The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  And then Matthews went to the world championship, where as the youngest and only undrafted player on the team he scored 6 goals and 9 points in 10 games. “It was just too hard to ignore,” said Chiarelli. “He played too well. He had a hell of a tournament against world-class players.”

  Still, when the Team North America announced its final roster, Matthews was listed as the thirteenth forward. No one expected him to play, much less land a spot on the top line with McDavid and Scheifele. But just as with the NTDP and in Switzerland, Matthews’s skill changed minds in a hurry. “Auston is a very gifted player,” said head coach Todd McLellan. “He gets better every day. As we built the team, we didn’t know whether he was going to be a part of it. After he made the team, he came in and we weren’t sure where we were going to play him, likely as the thirteenth forward. He worked his way up, and he just keeps getting better and better.”

  When Matthews made his Air Canada Centre debut at the World Cup of Hockey in Toronto, most would have been impressed if he had just got into a game for Team North America. After all, this was a team that had some of the best young players in the NHL—players who had not only been top picks but had followed that up with Calder Memorial Trophy rookie seasons and were already impact players in the NHL. Instead, Matthews gave a glimpse of things to come.

  On his first shift of the World Cup of Hockey, Matthews stripped Finland’s Laine of the puck and then fed McDavid down the ice for an odd-man rush. On his third shift, the 6-foot-3 forward avoided a check, drove to the net and fired off a shot, with Eichel potting in the ensuing rebound to give North America a 1–0 lead.

  “There was no fear in him,” said McLellan. “He hasn’t played his first NHL game, but he’s an NHL player. He belongs. There’s no, ‘Let’s babysit him.’ Let him play. He’s got all the skills and he’s playing the right way. He fits.”

  Two games later, Matthews added another clip to his highlight reel when he deked past Sweden’s Victor Hedman while on his knees before sliding a pass to Scheifele and then potting in the rebound for another goal. “He’s doing stuff that elite guys are doing and he’s doing it every game,” Chiarelli said of Matthews. “If there’s a wild card in this tournament, it’s him.”

  If there had been trepidation in having Matthews on the team, it was immediately erased. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet played in the NHL. He more than belonged among the best.

  Nor was it surprising that Matthews finished the World Cup tournament with 2 goals and 3 points in 3 games.

  * * *

  He has done more in one night for hockey in Arizona than the Coyotes ever did. This is our kid. He’s from our state. Everybody is jumping on the Auston Matthews bandwagon. — Ron Filion, Arizona Bobcats head coach

  * * *

  Shanahan was careful not to call Matthews a saviour when the Leafs drafted him. But it was difficult not to think of him that way on the night of his four-goal debut, especially if you were playing hockey in Arizona.

  Filion, who was born in Quebec and moved to Arizona in the early 1990s, had been running hockey practice at AZ Ice Arcadia in the Desert Palms Power Center in Phoenix, Arizona just as Matthews was enjoying his historic night. The rink is the same one that Matthews skated on as a kid. And though Matthews was now playing hockey on the other side of the continent, he might as well have been playing in his hometown.

  “Coach Ron! Coach Ron!” the kids shouted when they skated onto the ice on that Wednesday night in October. “Papi just scored a goal!”

  Papi is Matthews’s childhood nickname. And much to Filion’s pleasure and annoyance, he couldn’t get through a drill without hearing Papi’s name. Parents, who were watching the Leafs game on a TV in the arena restaurant, banged on the glass and held up two fingers to signal to Filion that Matthews had scored a second goal. When he completed the hat trick in the second period, the entire rink erupted in cheers.

  So by the time Matthews broke the record for goals in an NHL debut and scored his fourth of the game, Filion had already given up on the practice and was standing in front of a TV with everyone else.

  “At some point, it was hard for me to concentrate on the ice. I was just waiting for the next update,” Filion, who had coached Matthews from when he was ten years old until he was fourteen, told the Toronto Sun. “The whole rink was buzzing. A lot of people, instead of watching their own kids, went to the bar, which is attached to the rink, and were watching him.”

  “When I was [those kids’] age, there were guys from Arizona that I was looking up to as well,” said Matthews. “It’s pretty special.”

  Well, not exactly. No one from Arizona has done what Matthews has already done. With the exception of Dave Spina, who grew up in Mesa, Arizona, and went on to play in the minors and professionally in Europe, no one even came close. It’s why what Matthews has done is so special.

  “I would definitely say the rise in hockey interest in Arizona recently is because of him,” said Christian Cakebread, who played on the same Bobcats team as Matthews and is now at Niagara University. “There really wasn’t much of a hockey scene before him. The rink that I’d go to would have like one summer camp and the ice would be open for hours on end. Now, it’s exploded. Especially with the younger kids; when Auston came back the year before he was drafted it was just ridiculous the amount of people that came out there to watch him skate.”

  That bandwagon is bound to get more crowded. Whereas the Coyotes inspired Matthews to play hockey, having a homegrown star is bound to inspire many more to pick up the sport. According to the Arizona Republic, hockey registration in the state has already jumped from 2,349 during the 1996–97 season to 7,329 for the 2014–15 campaign—an increase of 312 per cent. In 2015, Filion led players born in 2002 to the peewee championship in Quebec, where the Arizona Bobcats topped thirty-one other teams to win the end-of-year tournament. This is no longer a non-traditional hockey market. If the Coyotes helped introduce the sport, then Matthews is the one who put it on the map. For kids growing up, he is the inspiration.

  “We couldn’t even have two Triple-A teams when Auston was playing here. And now, we were doing tryouts this weekend and we had eighty to ninety kids trying out,” said Filion. “That would have been impossible even when Auston was here. We’d be lucky to get thirty kids trying out. Now, it’s loaded.”

  Indeed, Matthews might not have followed the traditional path in order to get to the NHL, but from developing on three-on-three rinks and playing his draft year in Switzerland, he certainly blazed a trail for the next kid coming from Arizona or a place where hockey is not a dominant sport. As Matthews has said, “It’s a crazy story.” And it’s just getting started. “I guess there’s a lot of paths to the NHL,” said Matthews. “Everybody’s different. Obviously my path has been a little bit unique, but everybody’s in the NHL for the same reason. I wanted to get to the NHL and I was going to do everything to get there, regardless of where I was from.”

  Patrik Laine

  Winnipeg Jets’ Patrik Laine shoots on the Edmonton Oilers during the pre-season in 2016. Notice the elasticity of his stick. The Canadian Press/Trevor Hagan

  Winnipeg Jets

  » № 29 «

  Position

  Right wing

  Shoots

  Right

  Height

  6′5″

  Weight

  206 lb

  Born

  April 19, 1998

  Birthplace

  Tampere, FIN

  Draft

  2016 WPG, 1st rd, 2nd pk (2nd overall)

  Patrik Laine

  On the night of the 2016 NHL draft lottery in April, Sportsnet arranged satellite interviews with Matthews and Patrik Laine—the projected first and second overall picks in the upcoming draft—who were both in Finland preparing for the Ice Hockey World Championship held the following month in Russia. Matthews went first. Speaking from a hotel ballroom in Helsinki, Matthews sat with perfect posture and answered each question as seriou
sly and politically correctly as possible. There were few ums, few ahs, and not much in terms of sound bites.

  And then it was Laine’s turn. He too was at a hotel in Helsinki, but that was where the similarities between Matthews and him ended. When Laine’s picture popped up on the screen, he was lying on his back in bed, wearing a plain white T-shirt with Apple ear buds dangling down his chest, his eyes drifting to the ceiling. With his long blond hair and carefree smile, he gave off the impression of a laid-back California surfer dude who had just woken from a nap—something that he reinforced once he began to speak.

  When asked for the secret behind his blistering slapshot, Laine said his father had hung Coke bottles in the backyard for him to break. When asked about the comparisons to Matthews, Laine matter-of-factly said, “I know that the gap is smaller.” And when asked if he thought it was possible he could leapfrog Matthews and go first in the draft, Laine broke into a toothy grin and confidently agreed, his head still resting on the pillow. Sportsnet host Daren Millard, who had been conducting the interview, seemed pleasantly shocked by Laine’s candour: “I have to say, you’re a cool cat here, really casual about this.”

  “Yeah, I know what I’m capable of and I know that I’m saying that,” Laine replied in a Finnish drawl, “so I’m not afraid to say it out loud and like that about myself.” Asked later about his sleepy performance, the Winnipeg Jets’ second overall pick simply said, “It was filmed during the day. I was quite awake. I just wanted to be me in the interview and not have to pretend I was someone else.”

  Indeed, there is only one Laine. And he is definitely not boring or reserved. He speaks what’s on his mind, often without a filter. On why he switched from being a goalie to a forward when he was twelve years old: “I’m afraid of pucks.” On the success of his one-timer: “I will score ninety-nine times out of one hundred—the stick will break once.” Although his lines are funny, they’re also not very Finnish.

  “First of all, I would check his passport,” said former NHLer Ville Nieminen, who is from Laine’s hometown of Tampere. “Check to see if he has a US passport, because he is cocky. He’s not a typical Finnish guy. He’s so self-confident. He’s been following his own route.”

  In a cookie-cutter sport where hockey players are taught to spout clichés about “giving 110 per cent” and “taking it one day at a time,” Laine arrived in the NHL like a breath of fresh air. Off the ice, he seemed more concerned with making reporters smile than necessarily saying the right thing. On the ice, he was Thor with a wicked one-timer—Finland’s answer to Alex Ovechkin. “There isn’t another player from here that has caused this kind of circus as Patrik,” said Antti Makinen, a Finnish hockey broadcaster. “The driving school where Patrik got his licence, they are not marketing the driving school by their name. They are just putting his picture on a big poster. It says ‘Our Patrik’ and shows his licence. It’s hilarious.”

  Laine’s shtick wasn’t always funny. Growing up in Finland, where the word “modesty” might as well be stitched into the country’s coat of arms, Laine’s swagger sometimes closed more doors than it opened. He was often benched for his bravado. He feuded with coaches and was kicked off the national team. He was accused of being a me-first player, the kind of teammate who would be smiling if he were scoring but would be cursing at himself and others if his shots weren’t going in.

  Patrik Laine started playing hockey at a young age. Photo courtesy of the Laine family

  At the best of times, he was called immature. At the worst, he was accused of being selfish. The general feeling was that he wouldn’t amount to much unless he conformed and became like every other player in the country. “There’s been some times when I was younger where maybe the coach wants me to play like this, but I didn’t feel like I kind of needed to, or I just wanted to play the way I wanted to play,” said Laine. “If I tried to play my own way, I wasn’t playing, or I was sitting on the bench or I was not even on the roster. There was a season where I played like five games, because I wasn’t ready to play the games that he wanted me to play, but I think that’s only a good thing because there’s millions of guys that can be that player that the coach wants them to be. But I didn’t want to be that kind of player. I wanted to be my kind of player and develop that way.”

  Stubbornness served Laine well. Although he was often his own worst enemy—an emotional player who put the weight of the world on his shoulders to the point where he was assigned a full-time mental coach and needed to be talked out of quitting—he stuck to his guns to become one of his generation’s deadliest snipers. In the process, he has become Finland’s biggest and brashest star since Teemu Selänne was tossing his glove in the air and shooting it down with his stick. “I’ve been waiting a long time for Finland to bring another superstar to the league,” said Selänne. “And finally we have one of them.”

  * * *

  Of course, we have nothing to do with his shot. Nobody can teach a shot like that. As a coach you can say, “You should shoot a lot,” or give him a couple of tips about shooting, but his shot is his own. Nobody has anything to do with his shot or his scoring. — Jussi Tapola, head coach, Tappara Tampere

  * * *

  The nightmare-inducing shot, which netted him 36 goals as a rookie and 44 in 2017–18—second only to Alex Ovechkin in the Rocket Richard Trophy race—started innocently enough. In the backyard of his home, Laine had a hockey net, a bucket that held about fifty pucks and a board from which he would launch shot after shot. But most importantly, he had a neighbour who didn’t appreciate it when hard, rubberized pucks would fly over the fence and hit his house. “I hardly missed,” said Laine. “Just took shots in my backyard and learned how to shoot. I’ve always been a good shooter and always scored a lot of goals.”

  Shooting at a net soon got boring. So Laine’s father would tie Coke cans to the top left and right corners of the crossbar. Together, they had a competition to see who could hit the most cans. But eventually, being able to hit the can wasn’t enough. Accuracy, after all, is only one component of Laine’s shot. So his dad replaced the cans with bottles and hung them from the top corners. For a player who ranked second in the hardest-shot competition at the 2017 NHL All-Star Game with a 101.7 mph blast, seeing the glass bottles explode and shower the ground with tiny bits of glass was almost as satisfying as scoring a goal.

  At one time, Laine was also pretty good at preventing goals. From Miikka Kiprusoff to Tuukka Rask, Finland has a rich history of producing top-end goalies. Up until the age of twelve, a tall and lanky Laine dreamed of being the next Pekka Rinne until his father, who worked in Tampere as a plumber, decided Laine playing goalie was far too expensive and a waste of his son’s natural talent. “I liked being goalie,” said Laine. “Someone always had to go to the net. I just liked it, I don’t know why. It was a long time ago. Nowadays, I would never be a goalie. Guys are shooting way too hard for me. It’s nice to be a forward now.”

  Patrik Laine played in net until he was twelve, when he switched to playing forward. Photo courtesy of the Laine family

  No one taught Laine to shoot. No one even knows how he does it. Teammates have grabbed his stick, which has the elasticity of a pool noodle, and have wondered how he manages to generate so much power without snapping the thing in half. “I kind of figured it out on my own,” said Laine. “I haven’t practised techniques or stuff like that much. Just shooting and shooting. I don’t know how I figured it out. It’s pretty easy once you know how. I never had a skills coach helping me. I’ve been my own skills coach. I’m not teaching anyone. It’s my secret.”

  For a while, Laine was Tampere’s biggest secret. Located north of Helsinki in the southern part of Finland, Laine describes his hometown as “wet, cold and dark.” Of course, it’s like that in most of the country, especially in the winter. When Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan arrived in Finland for the 2016 World Junior Championship in December, he tweeted, “Early morning Helsinki… or mid-afternoon… or early evening�
� and then posted a picture of a sunless sky. Not surprisingly, Finns tend to consume more coffee—and alcohol—per capita than the residents of most other countries. They also consume a heck of a lot of hockey.

  Tampere is at the centre of it all. Laine calls it “the home of Finnish hockey.” It is here where the first hockey game was supposedly played, where the first indoor rink was built and where the country’s Hockey Hall of Fame resides. Despite a population of less than 300,000, Tampere supports two professional hockey teams—Ilves and Tappara—and has graduated a number of players to the NHL, including Vesa Toskala, Jyrki Lumme and Aleksander Barkov. “I think everybody wants to be a hockey player in that town,” said Laine, who grew up with three or four outdoor rinks within walking distance of his door.

  Laine didn’t work with the traditional skills coaches as a kid, but with a shot that could break Coke bottles, he quickly started getting attention as someone with a knack for the net. As a fourteen-year-old, he scored 28 goals and 45 points in 16 games for Tappara’s U-16 team, as well as 17 goals and 26 points in 27 games for the U-18 B team. “I heard about him when he was a younger kid,” said Jari Grönstrand, a Finnish-based scout for the Winnipeg Jets who is also from Tampere. “It was almost every game that he did something unbelievable. Some good goal or some good pass, and he can check too. He hits pretty hard. Maybe you haven’t seen it yet in the NHL, but he can check. You didn’t have to look for him on the ice.”

  Mostly, it was his shot that attracted the attention. He’s always had it, even when he was playing goaltender and shooting pucks in the backyard. It came naturally, but he’s put a lot of work into it, trying to make it harder, more accurate and—as he has said—more like Ovechkin’s. “I’ve always been a good shooter and always scored a lot of goals. I don’t know why,” said Laine. “I watched a lot of videos on the Internet, trying to learn. I was always trying to improve my shot and improve my game.”