Hockey Confidential (17 page)

By his minor bantam year, Connor McDavid had already made enough of a name for himself that Reebok Hockey (RBK), the sports equipment manufacturer that has endorsement deals with Sidney Crosby, Pavel Datsyuk and countless other NHL superstars, came calling. Connor had been identified by RBK as a “key influencer,” which is the corporate euphemism for “rising star.”

The equipment companies give these “key influencers” free equipment and sticks. They want these high-profile athletes wearing and exposing their brand, as well as developing brand loyalty at an early age. The parents of “key influencers” merely breathe a sigh of relief: they no longer have to pay for sticks and equipment, which is extremely costly in hockey. For the minor hockey player, what's not to like about getting the latest and best gear, and all of it for free?

But it does come with a price. Other players and families who aren't “key influencers” take notice. It can put a spotlight on a young player sooner than perhaps it should. And while the free equipment comes with no real strings attached—it's low-risk, low-cost investment spending for the equipment company—it can skew perspectives and expectations at a time when nothing goes unnoticed in the green-eyed world of minor hockey.

If getting free equipment didn't set Connor McDavid apart from the other kids, getting attention from player agents did. Like RBK, the agents recognized that McDavid was a precocious hockey talent. At the age of 12, the McDavids were being contacted by prominent player agencies that represented superstar NHL talent.

“We had agents knocking on the door, and while we were flattered by it, we never got too wound up about it,” Brian McDavid said. “We just said, ‘Connor is only 12 years old. There's nothing we need to do about this right now.'”

Change was the operative word for the McDavids in the 2009–10 season. Bearing in mind he was only 12—and not 13, like those he was playing with and against—there was a lot to process, on and off the ice.

In his minor bantam year—his Grade 7 year at school—Connor not only left his hometown York-Simcoe Express of the residency-based Ontario Minor Hockey Association to play for the vaunted Toronto Marlboros of the Greater Toronto Hockey League—which required a bureaucratic battle to get through Ontario Hockey Federation transfer regulations—he also switched schools, leaving Clearmeadow Public School in Newmarket to attend PEAC School for Elite Athletes in Toronto. PEAC is a private school that combines academics and daily sport-specific training. So if, like Connor, you're a hockey player, then your curriculum includes being on the ice every day at school, and in the gym doing off-ice hockey training daily, while also attending your academic classes. All of this in addition to playing AAA hockey after school for the Marlies, who on average would have two games and three practices per week.

“I was on the ice five times a week with the Marlies, but those were games and practices,” Connor said. “There's not a lot of time for skill development, so being on the ice every day at PEAC, that really helped me.”

Because he was going to school and playing hockey in Toronto, not at home in Newmarket, there wasn't the same free time to set up Camp McDavid in the driveway.

“That had always been Connor's way of getting his skill development,” Brian said, “so being on the ice at PEAC kind of replaced being on the driveway. He was still getting skill development, which was important to him.”

There were many long days, though. Connor would leave his Newmarket home at 7:15 a.m. to go to school in Toronto. His grandparents would pick up Connor and some Marlie teammates who also attended PEAC and drop them off at the rink for their Marlie practice. Brian, who was helping out as an assistant coach on the Marlies, would meet Connor at practice and drive him home. From start to finish, it was often close to a 12-hour day for Connor. And then he would have to do his homework once he got home.

“PEAC was a really positive experience for Connor,” his mother, Kelly, said.

But the same couldn't be always said for his first year playing hockey in the GTHL.

Maybe, in part, it was to be expected. The experts on physiology will tell you the physical differences between kids the same age, at 12 or 13, are greater than at any other age. It's a time when some kids have gone through puberty and others haven't. Go to a peewee or minor bantam game, and the physical maturation gap between players of the same age is greater than at any other time in the development cycle. Sizewise, it often looks like men against boys.

“In the 1996 age group, people were aware of who [1997-born] Connor was, so when he went [to the GTHL], there were a lot of expectations,” Brian said. “But Connor hadn't grown like other kids, so minor bantam was a very tough year.”

“It was a horrible year,” Kelly added. “At the time, I thought we made a mistake.”

Connor had gone to the Marlies because he wanted to play with and against better competition. Brian wanted him to play on a team where his dad wasn't the head coach, although he was still there as an assistant. But it was such a difficult year, they had to ask themselves whether Connor was in the right spot, whether it was still prudent for him to be playing against kids a year older.

“Connor and I would always talk at the end of each year to discuss whether to carry on in the 1996 group,” Brian said. “We relied on those conversations more than any feedback we were hearing from other people.”

Still, the McDavids knew there were skeptics, but Connor was already demonstrating a trait that so many great hockey players employ: using the negativity and/or doubts of others as fuel to drive him. So, confident he would bounce back, Connor stayed the course; the 1997-born kid continued in major bantam and minor midget to thrive and excel and dominate against the 1996-born class.

Connor's speed and skill, as well his high hockey IQ and ability to process the game, were eye-popping, off the charts. He was becoming the talk of the hockey town in Toronto minor hockey circles.

In the summer of 2010, when Connor was 13, one of his hockey instructors at PEAC, Joe Quinn, was working a summer hockey camp. Quinn told player agent Darren Ferris about Connor McDavid and Connor was invited to skate at a mini-camp for clients of the Orr Hockey Group, an agency that, of course, is headed up by Hall of Fame defenceman Bobby Orr.

“I was in the stands, watching the kids skate—they're doing drills—and I'm looking at this kid, he's not nearly as big as some of the others,” Orr recollected of his first time seeing McDavid on the ice. “I said to someone, ‘What is
that?
' That's exactly what I said. ‘What is
that?
' His hands, the way he skated, the way he could flip and handle the puck, he was incredible. . . . They said to me, ‘Do you know how old he is?' He was 13.”

Bobby Orr shook his head with a degree of amazement, which is funny if you think about it. Orr was only 14 years old when he left his home in Parry Sound, Ontario, to star for the Junior A Oshawa Generals. Fourteen. Exceptional and then some. And there was no panel of evaluators to bestow any official status on him.

“They found me by mistake in a playoff game I was playing in Gananoque,” Orr said. “The Generals were there watching. No one would ever come to Parry Sound to scout. It's different today.”

So different.

Connor McDavid's hockey IQ extends off the ice, too. He's finely tuned to who's done what on their path to get to the NHL. For the longest time, he envisioned himself going off to Shattuck-St. Mary's prep school in Minnesota at age 14 or 15, just like Sidney Crosby did. But after he saw John Tavares blaze the exceptional-player trail from the GTHL's Toronto Marlies to the OHL in 2005, he knew he wanted to do the same.

In the summer of 2011, when Connor was 14, he was invited back to the Orr Hockey Group summer camp. Not long after that, in time for the start of his minor midget season with the Marlies, Connor McDavid had himself an agent.

The McDavids went with the Orr Hockey Group. If anyone could understand the journey Connor was embarking on, it was Bobby Orr. There was also the familiarity of having been to two Orr Hockey Group summer camps. But Connor was set on getting exceptional player status and early admission to the OHL for the 2012–13 season, the same as defenceman Aaron Ekblad had just gotten for the 2011–12 season. Connor and Aaron had been friends dating back to their time as teammates on a spring tournament team in peewee. McDavid wanted to follow in Ekblad's footsteps.

“That was important to us,” Brian McDavid said. “[Orr Hockey] had been through it with Aaron Ekblad the year before, and that's what Connor wanted, too. We didn't really go through the whole interviewing process with all the other agents. Bobby was our guy.”

Connor had an outstanding minor midget year. He was the best player on the best minor midget team in the province. He went through the same evaluation process as Tavares and Ekblad; he had Paul Dennis come out to the house to compile the psychological and sociological profile of him and his family, but there was never any doubt. Hockey Canada deemed him exceptional and he became the first-overall pick in the 2012 OHL draft, going to the struggling Otters franchise in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The summer before he started in the OHL, McDavid got to do something he'd never really done: play with and against kids his own age. The top 14-year-olds in the country are assembled annually each summer in Toronto for the Allstate All-Canadian Mentorship program, an event headed up by the NHL Players' Association. NHL superstars—in 2012, it was John Tavares and Taylor Hall—act as mentors to the gifted bantam-aged players who learn, train and compete in an intense five-day camp.

In addition to measuring himself against players his own age—McDavid led Team Tavares to victory over Team Hall—he got to spend time with Tavares, pick his brain on what it's like to go through the exceptional-player process and size up the challenges that lay ahead.

“He was great,” Connor said. “It was good to speak to someone who had been through it. It made me realize there's a lot of hard work to be done.”

A lot of hard work; many lofty goals to be realized.

“Connor has always been different that way,” Brian McDavid said. “He's driven to reach goals he sets for himself. Originally, his goal was to leave home at 14 and play at Shattuck, the same as Sidney. Then it was to get exceptional status, be drafted No. 1 into the OHL and play as a 15-year-old. He wants to win a Memorial Cup. He wants to play for Team Canada at the World Junior Championship as a 16-year-old and win a [world junior] gold medal. He wants to be the first-overall pick in the NHL [in 2015], win a Stanley Cup and have a Hall of Fame career. He's had these goals for a long time. He's always known what he wants.”

And getting exceptional status was the first leap on the 15-year-old's quest to turn those dreams and goals into reality.

•   •   •

It was November 8, 2012, the date of a Subway Super Series
game in Guelph, Ontario, between OHL stars auditioning to play for Team Canada at the World Junior Championship and a team of Russian stars.

Fifteen-year-old first-year OHLer Connor McDavid was in the lineup against the Russians, and while he showed a couple of brilliant flashes in the game and there was no denying the phenomenal skill set and long-range potential, Hockey Canada wasn't taking a still physically immature 15-year-old to its national junior team camp in December. In a postgame interview on TSN, the Hockey Insider was asked about McDavid and said pretty much all of that, noting his time would come, that he would likely play in two or three WJCs and observing that he was the early favourite to be the first player taken in the 2015 NHL draft, although a lot could happen in two or three years.

It wasn't so much a throwaway line at the end as it was a recognition that NHL scouts love to extol the virtues of 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds in their non-draft years, but the longer they watch a player play junior, the more likely they are to pick apart his game in his draft year and fall in love with new flavours of the day who haven't been in the spotlight nearly as long. The Insider was thinking in particular of Tavares. By the time he got to his draft year, after four OHL seasons, the scouts were shredding Tavares's game, questioning whether he could skate well enough to be an “elite” or “franchise” player in the NHL. He still ended up going first overall, but Tavares's draft year was rife with negativity; it was as if the scales were being balanced after years of unbridled enthusiasm and accolades for his talents.

The Insider didn't think too much of his comment about McDavid as he made it, but he woke up the next day to see it had become something of an issue on Twitter:

Connor Crisp
@Connorcrispp

@TSNBobMcKenzie say lot can happen in 2 years about @cmcdavid97 implying he may not shine in the future, best player in the #OHL at age 15 #FIO. 9:47 a.m. • 9 Nov 2012