by Bob Mckenzie
Karl and Maria, with their athletic backgrounds, obviously allowed their kids to swim in the deep end of the gene pool. Nastasia went on to become a top basketball player on the York University women’s varsity team before she became a teacher. Natasha also played basketball growing up, but showed great flair for art and went to the Ontario College of Art and Design before deciding to switch to teaching. And, of course, quite remarkably, not one, not two, but all three Subban boys were drafted into the NHL, and one of them was named the NHL’s best defenceman a month after his 24th birthday.
Good athletic genes are one thing, and the Subban kids have them. But a work ethic? Advanced coaching and training techniques? They had all those, too. Karl Subban’s passion may be teaching and working to help kids less privileged than his own to learn, but don’t think for one moment he wasn’t involved every step of the way in the hockey development of his kids, notably P.K. A voracious reader and seeker of knowledge, Karl was gobbling up information on training, conditioning and coaching techniques even back in his Lakehead days, and he has never stopped, reading everything from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to . . . you name it.
Make no mistake, Karl and Maria Subban didn’t just raise their kids; they taught, trained and coached them, too. If Karl would push a little too hard, Maria was there to pull back and maintain some balance. “They were,” P.K. said of his parents, “a very good team. And when my dad thought it was time to move us on to someone who knew more than him, to go to another level with someone else, that’s what he did. He knew when it was time [to let go].”
“I knew hard work, I knew a lot about training from my days at Lakehead,” Karl said. “I introduced the girls to basketball and I trained them. If the boys were going to play hockey, I knew the value of practice. Of being on the ice every day. Time skating is time well spent, but I would skate, too. I didn’t sit in the car and read a book. A lot of parents don’t go on the ice with their children. I think that’s so important. The really young kids, they want you out there with them. Looking back on it now, it was a great strategy with P.K. We would do it every day. I’d get home from work—he was still in diapers, two and a half—I’d grab the baby wipes, and off we’d go in my old Corolla. He liked it. Some kids wouldn’t. He did. He always wanted more. P.K. couldn’t get enough.”
Karl was quite taken with the 10,000 Hour Rule Gladwell wrote about in Outliers—that it takes that much practice to become phenomenal at anything—and decided to try it with P.K. So the plan was to skate every day from the end of October to the end of the season. Keep in mind that P.K. was all of five years old at the time. That is, of course, what led to the well-documented story of P.K. skating at Nathan Phillips Square at Toronto City Hall late every weeknight with Karl. P.K. was in kindergarten at the time. Karl was working as a vice-principal of a night school to earn extra money, and when he finished work at 9 p.m., he’d go home and pick up five-year-old P.K. to take him downtown to City Hall. They’d skate for hours, into the wee hours, and once P.K. realized the older guys and rink attendants would play hockey with sticks and pucks after pleasure skating was over, Karl had no choice but to stay later. When they were done, Karl would grab P.K. a slice of pizza, take him home to Rexdale and put him to bed at 2 or 3 a.m. Karl would have to get up only hours later for his long two-job workday. But P.K. could sleep until it was time to catch the noon-hour school bus to afternoon kindergarten class. The next night, they would do it all over again.
“If I told P.K. I was too tired to go any night,” Karl said, “he’d say, ‘But I really want to go.’ And we’d go.”
“I’ll never forget Nathan Phillips Square,” P.K. said. “It always had that same smell, the smell of the air in downtown Toronto—you know, the hot dog vendors. I can still smell it now. We’d get a pizza slice every night. I loved that. I love the memory of it. That’s what I’m going to do with my kids. I’m so lucky to have those experiences.”
Karl noted that what worked for P.K. might not have worked for Malcolm or Jordan, and that what he learned from seeing P.K. embrace the nightly skates at Nathan Phillips Square is that “once kids become good at something, the younger they are, the more it fuels them. . . . P.K. had the advantage of me knowing the importance of practice. When he was a little older in minor hockey, P.K. would have power skating classes on the same day as his games. He’d skate with [power skating instructor] Cam Brothers at 10:45 at Westwood Arena and we’d have to be at St. Mike’s for a game at 1:15 p.m. It would bother me to think he was missing practice for a game, so he would do both. Games don’t make you better; practices do. It was a lot, but P.K. ate it up.”
Karl would also flood the backyard rink each winter, and P.K. would spend hours on it. So, too, would Karl, who would ask Cam Brothers for some drills and come up with his own unique take on repetition, and building more skills and moves into each, increasing the speed and degree of difficulty.
“Oh yeah, the figure-8 drill,” P.K. said, breaking into a wide grin. “Do you know how many variations of a figure-8 skating drill my dad came up with? Do you know how many times I did that? Two cones, so many variations—forwards, backwards, pivot one way, pivot another way, pass him the puck, take a pass, skate with a puck, jump over sticks on the ice, pass the puck over sticks on the ice. Over and over and over again, increasing the speed, always adding a new wrinkle. I loved it.”
And it no doubt explains, in part, P.K.’s masterful ability to skate, wheel and pivot and do things with the puck at top speed that so many NHL defencemen can only dream about.
“What I’ve learned about training and athletic performance is, yes, biology obviously plays a big part,” Karl Subban said. “But a lot of it is circumstance and environment. I mean, they went looking for the running gene in Jamaica and they didn’t find it. There is no running gene in Jamaica, just like there’s no hockey gene in Canada. But there’s a hard-working gene, and that’s what I’ve tried to teach to all my children.”
The book on the three hockey-playing Subbans has yet to be written, really. It’s still very much a rough draft. There’s no telling what they’ll be when each is fully formed. But the amazing thing is that, as similar as they are in so many respects—as you would expect with three brothers born within six years of each other, they share many of the same physical features and personality traits—the Subban boys are unique individuals who have travelled on their very own personal, and divergent, roads to be drafted into the NHL.
P.K. is a force of nature who just can’t help being P.K. He’s precocious, on and off the ice. Karl said P.K.’s power skating coach, Cam Brothers, once said of him, “P.K. is a lightning rod of controversy.”
“I think P.K. was eight years old when Cam said that,” cracked Karl. “Eight.”
Karl laughed some more at that. “P.K. is P.K.”
When P.K. was young, between five and seven years old, he was something of a minor hockey phenom. He could skate like an eight-year-old. Other players and parents would marvel at how a kid that age could shoot a puck into the top of the net from so far out. He played with the elite kids all the way up—Steven Stamkos, amongst others—but by the time it was his OHL draft year, he was no better than a sixth-round pick by the Belleville Bulls. Yet he surprisingly made the Bulls as a 16-year-old, playing on their power play and on the top shutdown pairing—as a rookie. Still, as talented as he was as he entered the OHL, two years later, he was not a first-round NHL draft pick, going 43rd overall to Montreal in the second round in 2007. Six years later, he collected the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenceman.
“I remember P.K. sitting in front of the computer [for the OHL draft] and all those kids being taken ahead of him, not going until [the sixth round],” Karl said. “That’s an emotionally charged situation. P.K. used it the right way. He’s still using it.”
By comparison, though, P.K.’s route to the NHL was paved with gold compared to what the more introverted middle brother, Malc
olm, experienced on his path to pro hockey. Miraculously, Malcolm didn’t start playing goal until he was 12, in major peewee. “Malcolm was the best skater of any of us,” P.K. said. “But he wasn’t a real hard-nosed physical guy. But as a skater and athlete, he’s incredible. He’s competitive in a different way. He just hates to be scored on.”
By the time Malcolm was 15 and in his OHL draft year, with only four years’ experience as a goalie, he had to wait until the 11th round to hear his name called—as fate would have it, by the same Belleville Bulls. Malcolm played midget hockey as a 16-year-old—not unusual for a goalie prospect—but even when he was 17, Belleville Bulls general manager and head coach George Burnett said, the plan was to put him in Junior A for another year because Belleville had a few other goalies ahead of him on their depth chart.
“But he came in as a 17-year-old and he outplayed the others and we made trades to make room for him,” Burnett said. “He wouldn’t give up the net. He made us play him—he was that good.”
So good, in fact, that the Boston Bruins took him 24th overall in the 2012 draft, 19 picks higher than P.K. went to Montreal.
Jordan, meanwhile, was another story entirely. Throughout his minor hockey career, the smallish defenceman, who may actually be able to outskate P.K.—and that’s saying something—was always one of the best kids, playing on the best teams. In Jordan’s draft year, 2011, Burnett completed the Subban trifecta in Belleville by drafting him fifth overall.
“If his name was Smith, not Subban, we would have taken him there,” Burnett said. “We didn’t take him because he was P.K.’s and Malcolm’s little brother. We took him because he’s a dynamic, skilled player. In his first two years in our league, Jordan outscored P.K. in P.K.’s first two years here. He’s an outstanding player and athlete. He just hasn’t grown to be the size of P.K.”
And yet, largely because Jordan was five foot nine and 175 pounds, he wasn’t taken by the Vancouver Canucks until the fourth round of the 2013 NHL draft. The scouts would tell you Jordan is the longest shot of the three Subban boys to be an NHLer, fighting a decidedly uphill battle to make it because of his size.
“Let me tell you, Jordan’s GPS is loaded,” P.K. said of his little brother, stealing his dad’s analogy. “The best thing that could’ve happened to him is people telling him he’s not going to make it, that he’s too small. That’s all he needed to hear.”
There was a telling, and poignant, moment at the 2013 draft when the three Subban boys were all together, preparing to go on TSN’s live broadcast of the draft, not long after the Canucks had ended Jordan’s agonizing wait by drafting him. During a commercial break, the Subban boys were just getting into place alongside host James Duthie when Jordan, in his Canuck jersey and hat, suddenly burst into tears. He buried his face into his hands. He was immediately comforted by his two brothers. He wiped away the tears just before the interview began. An observer watching this all unfold wondered to himself whether Jordan was crying tears of joy, relieved at being drafted, or showing a raw, emotional reaction—upset at not being taken until the fourth round.
“People don’t understand how emotionally charged the draft is,” Karl said. “Yes, Jordan cried. Malcolm cried, too, after he was drafted and he went in the first round. P.K. didn’t cry, but . . . [he wasn’t happy going in the second round]. Honestly, if you’re a kid sitting there, whether it’s the first round or the last round, you just want to hear your name called. That’s it. It’s a difficult time as a parent when you’re waiting. You want to say the right things to them; it’s difficult because there’s nothing you can say. They only want to hear their name.”
As important as his kids’ hockey is, Karl Subban, ever the teacher, is always looking for that moment where there’s a life lesson to be learned. And as Jordan waited to be drafted, along came a moment—for Karl, anyway—that transcended the entire draft and hockey.
Max Domi, the son of former NHLer Tie and a longtime friend of Jordan’s—as well as a teammate and opponent in minor hockey—had already been selected much earlier, in the first round, by the Phoenix Coyotes. But immediately after Max had finished with his media obligations and met the Phoenix management, Max came up into the seats and sat alongside his pal Jordan for moral support. Finally, the Canucks took Jordan in the fourth round, and relief washed all over the Subbans.
“That was such a grown-up thing for a kid like Max to do,” Karl said. “Imagine that. It was Max’s day. He went in the first round. But he thought of Jordan and came to be with him. Parents are always trying to teach their kids the right values, you want them to be humble and thankful and considerate and to give back to others who need help and support. What Max did there . . . what a great example for Jordan and my boys to see it. So, yes, Jordan cried . . . there was a lot of emotion there.”
While there were no words Karl or Maria could say to Jordan as he waited to hear his name called, the father/teacher/trainer most certainly had some perspective for Jordan after the fact.
“I’ve been around hockey a long time, and one of the things that is hard to see is someone’s potential, even for the best scouts in the world,” Karl Subban said. “You can’t tell Jordan he’s not going to make the NHL. Just don’t even bother, because he’s not having it. We don’t get too caught up in what other people see in our children. Jordan believes in himself. There’s lot there for him to improve upon. Size is his prize, but he has a desire to achieve and be successful. He has lots of fire in him.
“It’s not really any different for P.K. or Malcolm. You have to listen to what people say, you have to be open to ideas and opinions. I try to be objective about my children. But if people say P.K. can’t play defence, if P.K. believes that, those people will be right. Your kids are always going to get criticized by someone. That’s part of the game. People say all sorts of things about P.K.—who he is, making judgments on what kind of person he is, making a diagnosis from afar when they don’t even really know him. If they were all doctors, they’d be charged with malpractice.” He laughs.
“I’ve always believed that before you become a master mechanic, you have to be an apprentice, so you can’t get too hung up on labels. Experts are wrong a lot of the time. Scouts are wrong a lot of the time. Scouting is a fascinating thing. It’s a very difficult job. I have nothing but respect for the scouts who work so hard at it. But Malcolm was an 11th-round pick into the OHL, a first-rounder in the NHL. P.K. was a sixth-round pick in the OHL, a second-rounder in the NHL. P.K. won a Norris Trophy. So, good or bad, don’t get too hung up on labels or what other people say about you. Yesterday’s achievement is yesterday’s glory. You can’t tell Jordan he won’t make it to the NHL. Who knows, maybe he only gets as far as the AHL, but he’s on his path and journey and what he does will determine how far he goes, not what round he was drafted in or whether someone thinks he’s too small.”
No one in the Subban family worries too much about Jordan. His brothers and parents know him better than those who size him up, and what they know is that he’s the most competitive member of the entire family, that it’s a mistake to underestimate the youngest Subban boy, the smallest Subban boy.
“Put it this way,” P.K. said. “If there are six slices of pizza and our family of seven is sitting around the table, Jordan can’t tell you the one person who won’t get a slice, but he can tell you the one who will get one. It’s Jordan. Every time . . . people look at Jordan’s size and they don’t get him. Honestly, he can squat more [weight] than me, he lifts more than me—not in the bench press, but in everything else. He sprints better than me, he has a fire in him like you can’t believe. He wants [to make it to the NHL] more than me and Malcolm, and believe me, me and Malcolm really want it. But Jordan is on another level.”
As similar as his boys are, Karl knows there is much that is different about them. Not that there are many days when all three are in the house at the same time anymore, but if they are, Dad can prett
y much predict what they’ll be doing.
P.K., Karl said, will be watching video of his games. In the summer, he reviews every game from the previous NHL season—the good, the bad, the ugly—and breaks it all down. If not a game tape, then Don Cherry’s Rock’em Sock’em videos. P.K. can never get enough hockey.
Malcolm, the most introspective of the three, might be likely to go off on his own, teaching himself how to play guitar or chilling and playing a video game—maybe Call of Duty. P.K. said he didn’t even know Malcolm could play the guitar until, to P.K.’s surprise, he heard him playing and singing a song.
Jordan is the outgoing imp of the bunch, the one who’ll grab his mom’s laundry basket, turn it on its end to make it into a goal in the hallway, use a rolled-up sock as a puck and anything he can get his hands on as a stick and play his own version of floor hockey, all the while calling play-by-play. Karl is convinced Jordan has the best hockey hands of the bunch, in large part of because of his extensive mini-stick prowess, which he’s taken to another level as a shootout specialist with the OHL Bulls. When he was very young, Jordan would have the whole family laughing hysterically at his preoccupation with mimicking an NHL referee, including blowing a shrill whistle, sliding across the kitchen floor and calling penalties on the rest of the family.
Getting three boys to the NHL would be a grand achievement for any family. Karl Subban would never minimize that; he well knows the odds of putting one son in the NHL, never mind three. But he’s probably more gratified at what his kids have learned on their journey to pro hockey than the achievement of just being there. In other words, whatever niche the three Subban boys carve for themselves in the professional hockey world, having all three influenced and mentored by Bulls GM and head coach Burnett is the real payoff for Mom and Dad.