How relationships between NHL players have taken a turn over the years

It happened to me twice in my previous life as a hockey player: once as a 19-year-old junior with the Vernon Vipers and once as an NCAA player a couple years later.

A coach would call me into his office and, almost sheepishly, ask that I turn up the dial on being my typically unserious self in the dressing room. One of them may or may not have asked me to, “Y’know, be your usual clown self.” Both times it happened, our team was in a crisis, as all hockey teams are at some point every season, and I was never exactly sure how to handle the request. 

Walk in the room and juggle?

Truth is, I was perceived as someone who played hard but didn’t see the game as life or death, and held himself accordingly. I made small talk with friends on other teams between whistles, and that habit came to a head one specific game when I was with the University of Alaska Anchorage, playing against Minnesota State University at Mankato. 

My former teammate of two years and good friend, Chad Brownlee — now a country music celebrity — was with Mankato, and we had won a junior championship together a couple of years prior, with Vernon. He played defence and I was a right winger, so we lined up beside each other at a faceoff in the offensive zone.

“Browns, what’s happenin’?”

Crickets. 

“Oh, we’re being super serious, are we?”

Not even a glance. 

So I declared “ANKLE.” And a second later when the puck dropped, I chopped him directly across the ankle to pay back the slight.

But Brownlee never broke, and I knew he wouldn’t, and I expected (correctly) that he wasn’t going to extend me any courtesies were I to try to post up in front of his net to screen a goalie and tip a puck. He intended to battle me the same way he did anyone else, plus a little extra after the chop.

Later that same game, I was skating back down the ice after losing a race to beat out an icing, and came up alongside future St. Louis Blues captain David Backes. Few people I’ve ever played against did as much macho grumbling and brooding, and he pursued success like a wild dog after a bone.

I don’t remember specifically what I said, but it would’ve been some variation of, “Jesus, man, settle down, it’s just hockey.” That stuff occasionally breaks guys down, and for non-tough guys like myself, I’m guessing these conversations were subconsciously an attempt to bring my opponent’s intensity down. I would get guys to break down and laugh, or complain about their coaches, or at least engage in conversation.

In that moment, Backes growled and glove-on decked me, which seemed to be his preferred solution to most problems. He was a big fella, you may recall.

From that nothing moment, I took a pretty clear message that I wasn’t going to break him down. The feel from playing someone that intense, competitive and almost cartoonishly serious was … “Well, this is gonna suck.” I was inevitably going to take some extra whacks.

There was not going to be any light conversation in the scrums, loose pucks were going to be contested by someone who’d rather die than let me have the thing, and it just made the rink an unfun place to be. 

It’s here I want to clarify that I truly did care, and tried my ass off. And when the games got big, my attempts at starting these flippant conversations died off entirely. 

But midseason, boy, I found it hard to fake the passion.

I like to think I led my team in other ways — and my coaches did too, as I regularly wore a letter — but these two guys I was playing were big-C Captains. Brownlee of that university team at Mankato, and Backes, eventually in the NHL. 

Which brings me to a couple of recent NHL stories, neither of which was a big deal, neither of which was a massive sin, but both of which do speak to a shift in the relationships between NHL players. 

In the first, you had the Flyers’ Joel Farabee ask the Maple Leafs’ Connor Dewar for a fight (as he felt his home crowd’s energy was too low), which played out with a good scrap, and a thank you to the very passionate Dewar in the penalty box. Then, at intermission, Farabee was effusive in his praise of Dewar, thanking him for taking the fight again, and talking about what a good guy he is. 

In the next, we saw Utah’s Alex Kerfoot line up to take a draw versus Florida’s Sam Reinhart, and Kerfoot says, “Love ya, baby,” before puck drop. A mic’d-up Reinhart laughs and says, “Say it into the mic,” which Kerfoot confirms he’s already done. After Kerfoot cleans out Reinhart on the draw, the Panthers forward says, “Love ya a little less.” It’s a fun exchange, and a quick Google shows the two played hockey together in the Greater Vancouver when they were kids. 

That’s great, I love it.

On the same night as the Kerfoot-Reinhart exchange — which, again, is harmless and fun — the Vancouver Canucks were playing the Washington Capitals, which was a true Hockey Game.

The Caps’ Tom Wilson and Canucks’ J.T. Miller were all over one another, in each other’s faces after every whistle, and chirping each other verbally when physically wasn’t an option. Washington’s Pierre-Luc Dubois was chasing around Vancouver’s Quinn Hughes, causing problems, and the temperature of the game was through the roof. It was a great game, with a great finish. It was tough not to admire the passion with which some of those guys pushed, and it was smack in the middle of the year’s schedule against a non-conference opponent.

Over the years, I’ve come to regret the way I held myself on the ice, to some extent. I think I’d have had a better career had I taken it more seriously, and had I been harder on opponents rather than making friends. Part of that has come from becoming a professional hockey analyst and coming to truly appreciate the value of passion and nastiness.

One of Sidney Crosby’s defining characteristics is his competitive fire, where you know he’d cut out your throat to win another Stanley Cup. Nathan MacKinnon has been framed as a borderline psychopath for his competitiveness, but it works because he wins. Mark Stone is the same. 

Brad Marchand, Matthew Tkachuk and even some pure-skill guys such as Nikita Kucherov play with excessive amounts of attitude, where they take the game to your face. I don’t see Connor McDavid taking too many games for granted either, and he’s dragged his team within a breath of the Stanley Cup.

I can stop with the names because if you follow hockey, you understand what I mean and agree that passion and a take-no-prisoners attitude are valued attributes, and always have been. 

But if the league has shifted more toward the way I used to hold myself, and I think it has, it would raise the value of maintaining that “no friends on the ice” attitude.

Back when my dad played, the players mostly knew the players from their hometowns and their current teammates. There are, of course, exceptions, but even from listening to my co-host Nick Kypreos, it was a more segmented league before technology and the ease of travel shrunk the world. Players now simply know more other players.

“Us” against “them” is harder when guys don’t see “us” as their team, but the “us” is “We’re all NHL players.” Each off-season, players pool in about a dozen pockets around the world to train with one another. Minor hockey teams are less frequently pooled by region as they are by travel teams, where the good players get grouped together younger than ever. Combine that with the ubiquity of phones and tech (and NHL events), and these guys all have each other’s numbers, and most players know at least a dozen-plus guys on every team they play.

As much as Brownlee tried, it’s tough to snarl at a friend in a regular-season game, and he and I laughed about the moment post-game, where he relented that he almost laughed after the slash.

For those who can keep the snarl and say, “F-U, the puck is mine and I don’t care what happens to you in the process of me getting it,” even to guys they know, it’s a huge advantage. In the regular season, after teams are formed and well before the most meaningful games, any little bit of extra juice can make the difference between a win and a loss, and that seems to be where “will and want” persevere over “skill and hope.”

One of our most-played audio drops on Real Kyper and Bourne is Brad May saying: “I’d fight my mom to win the Cup.” 

Well, I wouldn’t fight mine. She’s a lovely lady, and I wouldn’t want to hurt her.

Brad May has a Stanley Cup. 

I don’t. 

There are many reasons but competitiveness is certainly a piece of it, and teams who have players who feel like May might just get their wish, and without having to fight family. 

They just have to fight their friends. 

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