t see on most skating coaches’ resumés. By his own admission, he is “a crazy guy” who teaches an even crazier technique that emphasizes balance and control but in ways that few can imagine. There were no pucks at a typical Dorozhenko practice. There was no time spent on systems training or scrimmaging. It was just hours and hours of skating. “I always say as far as the edges go, Boris is pretty hard to beat,” said Ron Filion, one of Matthews’s first coaches. “But the method is very out there and it’s not for everyone.”

  For five to six hours a week, Matthews performed huge leaps and pirouettes, ran in circles, stomped his feet and tried not to fall down while balancing on his heels for minutes at a time. It looked ridiculous, and some parents told Brian Matthews that he was wasting his money and his son’s time. But those were typical hockey parents. The Matthews family was not trying to be typical. “Everything is very unique,” Auston said of Dorozhenko’s methods. “It’s all edgework and you do jumps and 360s in the air. You’re wondering ‘What the heck is this?’ But then you go into a corner and you’re spinning off guys so easily and you start to realize that’s kind of how it all works together and translates to the game. Looking at it from the outside, I know people were wondering what we were doing. But if you go into it with an open mind and work hard at it, I think it’s a really good option.”

  In Dorozhenko, who was invited to live at the Matthews’s home for two years and essentially became part of the family, Brian Matthews found someone with a similar outlook. He wasn’t afraid to try new things, to admit that the old way wasn’t always the right way. In Auston Matt
hews, Dorozhenko found a student with natural skill but also with a sense of adventure. One year, Dorozhenko convinced Brian Matthews to put Auston on the worst team in the state, because he would get more ice time and learn leadership qualities. Another year, Dorozhenko took Auston to a tournament in Quebec City—as part of an all-Ukrainian team.

  “He was always my showman, because my style is very different,” said Dorozhenko. “Every day we were changing drills—some didn’t work, some were a waste of time—but Auston was trying them all. He didn’t complain. We would skate three hours on the ice and afterward he’d be shooting pucks on net. He had such energy, such passion. He’s a gamer.

  “I started working with him when he was eight years old and he was really just making his first step on the ice. Auston was very competitive right from the beginning. He hated to be second. He had to be first. It helped him a lot. Some of the drills I do are very hard for beginners. I remember one particular drill, he was almost crying because he couldn’t do it. I asked him to quit or to have a break for fifteen minutes. But he said no and kept trying and trying until he got it. When he felt not satisfied with a drill, he would keep doing it again and again.”

  The results were so good that Brian Matthews eventually pulled his son out of Triple-A and put him in a lower level, where there were fewer games, just so he could spend more time working with Dorozhenko. A year later, Brian signed his son up for Triple-A, but only as a practice player so he could learn proper positioning. Again, it was something no one else was doing. “I don’t know many kids that could take a year off,” said Filion. “But at the end of the day, not everyone is Auston Matthews.”