Koltsov played for the Belarusian national team at the 2002 and 2010 Olympics and also played three seasons with the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League from 2002 and 2006.

New Delhi: Belarusian former ice hockey player Konstantin Koltsov, who is also the boyfriend of tennis player Aryna Sabalenka, has died at the age of 42, Russian club Salavat Yulaev said in a statement.

Koltsov played for the Belarusian national team at the 2002 and 2010 Olympics and also played three seasons with the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League from 2002 and 2006.

“It is with deep sadness that we inform you that Salavat Yulaev’s coach, Konstantin Koltsov, has passed away,” Salavat Yulaev, based in the Russian city of Ufa, said in the statement.

“He was a strong and cheerful person, he was loved and respected by players, colleagues and fans. Konstantin Evgenievich forever wrote himself into the history of our club.

The game was already won when the puck slid to Cody Hodgson for the tap-in.

The Milwaukee Admirals of the American Hockey League, the Nashville Predators’ top minor league affiliate, had a comfortable 3-0 lead over the Chicago Wolves. On a historic win streak — they were en route to their 18th consecutive victory — the Admirals juggled their lines.

Off of a rush chance in the final minute, Predators prospect Juuso Pärssinen pulled off a slick toe-drag deke and waited patiently for a lane to open up. Then he feathered a perfect pass to Hodgson for the goal.

As the Wolves goaltender broke his stick against the post, Hodgson’s Admirals teammates mobbed him. Captain Kevin Gravel went to the net front to retrieve the puck. Netminder Yaroslav Askarov skated nearly the length of the ice to celebrate with his teammates.

And as the seemingly over-the-top celebration for a 4-0 goal unfolded, Hodgson didn’t think about the 2,920 days that had elapsed since he last scored a goal in a professional hockey game.

Hodgson didn’t think about the mysterious illness that caused him to walk away from the game. Or the tests for lung cancer, brain cancer and liver cancer that he’d endured in a fruitless quest to figure out what was making him sick.

He wasn’t thinking about the months of on-ice work and yoga and a grueling weight-loss regimen that led him to this point.

He wasn’t even feeling the blunt soreness of the broken rib he had sustained in his first professional game after his long layoff.

All he was thinking about was the gimme pass he’d just received.

“If I hadn’t scored on that one,” Hodgson joked, “I might’ve had to shut it down.”

Back in the locker room, Gravel gave the puck to Admirals equipment trainers and an informal debate broke out about what to write on the tape that’s commonly used to wrap milestone pucks in hockey.

“That was the joke in the room when we gave him the puck. ‘What do we call this?’ I suggested ‘Second First Pro Goal,’ but we were laughing about it after the game,” Gravel said.

“First goal in a very, very long time,” was another suggestion, but it was too many words.

So Hodgson posed with an unwrapped game puck.

If the milestone was undefined, it was still significant.

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As a younger man, Hodgson had been one of the NHL’s brightest young stars. He was a top-10 draft pick of the Vancouver Canucks and set scoring records on a line with Toronto Maple Leafs superstar John Tavares at the World Junior Hockey Championship. For a time, he was one of the highest-rated prospects in the sport.

His professional career, however, was set back by injuries early, including a bulging disc in his back that he sustained during the season he turned 20. He was eventually productive in Vancouver, but struggled to cement himself in the lineup. At the 2013 NHL trade deadline, Hodgson was dealt to the Buffalo Sabres in a surprising trade. In Buffalo, Hodgson quickly became one of Buffalo’s most productive forwards, leading the club in scoring in the 2013-14 campaign, after which he signed a six-year, $25 million contract.

Suddenly, however, Hodgson’s career derailed. Following up on the 20-goal, 44-point season that secured Hodgson that big extension, he managed just 13 points the next year. He was becoming conscious of repetitive muscle strain and shortness of breath. He was fighting for his career, and battling through an illness that appeared to be worsening.

Bought out by the Sabres, Hodgson caught on with the Predators. And his symptoms worsened.

“It’s a scary feeling waking up in the middle of the night and your lungs aren’t working and you can’t breathe in,” Hodgson said. “Your body is shaking, you get super hot, you can’t stand up without passing out. I was on about five different medications for blood pressure, and muscle relaxants, everything you can name.

“I knew there was no way I could possibly play.”

In addition to the extreme susceptibility to temperature and struggles breathing, Hodgson was dealing with repeated muscle strains.

“I couldn’t shoot, my mechanics weren’t the same, my skating was stiff,” he said. “I couldn’t turn, I’d torn all these muscles in my neck, and below my shoulders, and throughout my whole body, and for no reason. The muscles were just tearing.”

“He was skating with me in the summer, but he would be really sick,” said Brad Wheeler, Hodgson’s longtime trainer and coach. “He’d say stuff like, ‘I can’t hold a hockey stick,’ or ‘I can’t skate,’ or ‘I feel like I’m going to die.’”

By December of his sixth professional season, Hodgson was out of the NHL. By January he was out of professional hockey entirely.

Hodgson, with the Predators’ support at the time, furiously searched for the cause of his muscle issues, shortness of breath and liver problems. In the process, he was tested for brain cancer, lung cancer and liver cancer.

Eventually, Hodgson decided to get tested for malignant hyperthermia, a genetic disorder that various members of Hodgson’s family had contended with in the past — although not to this extent.

For most patients, malignant hyperthermia presents as an adverse reaction to general anesthetia. About 50 percent of those afflicted, however, including Hodgson, are also susceptible to exertion-induced reactions.

These reactions can be extreme, as they were in Hodgson’s case. The symptoms that presented sabotaged his ability to play professional hockey. At the time he was dealing with rhabdomyolysis, a type of muscle breakdown in which damaged tissue releases proteins and electrolytes into the blood that attack various organs.

“There was always an understanding among our family that if I had a car accident or got hurt on the ice, and couldn’t speak for myself, that I’d already let people around me know that I couldn’t use general anesthesia,” Hodgson said. “Trainers all knew, my teams all knew, my circle knew I had this thing that would matter if I had to go in for surgery, but we never put it all together.”

Once the source of Hodgson’s illness was identified, it was clear that he would have to retire.

It was a tough blow, but also a relief, given that many doctors who initially treated him suspected the source of his ailments might be terminal.

“Knowing I couldn’t play hockey sucked, but in the grand scheme of things, I knew that people deal with way worse,” Hodgson said.

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For eight years, Hodgson was mostly away from the game. He was able to live a normal life, closely monitoring his exercise levels while working with the Predators organization in their Learn to Play program and building a career in real estate. He got involved in the RYR-1 Foundation to try and use his story to educate folks about his disease.

Publicly, Hodgson would occasionally give interviews and describe himself as lucky and at peace.

For those who knew him best, however, the way it had all ended was still a source of real pain. That desire to compete, to still play hockey, wasn’t extinguished.

“When he got the test and they found out what it was, that killed him,” said Wheeler. “That’s all he ever wanted to do: play hockey.

“He’s been sad for eight years. … He’d go to the park on a Saturday night and just shoot pucks at the local rink, just pushing the local guys. He’s just so passionate about it”

Occasionally, Hodgson would play. With some close monitoring of his creatine kinase (CK) levels, he was able to work out and attend an on-ice session once a week, often with Wheeler and his NHL clients — a group that, in the summer, includes NHL-level players such as Dylan and Ryan Strome and Mark Giordano.

Hodgson would push it on occasion. In at least one of those instances, his symptoms returned so harshly that he was hospitalized.

Then last summer, something flipped.

In May, Hodgson moved back to Ontario. His brother had just had a child and his sister was pregnant.

Going home to Canada, however, brought him close to the game he loved.

“It sounds kind of crazy, but everything kind of switched this summer,” Hodgson said. “My body started being able to respond to physical activity. I was going out with buddies and playing some hockey and I noticed that I could keep pushing it. Normally, when I skate, even in the summers just for fun, my body would have some of the symptoms I’d have when I was playing.

“Suddenly I realized I could respond a lot better. I didn’t need to shut it down right away, the same way I used to.”

Hodgson consulted with his doctors, including the University of Toronto’s Dr. Sheila Riazi, a leading academic anesthesiologist who has focused her research efforts on understanding malignant hyperthermia.

In consultation with his physician, Hodgson got the green light to monitor his symptoms and health while ramping up his exercise levels.

Through caution and some trial and error, an appropriate method of managing his illness was found, although he’s still under the close observation of his physician and gets his CK levels tested weekly.

“I got a little excited,” Hodgson said. “I’m always cautious, but I always told myself that if I had the ability to play I’d at least try.”

Hodgson started skating more regularly, first one session a week. Then two or three. And then three or four.

He put the call out to old teammates and pro-level players asking for an invite to their summer scrimmages. He’d join alumni games hosted by former NHL superstars like Eric Lindros, just looking for reps.

By early August, Hodgson was beginning to think about a comeback. And that’s when he enlisted the help of Wheeler.

“What is it going to take, Wheels?” he asked.

Wheeler told him, “You can do it if you want to.”

Hodgson called Wheeler “a driving force” in his training.

The first thing he insisted Hodgson do? Drop 40 pounds.

“In this business everything is first impressions,” Wheeler said.

Hodgson traveled to Florida for a noninvasive procedure called a disc seal to strengthen his back, an injury that had troubled him on occasion in his playing career. And then he went about shedding 40 pounds in two months, going from about 235 to under 200.

“Once I had a goal, a bigger purpose, it seemed to melt off,” Hodgson said. “I changed a lot of my eating habits, sleep patterns to give me more energy.”

Despite his sensitivity to severe temperature changes, Hodgson found a way to integrate cold tub recovery into his regimen. He got deeply into yoga, Wim Hof breathing exercises and various stretches to target his muscles. And in the early fall, he headed back to Ontario to work with Wheeler.

“Before, the harder I worked, the more my body broke down,” Hodgson said. “Now it’s completely flipped. Now the more I work the better I get, the more confident I get.”

Despite some early trepidation from his family, they “got on the bandwagon.” And Wheeler, familiar with the work rate of NHL players given his star-studded roster of clients, put Hodgson through the ringer.

“If he isn’t sick and hurting after those skates, he’ll never be sick and hurting,” Wheeler said. “I pushed him so hard that anybody else might quit hockey. And his body didn’t hurt. He didn’t feel bad. His muscles were good.”

By December, Hodgson was ready to get into game situations. The feeling was that there wasn’t much he could do to improve any further by simply training. He had to find a team.

Hodgson asked former NHL head coach Terry Crisp how to structure a professional tryout, how to manage his expectations, how to target getting back in the game.

He offered to pay his own way to practice with a minor league team in an effort to earn a professional tryout. His contacts put the word out, and Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported about Hodgson’s attempted comeback on “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Hodgson was overwhelmed by the response. He began hearing from old friends, former general managers and experienced hockey people offering advice. And eventually the call came in from a Predators organization that Hodgson knew well, offering him a spot on a tryout deal with the Admirals.

“(Admirals general manager) Scott Nichol, when I called him, I think he was a little bit skeptical to get that call at midseason,” Hodgson said. “I told him that I’d been training for a while and I’d love to get a chance, even if it’s just to come practice with them, then if they thought I could help the team they could sign me to a PTO.

“For him to take a chance like that and then push to put me on this team, it’s something I want to reward their faith in for sure.”

Hodgson showed up, 33 years old, eight years removed from his most recent professional game, with off-the-shelf gear and 10-year-old skates, and earned a spot. The club signed him to a professional tryout and had him take warmups before he actually made his AHL re-debut.

With his brother and brother-in-law in attendance, Hodgson stepped onto a professional ice sheet. And in the very first period of his very first game back, Hodgson broke a rib and bruised a lung.

“Yeah, I was hoping it would go a bit smoother,” Hodgson said with a laugh.

“I played the rest of that game,” Hodgson said. “I moved some equipment around and then I played the next one. By the third game, I was having trouble breathing. So at first I thought, I just got back and I probably triggered this thing, but my CK levels were low, we tested everything. It was fine. … It was just a broken rib.”

Hodgson was concerned he would get cut.

The Admirals, however, were impressed by his toughness. Hodgson was just the kind of veteran they wanted to complement their young players.

Once he was cleared to return, however, the Admirals were on a double digit win streak. When The Athletic caught up with Hodgson in Winnipeg in mid-February, he was a healthy scratch.

“Our team is playing great, everyone is performing, so I understand it,” he said. “But when I get my chance again, I’ll be ready.”

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Hodgson’s chance arrived five days later, the game in the Chicago suburbs when he scored his first professional goal in eight years. Two days later, he was in the lineup again and scored again — this time off the rush, a goal that showed real speed and skill.

“I don’t know how he’s doing it,” said Gravel of his teammate’s form after so many years away. “But we’re lucky to have him and he’s helped us out a ton.”

The next day, in the second leg of a back-to-back, Hodgson dressed again and scored again, extending his goal-scoring streak to three games. The game after that, he scored twice.

“He told me he feels like he’s 17,” Wheeler said. “He feels better and faster than ever. And every game I watch, he’s getting better every shift.”

And he’s back to doing what he loves.

“It’s just nice to be back in the rhythm of things,” Hodgson said. “You feel good when you’re scoring, but I want to keep going. A four-game scoring streak is great, but I want to keep pushing the envelope.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: left, Jen Fuller / Getty; other photos, courtesy Milwaukee Admirals)

It looked for a while that the game between the Philadelphia Flyers and Ottawa Senators on March 5, 2004, might come and go without incident.

That was a bit surprising because eight days earlier, Ottawa’s Martin Havlat whacked the Flyers’ Mark Recchi in the face with his stick and afterward, heated words and insinuations flew. The Flyers were irate about the play and Havlat was suspended two games.

“Someday someone’s going to make (Havlat) eat his lunch,” Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock said.

“It might not come from our team,” Recchi said, “but he better protect himself.”

In the rematch, though, the first 58 minutes passed quietly as the Flyers built a multi-goal lead on the way to a 5-3 victory. But those last minutes were anything but quiet. And when it was over, officials tallied up a record number for penalty minutes in an NHL game (419) that still stands.

Another lasting outcome from that night: New league rules were implemented for the start of the 2005-06 season, the first after a lockout killed the 2004-05 season. Players who instigated a fight with fewer than five minutes to go were given a one-game suspension and the coaches of those players would be fined $10,000.

Twenty years later, fights in the waning minutes of games are almost non-existent. Here’s how it all went down.

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Senators forward Martin Havlat, speaking about the previous game that started it all: I had a forearm into Mark Recchi. I don’t think I hit his face, but I hit him for sure. I kind of lost it a little bit, so I got suspended for two games. My first game back after the suspension was of course in Philly. (Hitchcock) said someone would make me eat my lunch, right? I remember that quote.

Flyers forward John LeClair: That’s what started it, obviously. Nobody forgets that kind of stuff.

Flyers forward Mark Recchi: I remember Havlat got suspended, and they suspended him (two) games and we played them the (third). (League disciplinarian) Colin Campbell did a good job there.

Flyers goalie Robert Esche: There was bad blood going in.

Senators forward Daniel Alfredsson: We talked about it, but we didn’t think anything was going to escalate to that extent. Would something happen? Probably.

Havlat: I remember being in Philly the day before and I was sick. I wasn’t feeling well. I was like, “If I call in sick and don’t show up, everyone is going to think that I’m a loser and I’m scared.” I wasn’t feeling well, but I knew I had to play.

The first fight takes place at 18:15 of the third period, when respective tough guys Donald Brashear of the Flyers and Rob Ray of the Senators drop the gloves. Other fights broke out during the stoppage, including goalies Robert Esche (Flyers) and Patrick Lalime (Senators).

Esche: Brash had it made up in his head how that night was going to go. He went up and down the ice and then he started fighting (Rob Ray). It was a good fight. Brash was doing a great job. Everybody is kind of watching the fight … and then all hell broke loose.

Flyers forward Donald Brashear: Like any other game where guys’ emotions run up,  you want to make something happen or you want to get respect back. Something had to be done. I fought Ray a few times. He was a good fighter. He was doing his job and I was doing mine, and we both tried to do the best we can. Sometimes it gets ugly, but that’s the name of the game.

Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock: Everybody knew how tough Brash was but I always thought that Brash was a way better player than people thought. Way better. … I thought he was really a dependable player that could manage the puck and manage the game properly. I had a lot of trust in Donald.

Senators forward Rob Ray: If I remember correctly it was just us battling in front of the net. And then it just escalated into a fight. It was just two guys looking to get their teams fired up. Then everybody jumped in. It seemed like that sparked everything. It was just an emotional roller coaster from that point on.

Senators forward Shaun Van Allen: I couldn’t believe Brian Pothier jumped in and went after Donald Brashear after he fought Ray. I don’t know what set him off. It got out of control fast.

Flyers forward Patrick Sharp: I was on the ice just kind of chillin’, and found myself in a 6-on-6 brawl. I was in the first wave of the brawls. I actually got pounded pretty good. Todd Simpson grabbed me. There’s a fight between Brash and Rob Ray, and another one escalated. That’s when Eschey and Patty Lalime went at it.

Esche: I remember Danny Markov laying on the ice and there was a scrum going on, I went over to go pick somebody up, and I turn around and Patrick Lalime is right there — no helmet, no nothing. I was like, “What are you doing here?”

Senators goalie Patrick Lalime: Esche was in the middle of it all. That’s when I said, ‘I’m going down there.’ And I didn’t care. I knew he was a tough guy. But I got rid of all my stuff because I didn’t want to be weighed down by my glove, blocker and mask. And I knew I had to get his mask off.

Senators forward Chris Neil: Patty Lalime was awesome. For him to come down and do what he did, he’s just a great team guy. For him, he had a big smile on his face.

Lalime: After we were done fighting each other, we were just along the boards. I was just exhausted. I said to Esche, “I’m dead.” He said, “Me too.” So we made an agreement. No cheap shots. Nothing dirty. And I think that was a sign of respect. And every time I passed him after that, we always said hi to each other.

After play resumed came another series of fights. In a 6-second span on the game clock, six players were issued fighting majors: Chris Neil, Zdeno Chara and Mike Fisher from Ottawa, and Radovan Somik, Mattias Timander and Michal Handzus from the Flyers.

Esche: Once it got to a tipping point, which it clearly did the next shift, it was just going to continue to unravel.

Hitchcock: It was an emotional time, they were emotional games. Two really good teams. But I was really angry (because) the players that were being attacked, they weren’t scrappers or fighters or anything.

Flyers GM Bob Clarke: I was watching from the press box obviously as the manager. For me, Jacques Martin premeditated that. He had all tough players on the ice and the Flyers had four Europeans. As it turned out, our Europeans got beat up.

Senators coach Jacques Martin: I’ve never sent a guy out to fight in my entire career. I don’t believe in sending a guy over. When there are fights in hockey, I think that’s fine. But I don’t think I’ve ever been a proponent of going after people.

Van Allen: That would have been out of Jacques’ character to do that. I played for him for about six years. And he never asked anybody to fight – ever.

Neil: We made that decision as players. I said to Martin Prusek (the Senators backup goalie, who entered the game after the first fight), “As soon as the puck is dropped, skate down and grab their goalie. Because we’re all going.” We all knew what we were doing. Then after my fight I looked down the ice and I see Prusek still standing at his net and his arm over the crossbar. He didn’t understand a word I said because he didn’t fight.

Lalime: I think Prusek was being smart. Sean Burke was their other goalie. And I think Burkie was ready to go.

Another wave of fights came at 18:45 of the third. Recchi fought with Ottawa’s Brian Smolinski, while LeClair and Wade Redden paired off. 

LeClair: Some of it was guys picking the wrong guys to dance with. So, all right, you’re going to do that, and the next shift up we’re going to do this.

Recchi: I saw Johnny (LeClair) all of a sudden was fighting somebody and I just turned around and grabbed the first guy, and, let’s go. And everybody else was going, as well. It’s what you do as teammates, and we were a team, and we wanted to show that.

Havlat: Zdeno Chara got an instigator penalty and Jacques saved my life that night. He sent me to the penalty box to serve that instigator. And that way I was safe. So that was my participation in the fight. Smolinski fought Recchi right in front of the penalty box and I thought, that could have been me. And I don’t think I would have done as well as Smoke.

Lalime: I think they really wanted to get at Marty. But he was inside the box.

Flyers defenseman Chris Therien: It’s one of those things where it gets crazy, but it gets to a point where it ends up being more like a WWE event than an actual hockey game, and that’s what happened.

Alfredsson: Well, I didn’t have a fight in that game. And the last minute and a half probably took about a half hour to actually play. I remember looking up during one of the faceoffs and we have four coaches and three players on the bench.

Neil: Guys were coming off and high-fiving each other inside the locker room. The adrenaline was going. Behind the scenes, it was really intense.

The final fight happened on the ensuing face-off, at 18:47 of the third, when Patrick Sharp and Jason Spezza dropped the gloves.

Senators forward Jason Spezza: I was thinking, ‘Who am I going to fight? When am I going to fight? And I better make sure I fight because in a game like that, you don’t want to be the only guy who doesn’t fight.

Sharp: The building was rocking. They’re sorting out the penalties, and Hitch came over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “When 39 gets on the ice, you’re up.” And I’m thinking, who the heck is 39? Is that Dominik Hasek? Then I looked over and it’s Jason Spezza. … It’s one thing to fight when you’re in the NHL when it’s spur of the moment, but when you have time to sit there and think about what’s coming, you get little butterflies in the stomach. I looked over and saw Simon Gagne and he just gave me a look, like, good luck man.

Spezza: Jacques was much quieter. He didn’t say anything about it, but I remember the refs coming to our bench and saying, “That’s it. No more fights.” And I’m thinking to myself, “No way am I done. I have to fight in this game.” When I got out to that draw, Sharpie said to me, “We’re going.” And I felt like we were the two young guys who didn’t want to get left out.

Hitchcock: (Martin’s) bench was shorter than mine. I just said to myself, screw it. … I’m going to try to run him out of players.

Clarke: Patrick Sharp was going against Jason Spezza. He’s a Canadian, he could fight. Jason Spezza got the short end of that one. He was the only one we won.

Neil: Spezz getting 35 minutes in penalties, we use that as a trivia question sometimes. But he got all those minutes because he had no tie down (as required by league rules to prevent the jersey from coming off), he was the instigator and he fought with a visor. I wish I had that on my card, but I didn’t wear a visor.

Spezza: I used to joke with Neiler about it. I think he has every other fighting record in team history. I don’t think I have any other Sens records, but I got that one.

After the game, Clarke was so upset that he attempted to find Martin in the visitors’ dressing room.

Clarke: Foolishly, I was so mad at what Jacques Martin did, because he had planned it. … I was pissed and I went down (to the visiting dressing room). I said to their PR guy, could I see Jacques Martin? He said, “I don’t work for you.” And he was right. So, I left.

Martin: I guess they wouldn’t let him in. I think our coaches office at that time was actually part of the visiting dressing room. Just a little office. And someone told me afterwards that Bobby was trying to get in. And he was trying to get at me.

Ray: I heard about him coming down and being pissed off and blaming our side for everything. But you know what? Bobby Clarke has done some things over the years. I remember playing against the Flyers in the playoffs one year with Buffalo. And he wouldn’t turn the lights on in the arena for our practice. Another time, we broke a cheap fan in our dressing room and he sent us a bill for like $2,500 to replace it. I appreciate him, but he always took things to extremes. So I think this was him just trying to be a part of it.

Recchi: To me, fighting is fighting, but the way we handled it as a team and the way Ottawa handled it, I think it hurt Ottawa. They kind of went one direction and we went the other because of the way we handled it, and the way everybody was involved. Everybody. Every top skilled guy, to our role guys. They didn’t do that, and I think it kind of divided their dressing room a little bit and brought us even closer. I really feel that way.

Alfredsson: We stood our own ground and pushed back. I think it was something that helped us as a team for sure.

Ray: There was only one person pissed off and I think that was Jacques. He hated that stuff. I could see in his face, he didn’t like that stuff. I think he was the only one in the group who didn’t like it. I think for so long that group was pushed around. And that night, the players learned they could push back. And that did a lot for them.

Esche: We thought it was comical, we thought it was awesome, entertaining. Fun to be a part of.

Lalime: I don’t like fighting, but that whole night was a great hockey moment.

Clarke: It was just foolishness. They all laughed about it after. But I didn’t think it was much fun.

Neil: At the end of the day, we had four guys getting stitched up. They had six, so I think we won the war.

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: George Widman, H. Rumph Jr. / Associated Press; Dave Sandford / Getty)

TORONTO — Sarah Nurse was driving home from a recent PWHL Toronto practice when she got a bit of sage advice.

It wasn’t from a podcast or a friend on the phone. The advice came courtesy of a billboard on the side of the road in Canada’s most populous city, featuring her own face with the Adidas slogan “You got this.”

“I was like, yeah, I do,” Nurse said with a laugh.

The billboard she drove past is one of many across the country, including a massive advertisement at Yonge-Dundas Square — Toronto’s closest approximation to Times Square in New York City — that pairs Nurse with Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes and World Cup champion Lionel Messi.

Nurse, 29, has had major partnerships in the past. In 2020, Tim Hortons and Mattel collaborated to make a Barbie doll in her likeness. In 2022, she was featured on a Cheerios box. But in the two years since her breakout performance at the Beijing Olympics — in which she broke a record for points in a single tournament (18) — Nurse has become one of the biggest faces in women’s hockey.

She became the first woman to appear on the cover of an EA Sports hockey video game with NHL 23. She was a key figure in the launch of the Professional Women’s Hockey League as a member of the player-led bargaining committee that struck a first-of-its-kind CBA in women’s professional hockey. This month, she starred in a Canadian Super Bowl commercial and was one of the busiest athletes during NHL All-Star Weekend, appearing at several league and partner events.

“Everywhere you turn, it’s like, there’s Sarah,” said Canadian national team defender Erin Ambrose.

Nurse’s eight major endorsement deals put her ahead of virtually every other professional hockey player, outside of a handful of NHL stars. Among women and players of color, she is in uncharted territory.

Her ascension has been years in the making — all part of a carefully crafted business plan developed by Nurse and her team at Dulcedo Management, a talent agency, to make Nurse not just one of the faces of the game, but someone with the kind of celebrity that transcends her sport.

“You don’t need to follow basketball to know who LeBron James is,” said her agent, Thomas Houlton. “That’s what we want to do for Sarah.”

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When Nurse signed with Dulcedo in 2019, her reputation as a player was already strong.

At 24 years old, Nurse had already been a star at the University of Wisconsin, won an Olympic silver medal and been drafted with the No. 2 pick in the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League. In those early days, Nurse was often discussed as one of the newest branches of an impressive athletic family tree.

Her father, Roger, was an elite lacrosse player. Her aunt, Raquel, was a celebrated point guard at Syracuse University who married Philadelphia Eagles legend Donovan McNabb. Her cousins include Kia Nurse, a two-time Olympian and WNBA all-star, and Darnell Nurse, a defenseman for the Edmonton Oilers.

With Nurse’s multifaceted appeal, several agents came calling.

But after the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, Nurse, who graduated with a business degree, was looking to explore her interests in fashion and beauty — fields that are typically outside the areas of expertise for traditional sports agencies. Nurse, however, wasn’t playing in a typical sports landscape.

In the CWHL, players were paid only small stipends — Nurse said she made $2,000 as a rookie in the league — which meant playing women’s professional hockey was not a main source of income.

Dulcedo, which launched as a modeling agency but has since expanded into other industries, including sports, could give Nurse more opportunities to branch out.

“She didn’t just want to be known as Sarah Nurse, the hockey player,” explained Houlton. “And not just as a piece of the (family tree). … It’s been clear from the beginning that she really wanted to have her own legacy.”

“When I first signed with them,” Nurse said, “I did this glamor photoshoot, and I’d never done anything like that before because I’m a hockey player — nobody gives me fake eyelashes or puts lipstick on me. I was like, this could be the start of something great, because I felt like they got me.”

Houlton signed Nurse to blue-chip sports partners like CCM and Adidas but also worked on building up her social-media profile to position her in areas outside of hockey. “No skincare brand is going to want to work with you if we don’t see skincare anywhere,” he explained.

On the ice, Nurse was in another Olympic cycle with Team Canada leading up to the 2022 Games in Beijing and in the middle of a period of upheaval in women’s professional hockey. The CWHL folded in March 2019, and most of the players banded together to sit out of professional hockey until a better league was formed. Then the 2020 women’s world championships were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The stakes were high in the year leading up to the Olympics. For athletes without big-ticket professional contracts, the once-every-four-year window the Games provide is a critical moment to make money — and a name for themselves. A knee injury during tryouts put into question whether Nurse would be healthy enough to play.

“I came out of the world championships in Calgary and I was on the fourth line — that’s not a safe place to be. Then I blew up my knee,” Nurse said. “So I’m going into Olympic tryouts and I’m like, I don’t know if I can make this team.”

To the coaching staff, despite the fact she couldn’t skate in the months leading up to the tournament, Nurse had more than proven her worth to the Canadian national team.

“We knew that she was going to be a big part of our program if she was healthy enough to go,” said Canada’s head coach, Troy Ryan. “The combination of her work ethic and the medical staff did a great job getting her back.”

“What I love about Sarah, as a teammate and as a hockey player, is that she does the little things right. She’s versatile in the sense that she can play center and play wing. She can win draws, she’s hard to play against, you can trust her in tough matchups,” said Ambrose. “For so long with the national team, that was her m.o. Whatever you needed, she was there.”

Nurse made the team and was healthy in time for the start of the tournament. She also secured Olympic campaigns with General Mills, Sportchek, RBC and more.

Team Canada rewrote the record books in Beijing, going undefeated in the tournament to win a gold medal. Nurse, who started the tournament on the fourth line, worked her way up to the top line with Marie-Philip Poulin and Brianne Jenner, and broke Hayley Wickenheiser’s Olympic scoring record with 18 points in six games. She set a record for assists in a single tournament (13) and became the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal in hockey.

“That was really the catalyst for her to take that next step,” said Houlton. “And really propelled us into what was the next phase of her life.”

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Ninety minutes before the NHL All-Star red-carpet event, Nurse was in a hotel room in downtown Toronto doing her hair, getting her makeup done and shooting content for her social media channels — nothing she wasn’t used to.

Her All-Star weekend responsibilities had started days before, with media and promotional appearances. Earlier that morning, she was on the ice for an outdoor practice with the PWHL players chosen to represent the brand-new league at the NHL’s tentpole event. She then made a surprise visit to a girls hockey team with teammates Renata Fast, Natalie Spooner and Adidas.

After leaving the hotel, she’d walk the red carpet, surprise another girls hockey team — this time with Canadian Tire and Poulin — and, 12 hours after her day started, play in the PWHL three-on-three showcase at Scotiabank Arena. That part of her schedule doesn’t include the NHL skills competition, which Nurse was on the ice for on Friday night, or the regular-season PWHL game she played on Saturday.

“That whole week was a blur,” Nurse said.

“I don’t even know if we were anticipating what occurred there in terms of, like, you can’t even walk a couple of steps without someone stopping and saying, ‘That’s Sarah Nurse, can I get a picture?’” Houlton said. “It was amazing to see how far she’s come.”

Everything about Nurse’s NHL All-Star weekend suggests the plan has worked. In the last year, Nurse has gotten so busy that Dulcedo added Phoebe Balshin to the team as a senior athlete manager in January 2023. Her job was to create a more strategic plan for Nurse’s brand and help her take the next step.

“When I first came on, a big conversation was: Sarah works with so many brands, but what is her brand? Who is she? What is her mission and vision?” Balshin said. “So we basically built out a five-year plan with her to take us through Milan (the 2026 Olympics.)”

To refine the process, Nurse identified four specific intersections of her own interests and growth opportunities: hockey, fashion and beauty, entrepreneurship and community. A potential partnership must move the needle in at least one of those categories.

“If something doesn’t align with me, we’re not going to do it,” Nurse said.

Nurse now has eight major sponsors: Adidas, CCM, RBC, Canadian Tire, Tim Hortons, EA Sports, Chevrolet and, most recently, Dyson. She’s also signed other paid partnerships with beauty brands such as Dove, L’Oréal and Revlon.

Brands targeted Nurse after her Olympic performance, but that’s just one part of the total package. She’s outgoing with an affable charm, an infectious laugh and an ease on camera.

“It comes down to personality, and Sarah is very much one-of-one,” Houlton said. “Sarah can show up on set straight out of bed and look amazing, sound amazing, and give the brand the best performance they’ve ever seen.”

Nurse is a biracial Black woman and is vocal in her support of increased representation in a predominantly White sport. Her team is cautious about the intentions of potential sponsors. “I need to ask all the right questions to make sure that this brand is not just using her so they check their diversity box,” Houlton explained.

They’ve also worked with partners that Nurse already had in her portfolio to ensure that her goals are being met — not just the brand’s own objectives.

During All-Star weekend, Nurse did a shoot with RBC that included Poulin and Toronto Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews, which oriented  Nurse as a professional athlete — not just as a women’s hockey player. Her Adidas campaign has her aligned with big names outside of the sport, such as Mahomes and Messi. “Our goal is to get her neck and neck with the best,” Balshin explained.

Auston Matthews, Sarah Nurse, and Marie-Philip Poulin answered hard-hitting questions from kids at an RBC press conference

(via @RBC) pic.twitter.com/7T7k7bT8QV

— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) February 5, 2024

Last week, Nurse launched “Nursey Night,” in which she will host young Black girls at PWHL Toronto games, meet with them postgame and mentor them throughout the year. The idea started as a way for Nurse to give away her brother’s season tickets every once in a while but it ended up with a $50,000 donation from Rogers and a partnership with Black Girl Hockey Club, a non-profit organization focused on making hockey more inclusive.

“People want to be involved in anything she does,” Balshin said. “That’s kind of how we snowball things over here.”

On top of promotional appearances and events, Nurse posts paid promotions on social media and has gotten more active on TikTok, posting videos while doing her makeup or skincare, or providing motivation to young girls and women who visit her channels. Everything gets put into a content calendar that Balshin manages, and every morning she sends Nurse a text outlining “everything we have to worry about today.”

“She has made our lives a lot happier,” Nurse said. “We got to a point where there was just too much happening and we couldn’t facilitate everything.”

With everything going on off the ice, it’s easy to forget that Nurse is one of Canada’s best hockey players and a face of the PWHL in Toronto. She’s also the vice president of the PWHL Players Association and is on the Hockey Canada player committee.

“I would love to sit down and see her calendar,” Ambrose said. “I am in awe of what she does away from the rink. I am in awe of what she does at the rink. I truthfully don’t know how she does it but I love her for it.”

Nurse knows it sounds like there’s a lot on her plate but insists she’s very good at compartmentalizing. Ryan, also her coach with PWHL Toronto, says Nurse’s other responsibilities have “never negatively impacted who she is as a player.”

“I think she’s found ways to actually use it to make sure she still has an impact in the game,” he said. “She’s under a spotlight and under a microscope so much. I think that sense of pride she probably gets with that has probably forced her to do the extra work.”

“I’m very conscious of the fact that for me to do all of this other stuff, I need to perform my best on the ice,” added Nurse, who scored two goals on Tuesday night, including the game winner against Minnesota.

Gone are the days of players such as Nurse making only $2,000 a season to play hockey. In the PWHL, the minimum salary $35,000, with some top players making as much as $100,000. Still, even the league’s best players aren’t getting rich playing women’s professional hockey.

“The marketing does mean a lot to them and is a main source of income,” Balshin said.

The work that Nurse is putting in is also laying the track for life after hockey, whenever that comes. It would take something unforeseen for Nurse to not be at the 2026 Olympics.

Nurse has thought about pursuing several paths, from real estate investment to launching a clothing line or a production company. “I definitely have aspirations to expand and grow into different sectors,” she said.

“We want her to be a face of hockey, period, not just women’s hockey. And of inclusion in sport,” Balshin said. “She wants to show young girls that they can be so many things.”

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Mark Blinch / Getty Images, Nicole Osborne / NHLI via Getty Images)

In late July, NHL scouts traveled to Central Europe for the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, an under-18 international tournament, to watch some of the best young players eligible for the 2024 NHL Draft.

Over six days, scouts bounced between the FOSFA Arena in Břeclav, Czech Republic, and the Pavol Demitra Ice Hockey Stadium in Trenčín, Slovakia, as they watched likely first-round picks Berkly Catton and Sam Dickinson from Team Canada and highly rated Czechia defenseman Adam Jiricek. But few prospects caught their attention as much as Trevor Connelly, a 17-year-old forward from Tustin, Calif.

Over five games, he scored five goals and had five assists and led Team USA to its first medal at the event since 2016. He displayed dynamic skating, puck skills and offensive creativity. In the bronze medal game, Connelly went end-to-end and chipped a shot over the shoulder of Finland’s goalie. One scout said of Connelly: “He looked like the best player here.”

His play was written about glowingly by several hockey publications, with The Hockey News calling his performance the “start of the hype train for him.” After playing well in the United States’ top junior league and shining in another international event in December, he moved up to No. 5 on one prominent list of North American prospects.

Connelly was known to scouts before the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, but his play forced teams to consider him anew. He was no longer just a prospect; he was a potential impact NHL player. But that made the evaluation of him thornier because, as one scout said, “Some stuff I’m just not willing to look the other way on.”

Many NHL evaluators were already aware that, in 2022, when he was 16, Connelly posted to Snapchat a picture of a teammate sitting on the floor of the children’s area of a library with building blocks assembled in the shape of a swastika. Connelly added the caption “creations.” He was removed from his team, the Long Island Gulls, after that incident. Connelly apologized for the posting of the swastika and said he didn’t understand how hurtful it would be to others. Some NHL people were also aware he had been accused of directing a racial slur at an opponent during a game in 2021, which he has denied. He was initially suspended after that allegation, though the suspension was not upheld, with the disciplinary committee for the California Amateur Hockey Association writing that the allegation could not be corroborated. Connelly told The Athletic he doesn’t use racial slurs. Some teams were also aware that Connelly had been involved with four amateur programs from 2020-22, an unusually vagabond career for a player with his talent; one of those stops, at Bishop Kearney, a high school in Rochester, N.Y., with a select hockey program, lasted less than two weeks.

Teams are also evaluating Connelly amidst a sea change in the level of scrutiny being applied to behavior by NHL executives, coaches and players. Actions that might have previously gone unnoticed or unexamined are being exposed and judged by the media and fans. That has led to the exile of several prominent hockey men over the last few years.

That scrutiny has trickled down to the draft process. In the 2020 and 2021 drafts, teams chose prospects they knew had committed misconduct and were fiercely criticized. One team — the Arizona Coyotes — quickly renounced the player’s rights. Another — the Montreal Canadiens — retained the player but endured a dressing down from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, among others.

“You were always worried about the player’s character and how it could affect your team, but the external considerations are newer. How will your fans react? What will the feedback be on social media? Will people dig up anything on this player’s old social media posts? How will this pick reflect on your team and team ownership? These are all newer things we didn’t worry about as much before,” said one NHL executive.

Even teams that said they have already decided against drafting Connelly are grappling with the questions his evaluation raises, figuring it won’t be the last time they are put to this test. How much should an organization’s stated values figure in the draft process? How do teams weigh a prospect’s talent versus misdeeds from the past? Because prospects are often minors when troubling behavior occurs, teams are also trying to decipher what acts are byproducts of immaturity as opposed to signs of a larger concern. And when is a second chance warranted?

Said the NHL executive: “Before, we never would have met with our public relations department to discuss a potential draft pick.”

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The due diligence teams do on prospects is, as one NHL executive termed it, largely a “word of mouth” system. “None of us are HR people. None of us know the questions to ask. We all have our network of people. We just call each other,” said an NHL executive, who like some others who spoke to The Athletic were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about prospects or their team’s draft process. Some youth hockey sources were granted anonymity due to their fear of retribution.

As NHL scouts begin evaluating a prospect, their first call is typically to a coach who worked with the player. Some scouts might dig deeper, talking to parents, billets and teammates, but some evaluators don’t, relying almost entirely upon the opinion of a coach with whom they may have a relationship. Coaches can provide a great deal of information about their star players. But they also are not impartial. Coaching a high draft pick can lead to a better job for a coach and more ticket revenue for a junior team. The NHL also compensates Canadian Hockey League teams for drafted players who make the NHL with CHL eligibility remaining. “They are incentivized to promote that player,” said one former NHL executive.

Also, hockey is a parochial sport, and there is an ingrained reluctance by many of those who speak with NHL scouts to disclose information that could imperil a pro career. In hockey parlance: No one wants to be the guy who “buries” a kid.

There are surely dozens of current NHL players, if not more, who have benefited from this system. “There are good players out there who have done bad stuff that have already been drafted, they just haven’t been caught,” said one NHL team official.

But even when the wrongdoing is widely known, it hasn’t stopped teams from drafting a talented prospect.

At the 2014 draft, the Tampa Bay Lightning used the No. 19 overall pick on Tony DeAngelo, an 18-year-old defenseman from the Sarnia (Ontario) Sting who was twice suspended for violating the league’s harassment and abuse policy for the use of a slur. Al Murray, Tampa Bay’s director of amateur scouting, said at the time of the draft that some of the incidents involving DeAngelo were “blown out of proportion.” Most critically, the Lightning faced little to no criticism for selecting DeAngelo.

DeAngelo was traded to the Arizona Coyotes after only two years in the Tampa Bay organization, never playing for the NHL team, amidst a report of “attitude issues.” In total, he has played for five organizations over nine seasons and faced team and league discipline for, among other issues, a physical altercation with his own team’s goaltender, for what his coach called a “maturity issue” and for physical abuse of an official.

Fast forward to the 2020 draft.

The Coyotes drafted Mitchell Miller, a defenseman from Sylvania, Ohio, in the fourth round. Miller was at one point projected to be selected much higher, but then NHL teams learned that when Miller was 14 years old he was convicted of assault after he kicked and punched a developmentally disabled classmate, called him a racial slur and convinced him to eat a piece of candy that had been dragged through a urinal.

Like DeAngelo, NHL teams knew about Miller’s past; some teams took him off their draft board, meaning they would not select him no matter how far he fell. After the draft, Coyotes president Xavier Gutierrez said the team would help Miller learn from his past misconduct. But Coyotes fans weren’t having it. Social media backlash was fierce. Mitchell’s victim said how hurt he was by the pick; his mother told the Coyotes her son never received an apology from Miller.

A few weeks after the draft, the Coyotes renounced Miller’s rights.

In November 2022, the Boston Bruins signed Miller, who was coming off an 83-point campaign with the Tri-City Storm of the USHL. Boston fans flooded the Bruins’ inbox and posted seething comments on the team’s Instagram page. Respected Boston veterans Patrice Bergeron, Nick Foligno and Brad Marchand voiced their disapproval.

The Bruins promptly released Miller. Team president Cam Neely apologized to the victim’s family and said the Bruins would be “re-evaluating” internal processes. Miller now plays in Russia.

Another test for NHL teams came at the 2021 draft. Logan Mailloux, an 18-year-old from Ontario, tantalized scouts as a blueliner with size and skill. But at least nine teams told The Athletic that Mailloux had been removed from their board as a result of his criminal conviction in Sweden roughly seven months earlier for disseminating a photograph of himself and a young woman, taken without her consent, engaged in a sexual act. Prior to the draft, Mailloux called the conduct a “stupid, childish mistake,” but in interviews with some NHL teams Mailloux allegedly portrayed the woman as vindictive.

Three days before the draft, the young woman told The Athletic that all she wanted was a “heartfelt apology” from Mailloux. An hour after the publication of that story, Mailloux announced that he was asking teams not to draft him because he had not “demonstrated strong enough maturity or character to earn that privilege.” Mailloux’s announcement prompted many NHL executives to assume he’d go undrafted.

The draft was held virtually that year, with teams videoconferencing in to make selections. When it came time for the Montreal Canadiens to make the No. 31 overall pick, general manager Marc Bergevin announced that the Habs “were proud to select … the Knights de London défenseur Logan Mailloux.” The pick was followed by several seconds of dead air before host John Buccigross said: “All right, well, this is something the league probably wishes didn’t happen.” Draft analyst Sam Cosentino added during the broadcast: “The most polarizing pick I’ve ever seen, maybe in the history of the draft.”

Canadiens assistant general manager Trevor Timmins struggled to come up with an answer when asked about the pick the following day. Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister and a lifelong Habs fan, said he was “deeply disappointed.” Montreal subsequently announced Mailloux wouldn’t attend development camp or training camp.

But he remains in the Habs organization and was an all-star for the Laval Rocket of the American Hockey League. The two men responsible for picking him, however, are no longer with the Habs. Bergevin and Timmins were ousted within months of drafting Mailloux. The team was struggling when they were let go, but drafting Mailloux remains part of their legacy in Montreal.

Miller and Mailloux were convicted of criminal acts. What Connelly did or has been accused of doing is harder to categorize and that makes his evaluation different. For some teams, that gray space could provide the room needed to take a chance on Connelly. For others, that gray space, the unknown, heightens the concern. “He’s a hell of a player and could play in the league for a long time,” said one NHL executive. “(But) you may not keep your job after picking him.”

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Connelly, his mother and his representatives have worked hard to make the case that Connelly is guilty of only a single youthful mistake: the posting of the offensive photo to Snapchat. And when discussing that incident, they highlight the outreach he has done to better understand the hurtful nature of the photo he posted and the community service he’s completed.

“We determined that he’s not a hateful kid. He’s an ignorant kid. And my position is you don’t punish ignorance, you punish hatred. You educate ignorance,” said John Osei-Tutu, an NHL agent advising the Connelly family.

But Connelly’s frequent moves and short tenures at prominent hockey programs have also been flagged by teams. While it is not unusual for top prospects to move to a new program in search of a better situation, Connelly’s well-traveled career stands out. Between the ages of roughly 13 and 17, he was a member of seven different programs, and that included two stops where he stayed less than a month. To understand what might be behind those frequent moves, The Athletic spoke to more than 40 people (players, parents, coaches and others) who interacted with Connelly during his playing career.

Connelly played six seasons for the Anaheim (Calif.) Jr. Ducks, ending with the 2018-19 season when Connelly was around 13, and The Athletic interviewed more than a dozen parents who had a child who was a teammate of Connelly’s during at least one of those seasons. Ten of those parents said they witnessed behavior by Connelly that they considered troubling, and eight of those 10 parents described Connelly’s actions as bullying.

Four parents said they saw Connelly punch a teammate during practice; three of those parents said they saw it happen multiple times. It was usually in response to Connelly getting frustrated, those three parents say, such as when he lost a puck battle or a teammate wouldn’t allow him to cut in line during a drill. Five parents said he would slash teammates with his stick out of frustration. Four of those five parents said they also saw him slew-foot players — trip an opponent from behind with a leg or foot.

Individually, those incidents are not unheard of at the highest levels of youth hockey. And some parents chalked up Connelly’s behavior to the fact that he was intensively competitive. However, the incidents were frequent enough that eight parents said that at some point they felt concern for the well-being of their son or that of other players.

Parents said Connelly also picked on some teammates in the locker room and away from the rink. He seemed to focus on players who were small in stature and/or were among the less talented members of the team, according to eight parents. He would make fun of their appearance, tell them they were not good players and that they didn’t belong on the team, among other insults. “He wasn’t just a troublemaker; it wasn’t just that. He was mean,” said one parent.

One mother said her son avoided team activities, like bus rides or team meals, to avoid being around Connelly more than was necessary. Another mother said her son asked to not stay at the team hotel because he didn’t want to be around Connelly. Yet another parent said she went so far as to ask her son to assist a player Connelly repeatedly picked on. “It’s frustrating when you have to tell your kid to protect his teammate from another teammate,” she said. Two players left the Anaheim Jr. Ducks program prior to or during or the 2017-18 season in part because of how they were treated by Connelly, according to three parents associated with that program.

Connelly, in response to the above allegations, wrote in an email: “I am surprised and sad to hear these allegations. It is difficult to respond to anonymous allegations. I’m willing to sit down privately with anyone and listen to what they have to say. I wasn’t a perfect kid or teammate. It’s no secret I am highly competitive and there were definitely times when I let my competitiveness get the best of me but I never tried to intentionally injure anyone.

“Since I started playing travel hockey, I’ve had to listen to a lot of negative things yelled at me when I was on the ice, mostly by parents of other players. I know what that feels like and it’s one of the reasons I’ve committed myself to being a leader on and off the ice.”

Three parents said they complained to Jr. Ducks coach Eugene Kabanets about Connelly’s conduct at some point. (The Athletic reviewed one of those complaints, sent via email, when the players were around 11.) Others said they were reluctant to complain because Connelly was such a good player that they didn’t believe Kabanets would do anything.

Kabanets acknowledged that there was the “occasional conflict” on the team but described Connelly as a “good teammate.” He added in an email: “If and when I observed issues or when concerns were ever brought to my attention, I spoke to the players in question and to their parents and we would address it immediately at that time. The main thing that stands out to me when I think about bullying during that time period is what I observed Trevor endure personally. He was the victim of ridicule and extreme bullying from a young age, often from the parents of opposing players. It was very difficult to watch and I know that it was hard for him as a young child.”

For the 2019-20 season, then 13-year-old Connelly left the Jr. Ducks and played up an age group with the AA San Diego Saints. Coaches Josh Robinson and Rob Overman said they were unaware of any specific issues involving Connelly during his one season with the team. Tanya Maxwell, who carpooled her son and Connelly to practice multiple times per week, said Connelly was a model teammate and added in an email that the fishbowl atmosphere of youth hockey in California can cause “a lot of jealousy and unwarranted gossip about the top players.”

In 2020, Connelly, then 14, enrolled at Bishop Kearney, which started a boys select hockey program during the pandemic, drawing top players from around the country. Almost immediately, the school suspended Connelly, but he left Bishop Kearney shortly thereafter. A public relations official working with the family said that all that should be written about Connelly’s short stint at the school is: “He was there for a week and he left.”

Sources involved in the school’s hockey program said that Connelly was suspended after urinating on another student’s belongings, among other alleged acts. One source said Connelly was acting in response to hazing that Connelly had received earlier. That source said he witnessed the hazing Connelly endured and also saw students tease Connelly about being hazed.

Steve Salluzzo, Bishop Kearney’s president, wrote in an email: “We do not discuss student matters with anyone beyond students and their families.”

Trevor Connelly said in a statement: “At 14 years old, I was the victim of a humiliating hazing incident in my dorm room and then harassed about it afterwards. I reacted poorly to the situation with an immature act. While I took responsibility at the time, I regret and am embarrassed by how I handled myself.”

Connelly next joined the North Jersey Avalanche of the Atlantic Youth Hockey League. Avalanche coach Donny Kane said Connelly left the program after approximately two weeks because it became too difficult to travel between California and the East Coast regularly because of travel and quarantine policies during the pandemic. Matt Zocco, a coach and father in the program, said Connelly was “well mannered” in all his dealings with him.

Connelly returned to Southern California but did not rejoin the Jr. Ducks. “At that time we did not feel he was a good fit for our program,” the organization said in a statement.

Connelly instead joined Anaheim’s Jr. Ice Dogs, and in April 2021, when he was 15 and playing for that team versus the L.A. Jr. Kings, he was accused of directing a racial slur at an opponent. What happened remains in dispute. The player came off the ice “so visibly shaken and upset with tears streaming down his face after the incident that I had to sit him for the remainder of the first period so he could collect himself,” according to an email his coach, Brett Beebe, sent to Pacific District official Wayne Sawchuk, which was viewed by The Athletic.

Video footage of that game shows the player leaving the ice in the first period and flagging his coach’s attention. The two move behind the bench and speak for approximately one minute, with the coach consoling the player. The player then walks to a nearby vestibule and bends over with his hands on his knees, where he remains until the period ends.

Beebe asked in his email to Sawchuk that the incident be reported to members of the Pacific District tournament disciplinary committee. He later testified before that committee, which suspended Connelly.

The matter was then taken up by the disciplinary hearing committee of the California Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA). After a hearing before that group, the panel found that “the alleged incident as described by the Pacific District Tournament Disciplinary Committee may have occurred, however, there was no supporting documentation presented by the (Pacific District Tournament Disciplinary Committee) that corroborated the allegation against the player, and the player maintained that he at no time uttered any racial slurs against his opponent,” according to its written decision. In closing, the CAHA committee stated that Connelly had not violated the USA Hockey rule covering misconduct.

Connelly attended the hearing, conducted via videoconference, as did his parents and Osei-Tutu, his adviser. Beebe and the player who alleged Connelly used the slur were not in attendance, according to the committee’s written decision. Beebe said in an interview he was not made aware that the hearing was taking place, and no one from CAHA alerted him that the allegation was under further review. The player who made the initial allegation was not contacted about the hearing, either, nor were his parents or the player’s adviser.

CAHA president Tom Hancock declined to comment, citing CAHA’s policy not to discuss disciplinary matters involving minors. Sawchuk also declined to comment. Connelly wrote in an email: “I don’t use racial slurs. I have stood up for teammates when they have been called racial slurs and I understand this is a problem in our sport. This is why I’m so committed to my work as a coach and mentor with Hockey Players of Color.”

Colleen Connelly, during a two-hour interview in Nebraska, where Trevor Connelly currently plays for the Tri-City Storm of the USHL, said: “There is a significant history with (the LA Jr. Kings) and my son. Parents on that team have been extremely abusive to Trevor for many years.”

Connelly returned to the East Coast for the 2021-22 season, joining the Long Island Gulls. In March 2022, Connelly, then 16, posted the photo on Snapchat of a teammate sitting next to the building blocks assembled in the shape of a swastika. The photo was quickly taken down, but screenshots circulated and team officials and parents learned of the photo. (The Athletic has reviewed a screenshot.)

The two players were not immediately disciplined — they played in a regional tournament days later — but after consulting with the U.S. Center for SafeSport, USA Hockey, New York’s state governing body and the club’s attorney, who conducted an internal investigation, the Gulls removed both players from the organization.

The incident came at a time when Connelly was able to be recruited by college programs, though some schools had already decided not to pursue him. “Because of everything that went with him, we just didn’t (recruit him),” said a coach at one perennial powerhouse.

Connelly called the incident an “awful mistake” in an email and added: “While I was not in the photo and did not participate in building the symbol, I understand and recognize how ignorant I was in sharing it. I did not appreciate how offensive and hurtful the post would be in the moment and I still feel terrible about it.

“Over the last year and a half, I’ve dedicated a lot of time and energy to educating myself, completing diversity trainings, doing volunteer community service work, and to coaching and mentoring other hockey players. I am also very grateful to be working with a Rabbi and Cantor. They have been very kind to me and I’m learning a lot from them.”

In an interview with RinkLive, which came after Connelly’s play at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, Connelly said he had visited the L.A. Holocaust Museum and read the book “Night” by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and that he was undergoing diversity, equity and inclusion courses and performing community service.

Jazmine Miley, the founder of the Hockey Players of Color program where Connelly volunteered following the swastika incident, said: “Trevor is an amazing young man who just made a dumb mistake and is working his way to fixing that.”

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Osei-Tutu, who began advising the Connelly family around the time Trevor left Bishop Kearney, has been lobbying NHL teams on Connelly’s behalf. In defense of his client, he tends to push back on or deny all but the swastika incident. The other allegations are untrue, misconstrued or lack context, he said. He considers Connelly to be mostly “a victim of the game of telephone.”

This runs contrary to how some NHL teams view Connelly. “We’re willing to forgive and take a chance on a kid who just makes one mistake, the issue for teams comes when there is a pattern and you’re worried it is representative of a real issue with the player and not just immaturity,” said a scout.

In September, Osei-Tutu sent a flurry of direct messages defending Connelly to a prospects writer after that writer posted on social media a quote about Connelly from an unnamed scout: “He’s got top 10 skill, but bottom 10 character.” Osei-Tutu repeatedly expressed concern that The Athletic was trying to “destroy” or “cancel” Connelly. He also offered in an interview the name of another prospect who was previously disciplined for using racist language and suggested The Athletic look into that player. On multiple occasions he attempted to draw a distinction between Connelly and Mitchell Miller, saying only his client showed accountability.

After the Connelly family became aware The Athletic was working on this story, they engaged an attorney who previously was involved in a lawsuit against The Athletic. (That lawsuit has since been dropped.) That attorney sent an eight-page letter that, among other assertions over more than 3,500 words, attacked the journalistic integrity of one of the writers working on this story. The family also engaged a Los Angeles-based public relations person who includes “reputation management” among her areas of expertise in her company bio.

Connelly recently began meeting with NHL teams, and evaluators have asked him direct questions about the swastika incident and his stop at Bishop Kearney and other issues, parsing his responses. One evaluator described Connelly as upfront and transparent in his meeting with him, another said Connelly was eager to deflect blame onto others and showed little accountability. But even that parsing is unlikely to bring true clarity for teams debating whether they should select Connelly at the June 28 draft in Las Vegas. When a prospect’s misconduct falls into a different category than, say, Mitchell Miller, when the wrongdoing takes place during a prospect’s teenage years (or younger), when teams are trying to decipher whether wrongdoing is a sign of a real behavioral problem, a clean evaluation of Connelly and players like him in the future may not be possible. Especially as teams factor in what adding a player of his talent can mean for a franchise.

“I believe in a path to redemption but it’s not my job to provide it,” said one scouting director. But another evaluator predicted Connelly will be chosen, just not as early as the rankings portend. “At one point the difference between him and the next guy will be too big,” said the scout. “All it takes is one team.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Main photo courtesy Dan Hickling / USHL; other photos courtesy Tri-City Storm / USHL)

WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Behind a large desk in an office tower with a view out over True North Square, Mark Chipman is working the phones.

Chipman is chairman of the Winnipeg Jets. A local businessman who got caught up in the failed movement to save his city’s NHL team three decades ago, he later fixed his gaze on bringing big-league hockey back to one of the smallest markets in North American professional sports and defied the odds by actually making it happen.

On this day, he’s still fighting to ensure the Jets work in Winnipeg by taking on a cumbersome task: making personal calls to those who have let their season tickets lapse.

The organization’s once-solid foundation seems to again be quaking beneath Chipman’s feet. Even playing out of the NHL’s smallest permanent arena, which holds 15,225 fans for hockey games, the Jets are drawing just 87.4 percent of capacity this season, the third-lowest mark in the 32-team league. Their overall average attendance of 13,306 is the lowest of any NHL team other than the Arizona Coyotes, who are playing in a college arena. And that’s despite the Jets being one of the top-performing teams in the Western Conference.

Winnipeg’s season-ticket base has suffered a 27 percent decline in just three years, falling from approximately 13,000 to just under 9,500, according to the Jets.

“I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to get back to 13,000,’” Chipman said. “This place we find ourselves in right now, it’s not going to work over the long haul. It just isn’t.”

One by one, Chipman gathers first-hand information from the people who are no longer walking through the doors of Canada Life Centre after filling the building for 332 straight sellouts upon the Jets’ return in October 2011.

Why did they stop coming?

What would convince them to return?

It’s difficult to imagine another member of the NHL’s Board of Governors rolling up their sleeves to this degree, but failure to turn the situation around could threaten the 2.0 version of the Jets’ ability to remain healthy and competitive in the long-term, Chipman said.

The Jets’ health, on and off the ice, is an extremely sensitive subject in a city where heartbreak has been felt before. The Jets left town once already — for Arizona, perhaps the ultimate symbol of hockey’s southern expansion — only to be reborn with a second chance. Losing the team again would likely mean the end for top-tier pro sports in Winnipeg.

So Chipman is looking for opportunities to win back business by offering invitations to former ticket buyers to return for a game of their choice before the end of this regular season.

“They’ve been really very friendly,” Chipman said of his calls during an exclusive interview with The Athletic this week. “When I first started making them, I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but they weren’t hard calls. They were, ‘Look, I want to come back, but I’ve got two kids, 9 and 11. They’re playing hockey. I can’t come to that many games.’ And I get it. We understand.

“Had another guy annoyed over the fact that we had a discounted ticket and beer offering last year. Fair enough. You’re a full-season ticket holder. Somebody in your section got in on a promotion we did. Our bad.

“It’s a whole range of stuff, but pretty much everyone I spoke to today is coming back to a game.”

---

Amid the swirl of excitement that accompanied Winnipeg’s return to the league after a 15-year hiatus was a warning from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

“It isn’t going to work very well unless this building is sold out every night,” he said.

That statement didn’t initially pop the way it does when read in the current context, because in the spring of 2011, there was a fervor around the reborn Jets. When it was announced that the Atlanta Thrashers were migrating north to Manitoba, 13,500 season tickets were sold in 17 minutes on a Saturday.

Much had changed since the original Jets left town, starting with the construction of a well-appointed downtown arena and the introduction of a league-wide salary cap that tied player salaries to overall revenue.

What remained the same was the fact that Winnipeg would need to punch above its weight to compete with teams based out of much larger markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto. With a population of 749,607, according to the 2021 Canadian Census, there’s a friendly feel in the air here: the kind of place where Chipman routinely hears opinions on the team’s roster while pumping gas and where, yes, you may end up receiving a phone call from the NHL franchise’s chairman about renewing your season tickets.

Chipman said he feels “indebted” to the NHL for the city’s second chance.

He first made a presentation to top league officials in January 2007 during a meeting that included representatives from Las Vegas, Seattle, Houston and Kansas City, and ultimately saw Winnipeg pushed to the front of the queue when the Thrashers came up for sale and relocation four years later.

While NHL officials continue to believe in the viability of the market — “We wish all of our clubs were selling all of their tickets for every game, but I can’t say there’s a level of concern,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic during the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting in December — Chipman acknowledged that the Jets are on the radar at league’s head office for reasons they’d rather not be.

“They pay attention,” he said. “They see the numbers. They see where the league’s at and where we’re at. And we’re an outlier right now. So, rightfully, they want to know, what are you doing? What’s going on? What happened and what are you doing about it?”

Bettman is scheduled to visit Winnipeg on Tuesday and get a firsthand look at the situation, meeting with key corporate sponsors and potentially even addressing fans directly before that night’s game against the St. Louis Blues.

That comes as the organization’s sales team has started shifting its attention to the 2024-25 season. For the first time this season, the Jets will give priority on playoff ticket purchases to those who put down a deposit on season seats for next season. And they’ve grown more flexible with options covering a select number of games.

Currently, the team has a season-ticket base of roughly 9,500 — an unsustainably low number, according to Chipman. The team saw a big decline in renewals when the pandemic hit and has endured subsequent drops after the past two seasons.

They are now feverishly trying to reverse the tide.

---

To understand how the Jets got here, you must first understand what made their lengthy sellout streak unique to begin with.

They managed to fill the building for more than a decade despite having just 15 percent of their season seats purchased by businesses. That lags well below the norm in a league in which some teams sell 50 percent of their tickets to corporate interests, according to Chipman.

What that means in practical terms is, in Winnipeg you need real people to spend real money on 41 home dates per year. And the way they did that initially was through a significant number of individuals going in on shared season-ticket packages with friends and family — a market reality that Chipman viewed as a strength until seeing what happened when a member or two of each group moved out of town or ran into a situation in which they could no longer afford to keep up their end of the arrangement.

“It was like a bubble that burst on us,” Chipman said. “We had what I thought was this strength in numbers that didn’t turn out to be.”

In response, they’ve tried to rally local business leaders.

The Jets have recently recruited 34 well-connected men and women and asked them to tap into their networks to try and generate new business. Chipman said he’s been extremely forthcoming with that group about the challenges of operating an NHL team. The idea is to not only tug at civic pride but also reinforce the positive economic and psychological benefits that the presence of the Jets brings to the community.

“What we try to convey to those people is, we’re trying to win,” Chipman said. “And in order to win or be competitive, we’ve got to keep up. We will never match the Leafs’ gate. It’s really remarkable. We can’t match that. But Edmonton really outperforms us, and that’s harder to accept, right? Because we think of ourselves as equals.

“I know Edmonton is a bigger city and they have that pedigree of all those Stanley Cups, but I think most people in Winnipeg and most people in Edmonton look at one another (with) a healthy respect.”

There’s a natural inclination for him to look around the league and draw these comparisons. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which have massive national television rights deals, the NHL remains a gate-driven league. And elsewhere, business is booming.

Chipman specifically mentions the success of markets that were once referred to as “non-traditional,” like Nashville, Dallas, Carolina, Florida and Las Vegas.

“The game’s growing,” he said. “You’ve seen it. You’ve had a front-row seat. Those markets in the U.S. that we used to look down upon, they’re fun, and they’re alive.”

To some degree, the lingering effects of the pandemic and an inflationary environment account for what’s happened in his own backyard, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. The Jets have the second-cheapest tickets in Canada, according to Chipman, and they plan to institute only a negligible bump in cost for some sections, with a decrease in others, next season.

Chipman doesn’t shy away from the organization’s role in the current state of affairs.

They’ve heard complaints from customers ranging from the high costs associated with transferring tickets between members of a group to frustrations about the Jets’ previous unwillingness to sell smaller packages. They’ve also had to build up a sales staff that wasn’t needed in the days when the tickets basically sold themselves.

“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves,” Chipman said. “For 10 years, we weren’t a sales organization; we were a service organization, and I’m not sure we were that good of a service organization, to be honest with you.”

---

As the Jets’ business took a turn in recent years, one of the toughest parts about addressing the problem has been talking about it at all.

There’s a sensitivity to the fact that people in the community are struggling. There are more important things than professional hockey. And as the team found out when it evoked images of the 1996 Jets departure as part of a ticket-selling campaign dubbed “Forever Winnipeg” last spring, even the vague notion of a looming threat to its viability wasn’t received well.

“Because of the history, it’s a bit of a tinderbox,” Chipman said. “In retrospect, we weren’t trying to be dramatic, but it got people’s hair up. That wasn’t the intent, but our bad. So it is not just the issue of not wanting to appear to be whining about this or evoking sympathy, it’s also the issue of not wanting to appear to be in any way threatening.

“And that’s hard given the history.”

It takes all of us. Forever. pic.twitter.com/9W2TTBABBH

— Winnipeg Jets (@NHLJets) April 11, 2023

Chipman himself is still searching for the right words here. He remembers first-hand the emotional roller coaster those involved with the “Save the Jets” campaign rode in the mid-1990s and said, “I can honestly say to our fan base, I understand whatever that is — whatever that feeling is.”

If not by his words, he should be judged by his actions.

In the face of declining ticket revenues, the Jets have continually upgraded and modernized Canada Life Centre and have now invested as much in building improvements as they spent on building it, according to Chipman. They also handed out $119 million in long-term contract extensions to Connor Hellebuyck and Mark Scheifele in October. They extended Nino Niederreiter in December. And they got a jump on the competition by trading a first-round pick to Montreal for Sean Monahan during the All-Star break.

They are a team spending to the salary-cap ceiling and turning over every rock necessary to build a Stanley Cup contender. They’re doing so with the belief that fans will see the promise in what they’re building and start returning in greater numbers. And they’ve been encouraged by some recent numbers, including 13,786 against San Jose on Feb. 14 and 14,707 against Minnesota on Tuesday.

“I would hope that if you walked around any one of the four floors here or over in hockey ops and said, ‘What is it? What is it you are trying to be? What is True North and the Jets?’ I would hope that without much hesitation, most people would say, ‘A source of pride,’” Chipman said.

“That’s what teams ought to be, and that’s what we’re trying to convey to people. We’re trying to be something you can be proud of.”

(Graphic: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic, with photos from Trevor Hagan / Associated Press and Darcy Finley / Getty Images)

Once upon a time, there was a screenplay for a hockey movie that was so absurd, so over the top, that even the studio executives who wanted to make it wondered if it was too unrealistic.

Almost every page of the script featured profanity. There were wild brawls on the ice, fights with fans in the stands and a trio of bespectacled brothers who raced toy cars at home and pummeled opponents at night. It was so outrageous that one day Ned Dowd, a minor-league hockey player, received a call from his sister, Nancy, who wrote the screenplay and was trying to get the movie made.

She asked for Ned’s help.

Nancy Dowd had shadowed Ned’s team, the Johnstown Jets, for a month during the 1974-75 season of the North American Hockey League (NAHL), about the lowest rung of the minors, a place for long shots, has-beens and brawlers. Nancy had degrees from Smith College and UCLA’s film school, but she’d become fascinated by her brother’s existence on hockey’s frontier and wrote a script about a rowdy minor-league team on the verge of collapse that rallies to win the championship.

The movie, “Slap Shot,” would go on to become one of the greatest sports films of all time, a classic still beloved by both fans and players more than 45 years later. But first a studio had to make it, and that’s why Nancy Dowd called Ned. She asked him to fly to Los Angeles and meet with actor Paul Newman, director George Roy Hill and skeptical executives from Universal Pictures.

Ned, a self-described raconteur with a history degree from Bowdoin College, walked into a private dining room at Universal and started to regale the group with stories about his playing days in Johnstown, Pa. Soon it must have become obvious that the wildest thing about “Slap Shot” wasn’t the brawls on the ice or fights in the stands or the goofy, goony brothers later immortalized as the Hansons.

The wildest thing was that so much of it actually happened.

---

Fred Yost waited at the airport. And waited. And waited.

He was there in October 1974 to pick up three new players for the Johnstown Jets before training camp, and even though Yost had never met them, he was confident he would recognize the trio as hockey players.

Except no one at the airport looked much like a hockey player. What Yost did see were three tall guys with long hair and glasses. A rock band, he thought.

The airport crowd thinned. Yost, the middle-aged sports editor of the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, was still there. So were the three guys with long hair and glasses who Yost watched throttle an unaccommodating vending machine at the airport.

“Are you guys the Carlsons?” Yost asked, and when the three said they were, Yost would later tell a colleague his only reaction was: “Oh my god.”

The three brothers wore black-rimmed glasses. They were 6 feet 3. All had long hair. They wore consecutive numbers (16, 17, 18), played on the same line and lived together. Steve played center, Jeff on the right and Jack on the left.

During their first shift at training camp, Steve Carlson held up two fingers to signal to his brothers play number two. The rest of the Jets were stunned.

“You don’t do that in hockey,” goalie Ron Docken said.

Some players started to laugh — including, until that moment, the Jets’ toughest enforcer. That was a mistake. Jeff Carlson, in the words of Docken, skated over and “beat the tar out of him.”

Before the Jets’ first game, defenseman Pat Westrum walked into the locker room and saw the Carlsons sitting together — as always — with golf gloves on. Confused, he watched as the brothers wrapped tape between their fingers.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” Westrum asked.

“Oh, yeah, this is good,” one of the brothers said. “If you get in a fight, it cuts their face.”

This is going to be bonkers, Westrum thought.

In the first period, Westrum watched the Carlsons fly all over the ice and smash opponents into the boards, a three-headed attack squad out for mayhem. Later in the game, all three brothers fought a different opponent at the exact same time. They racked up six penalties, scored three of the team’s four goals and Jeff Carlson was ejected.

Westrum couldn’t believe it: Are you kidding me? This is what I’m getting into?

---

Drunk late one night in Johnstown, Ned Dowd called Nancy in Los Angeles.

Ned was in his second season in Johnstown and just his second season of pro hockey. After earning his masters from McGill University in Montreal, he had decided to chase his hockey dreams in the rough-and-rugged NAHL, where the old joke was: “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.”

“It was my first job out of college,” Ned said. “Really, I went to college to do this?”

On the phone that night, Ned told his sister about the absurdity of minor-league hockey. During his first season, the Jets had almost folded. The team had been $50,000 in debt and held a telethon to raise money. One newspaper report said at the time the Jets needed to average at least 3,200 fans for four playoff games or else drop out of the NAHL.

When Nancy asked Ned who even owned the Jets, Ned said he didn’t know.

On top of that, Ned’s first season in Johnstown had ended in the most bizarre way possible.

With 19 seconds left in the second period of a semifinal playoff series against the Syracuse Blazers, Johnstown fans attacked two Syracuse players in the penalty box. One of those players was notorious NAHL bad boy Bill “Goldie” Goldthorpe, conspicuous with his bushy sideburns and big blonde afro. Goldie Goldthorpe’s reputation preceded him in every arena. Once, he bit an official. Another time, he traded punches in street clothes on the ice with Ron Orr, the brother of Hall of Famer Bobby Orr and the general manager of the other team.

To calm the storm in Johnstown, the referee sent both teams off the ice. It didn’t work. More than 400 Johnstown fans swarmed around the Blazers’ locker room. Citing insufficient protection from security at Johnstown’s arena, the Syracuse coach refused to return his team to the ice and forfeited the game. (When the Blazers did leave, Johnstown fans pelted the team bus with beer bottles).

In the morning, Johnstown players voted not to travel to Syracuse for the next game because, Docken said, Syracuse fans “would have been throwing beer cans and whatever else at us.”

Or, as Ned Dowd put it, “We all just said: We’re not going back there.’”

So the Jets forfeited the game — and the series — and Ned’s first season of pro hockey was over just like that.

As Nancy listened to her brother’s stories on the phone, she had an idea. She dropped everything, bought a ticket to Johnstown and embedded with the Jets.

Once there, she met three muses with long hair and black-rimmed glasses.

---

The first time Ron Docken walked into the Carlson brothers’ house in Johnstown and saw the toy racetrack, he was not surprised.

“Not a bit,” he said.

That was just the Carlsons.

Docken: When the Carlsons got their first paycheck, they went down to the local department store and bought remote cars and every inch of track they could get.

Westrum: Their house was whacko. It was wide open. And the whole thing revolved around the racetrack.

Docken: In their living room, they set up a track and then it went down the hall into the bedroom, into the bathroom and back out again.

Westrum: We’d have a few drinks and then we’d bet on whose car was going to win. That was after practice a lot.

Docken: When you’d go over there, the refrigerator was full of beer and that was about it.

Westrum: I don’t know if they even ate at home ever. It was just a mess.

Docken: You’d race and you had $20, $30, $40, $50 in the middle of the track, but if your car went into the bedroom and didn’t come back, you lost.

Joe Gorden, Johnstown Tribune-Democrat sportswriter: We’d just got into the motel and a lot of guys had gone to their room. We were standing around the lobby. A kid came in, maybe 10 or 12 years old. A little chubby. He walked right up to Jack Carlson and said: “Are you Jack Carlson?” Jack said yes. The kid took off his jacket, threw it on the floor and said: “I came to challenge you.” The Carlson brothers are all standing around. The kid produced a roll of quarters and said: “We’re playing video games.” The only video game in those days was pong, so Jack Carlson played pong against this kid for hours. The other two Carlsons were standing there, cheering, they were really into it.

Docken: Jeff Carlson had a pet rock in his locker.

Gorden: They used to walk around town with a brick on a leash.

Gorden: Jack Carlson was whistled for a penalty at one point and put in the penalty box. The officials looked around and he wasn’t there. They couldn’t find him. He was three rows up in the stands sitting next to a little kid. The kid had yelled down to him: “Hey, Jack, do you want a hot dog?” So Jack went up and sat beside this kid and ate a hot dog.

Ned Dowd: The bus, we called it the Iron Lung.

Gorden: One night almost everyone was asleep. Steve Carlson rolled up in a blanket and went to sleep and the other guys set him on fire. I woke up, there’s smoke, there’s flames coming off his blanket, they’re all laughing.

Westrum: Lighting people’s tennis shoes on fire.

Gorden: When I went on the road with them, I roomed with Dick Roberge, the coach, at first. We went into the motel in Cape Cod, and Dick said: “We have a block of rooms.” They said: “Yep.” He said: “You have the Carlson brothers?” They said: “Yep.” He said: “I want you to put them at the other end of the motel. And let me know what the damages are in the morning.”

Docken: These guys were hilarious.

They were also prone to a fight or three.

---

Nancy Dowd hung around the Jets for three or four weeks.

She crossed paths with John Mitchell, the team’s executive director who wore a black winter hat, peppered his sentences with “son” and cautioned his players about their vampire hours: “Big man at night, little man in the morning.” She met eccentric backup goalie Jean-Louis Levasseur, who once wore fishing gear to a team party and tried to reel in a bar of soap from a fish bowl, and Dave “Killer” Hanson, a friend of the Carlsons who also raced toy cars, loved comic books and often joined the brothers in fights.

Nancy even asked Ned to carry a small tape recorder into the locker room and onto the team bus.

“We would always see Ned reach down and turn the tape recorder on,” Docken said. “As soon as that happened, all the F’s and S’s would go flying around.”

Nancy flew home to Los Angeles with about 50 hours worth of behind-the-scenes audio tapes. A talented writer with a knack for dialogue — she later won an Oscar for best original screenplay for the movie “Coming Home” — Nancy produced a script in four months.

---

It was a January night in Utica, another game in a long season full of them, when the Carlson brothers went to jail.

The trouble started when Jack Carlson squared up with Mohawk Valley defenseman Gerard Gibbons. Before the two could exchange punches, Steve Carlson rushed in and cross-checked Gibbons, setting off a brawl.

At some point during the chaos, an object thrown from the stands hit Jack Carlson in the face (some witnesses said it was keys; others thought it was ball bearings, nuts and bolts). Either way, the Carlsons and some of their teammates scaled the plexiglass, climbed into the stands and used their sticks to fight Utica fans. Mohawk Valley coach Brian Conacher claimed one of the Carlsons chucked his stick into the crowd like a spear. An usher rushed over to one of the Carlson brothers, so Dave “Killer” Hanson rushed to take on the usher.

It was chaos.

Fifteen Utica policemen arrived at the arena and hauled away Jeff and Jack Carlson in cuffs. Later that night, Harry Neale, who was coaching the Minnesota Fighting Saints of the World Hockey Association at the time and happened to be in town on a scouting trip, bailed the brothers out of jail.

Two weeks later, while the legal proceedings from the brawl in Utica played out in court, the Jets faced the Broome County Dusters. Some of the Dusters’ players wore fake glasses attached to big noses during warmups — a shot at the Carlson brothers. In the locker room before the game, Steve Carlson warned Johnstown coach Dick Roberge, according to the book “The Making of Slap Shot: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Hockey Movie” by Jonathan Jackson.

“Coach, as soon as that puck is dropped, we’re pairing up,” Steve Carlson said.

The brawl resulted in: Jack Carlson flying over the boards; a Dusters player ending up in the Johnstown bench, where he received “about 1,000 lumps” from Roberge and the team trainer; the Dusters coach accusing Jack Carlson of wearing tape on his hands; and a red-faced, cut-up, stick-swinging Dusters tough guy named Ted McCaskill delivering one of the most cold-blooded postgame quotes of all time.

“If I could have,” McCaskill said about his run-in with Jack Carlson, “I would have decapitated him.”

Around that time, something changed for the Jets. Once a team with a losing record on the outside of the NAHL playoff picture, the Jets went 22-8 in the final 30 games and roared into the playoffs.

“Everybody was scared of us, to be truthful,” Westrum said.

The Jets rode that intimidation and their talent — Dave Hanson, Jack Carlson and Steve Carlson would all play in the NHL — to an unlikely championship and a perfect Hollywood ending.

---

Once Universal signed off on the movie, Paul Newman traveled to Johnstown in February 1976 to scout the city as a possible location. Naturally, he went to a Jets game.

With 18 seconds left that night, Dusters goalie Cap Raeder allowed his eighth goal of the night. A rowdy Johnstown fan shouted something at him. Raeder skated over, broke his stick against the glass and climbed into the crowd. Teammates joined him, some firing sticks into the stands. Just as order was about to be restored, Johnstown fans knocked over a piece of plexiglass, which smashed Duster Ed Pizunski on the head. Pizunski returned the favor by pummeling a nearby fan.

After the game, Newman grabbed a beer with a reporter from the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. He was delighted.

“We don’t have to look any farther,” Newman said. “This place is perfect.”

The movie started filming in Johnstown in March 1976. Many real-life characters had parts in the movie: Ned Dowd was the notorious goon Olgie Oglethorpe. Nine Broome County Dusters appeared in the film, including Ted McCaskill, as did many Johnstown Jets. Most famously of all, Jeff and Steve Carlson along with Dave “Killer” Hanson starred as the glasses-wearing brothers who loved toy cars and brawls (the Carlson’s brother Jack got called up to play in Edmonton of the WHA before the movie was shot).

In other words, the trio played themselves.

In one final intersection between real life and art, the Jets played a playoff game in March 1976 against the Buffalo Norsemen. During warmups 20 minutes before the game, Johnstown’s Vern Campigotto skated past Buffalo’s Greg Neeld, who had lost his left eye years earlier and had more recently antagonized the Jets.

“Hey, you one-eyed bastard,” Campigotto said, then challenged Neeld to a fight. Dave “Killer” Hanson jumped in. So did Steve Carlson despite a cast on his hand.

Since there were no officials on the ice and the incident happened before the puck dropped, the Jets were not penalized for inciting a brawl. Actually, they were rewarded for it. The Buffalo team refused to come out of the locker room and forfeited both the game and the playoff series. In one final twist, the NAHL fined Buffalo, not Johnstown, $1,000.

The only thing that did not actually happen that night: No one yelled they were trying to listen to the song!

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: Jets team picture courtesy of the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune-Democrat; other images: Getty; Movie Poster Image Art)

 

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland — The morning fog grows so thick outside Mary Brown’s Centre that South Side Hills, an imposing rock outcropping standing between St. John’s and the rough waters of the north Atlantic Ocean, isn’t visible a few hundred meters away.

Inside the empty arena, the only voice is not loud but still penetrating.

A coach is standing in the middle of a group of professional hockey players. He turns his head side-to-side, looking for recognition, any sign of life.

“Whatever the f— is up,” he barks at players kneeling before him, “make sure you’re ready to go tonight.” After that, he turns and leaves the morning skate hours before a game.

The coach is Matt Cooke. He is wearing a beige ball cap and he’s added a few pounds from his own playing days. But he hasn’t lost any of the energy of his 16-season NHL career. He’s the same Matt Cooke who would rise to the top of the list of most reviled NHL players of the past two decades.

His unprovoked open-ice shoulder check on Marc Savard in March 2010 is still one of the most universally condemned hits in modern NHL history. It left the Boston Bruins forward with a concussion, contributed to the end of his career and led to a change in the NHL rules meant to deter blindside hits.

A year later, Cooke was suspended for 17 games for a punishing elbow to the head of New York Rangers defenseman Ryan McDonagh.

Cooke also lacerated Erik Karlsson’s Achilles’ tendon when his skate came down on the NHL All-Star’s left leg during a board battle. The questions about whether Cooke was a hard-nosed player gave way to questions about whether he was a malicious one.

Then-Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk echoed many in the hockey world when he labeled Cooke a “goon” who “should never be playing in this league.”

Cooke’s final suspension was seven games for a knee-on-knee hit on Colorado Avalanche defenseman Tyson Barrie in the 2014 playoffs.

Many believed he was incapable of changing. When his career ended a year later, any player looking to skate through the middle of the ice untouched breathed a sigh of relief.

But now he’s a rookie head coach of the Newfoundland Growlers, the ECHL affiliate of the Toronto Maple Leafs. A leader of young men. The shaper of young hockey minds.

For those who remember Matt Cooke on the ice, it might be a chilling thought.

“Matt Cooke the person has always been different from Matt Cooke the player,” he says.

---

The first hint of Cooke’s future came when he was just a 5-foot-1 13-year-old playing minor hockey for the Quinte Red Devils, in Belleville, Ont. Physical play was ingrained in his game in the early 1990s, but he was never taught what that should look like.

“My first game, I’m scared. I’m flying on my knees trying to cannonball guys because I’m scared,” Cooke says. “I was taught to give the biggest hit possible. But I never intentionally tried to hurt anybody, ever.”

Just like many of the players he now coaches, Cooke was overlooked. He was not picked in the 1996 NHL Draft.

But he was tenacious. He refused to accept his fate. As an undrafted 18-year-old, he attended Toronto Maple Leafs training camp on a professional tryout and earned a contract. He impressed the Leafs coaching staff with his determined style of play and surprisingly strong set of hands.

An unfortunate clerical error meant his three-year contract offer with the Leafs wasn’t filed to the league office in time, forcing him to return to the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires. Armed with confidence from his tryout success, Cooke showed a new side to his game. After scoring just eight goals during his draft year, he led his Spitfires team with 45 goals.

“I was always undersized, not fast enough, not skilled enough,” Cooke says proudly. “And I beat the odds.”

At the 1997 draft, he wasn’t forgotten. The Vancouver Canucks picked him in the sixth round, 144th. He had a nine-season stint with the Canucks before moving to the Penguins, developing into not just a reliable goal scorer but a gregarious teammate. Coaches could not escape special teams meetings without being peppered with questions from Cooke.

“He was not a guy who was quiet in the room,” Cooke’s former teammate Tyler Kennedy says.

But even with his ability to find the back of the net, Cooke made his name turning the middle of the ice into a hazardous place for the opposition.

That’s when the harmful hits piled up.

In the aftermath of his headshot on Savard, as the hate toward him swelled, he realized he needed to change.

Kennedy noticed his once-chatty teammate growing reticent. “When you hurt someone, no matter who you are, you think about it,” Kennedy says.

It led Cooke to then-Penguins bench boss Dan Bylsma. After the 2010-11 season, Bylsma took Cooke under his wing for repeated one-on-one video and on-ice sessions.

“It was a point of reflection about his career, who he was as a player and how he was perceived,” Bylsma says. “He had a desire to change that.”

Cooke says if he could, one thing he’d change is that March 7, 2010, hit on Savard.

“At the time, to survive in the game, I felt like Matt Cooke the player was the guy that made the middle of the ice harder for people to get to,” he says.

“Now there’s a specific rule in place that I would have been suspended for a lot of games for that hit. But at the time, legally within the game, I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t get a penalty and I wasn’t suspended. I hate the fact that Marc was hurt.”

When Savard returned to the ice, he sustained another concussion in a hit from Matt Hunwick on Jan. 23, 2011, ending his career.

Cooke has never spoken to Savard. He said he tried to get in touch for a month after the hit. “You can only get rejected so many times,” Cooke says softly.

Savard, now an assistant coach for the Calgary Flames, did not reply to a text message seeking comment.

For Cooke, it’s a part of his past.

“I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” he says. “Back then, I wanted to apologize. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t personal. It could have been Milan Lucic who crossed the middle. The play would have been the same.”

---

When his playing career ended after the 2014-15 season, Cooke ran a hockey academy in Minnesota and coached at two high schools. If Cooke’s players expected him to teach them how to deliver thunderous checks, they were disappointed.

“The reality is different from the perception (of Cooke),” Bylsma says.

Instead, he stressed how to compete relentlessly without hunting for heads.

Cooke would throw his old gear on and mingle with players on the ice. They might have complained he talked too much. But Cooke was undeterred. “Even though you don’t see it with your eyes, I want you to hear it with your ears, so you can be successful,’” Cooke would tell them.

His NHL experiences were only important if they were shared.

“Most people don’t know, but through the last six or seven years, Matt has been doing a lot of work with his coaching,” Bylsma says.

He also has stayed busy doing other things. Cooke paid for suites for underprivileged children to watch NHL games in multiple stops during his career. He traveled to war-torn Haiti to donate time and money to charities and help build orphanages. But none of that got him any closer to a return to the league. When he applied for dozens of professional coaching vacancies across North America, he felt like his legacy followed him.

“Not even a discussion with some teams,” Cooke says.

On a whim, he applied for the Toronto Marlies head coaching vacancy in the AHL this offseason. He shrugged when he learned the organization went with the uber-experienced John Gruden, fresh off an assistant coaching stop with the Bruins. But he was encouraged when he received a phone call from Marlies GM Ryan Hardy, who wondered if Cooke would be interested in the Growlers’ vacancy.

“We all had some sort of preconceived notion of how (Cooke) might be as a coach based on how he was as a player,” Hardy says. “We found him to be a really intelligent guy who had a passion for teaching. He was able to reflect on his experience as a player.”

Cooke had never been to Newfoundland when he and his wife traveled east to begin his second act.

“We’ve always had resistance to live in the moment,” Cooke says. “In doing this, the two of us made the decision to be present more. I’ve put a lot of boots in the ground to earn respect.”

Cooke understands the ebbs and flows of a season in a place like Newfoundland can suck players of their mojo. The inexperienced professionals are mostly fresh out of college or junior hockey.

But the Leafs take the Growlers seriously. Leafs regular Bobby McMann, for example, developed in Newfoundland in 2021.

“There are guys on this team who will play in the NHL,” Cooke says. “It may take them three years, but they’ll play.”

The organization is trusting Cooke, 45, to teach players how to become professionals.

And he is learning how to do just that.

When Cooke has to halt a special-teams drill to tell his players to protect the middle of the ice, he is ultimately sniffing out a lack of effort. He believes his team is “going through the motions.”

“This is your practice for tonight’s game,” he warns them. “Don’t do it half-assed.”

That attitude and approach is what drove Cooke as a Stanley Cup winner with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

“(Cooke) earned my respect because he was always honest with his decisions,” Kennedy says. “Everyone he played with had his respect. He was the definition of a guy who everyone hated to play against but loved to play with.”

---

Cooke is over an hour late for lunch when he enters a dark restaurant, shaking his head with embarrassment. He is still learning the realities of coaching two steps below the NHL.

Like how after a 3 p.m. game on a Sunday outside of Montreal, commercial flight delays mean his team can’t fly out until 9:30 p.m. Monday, arriving home at 2:30 a.m.

A practice on Tuesday, despite three games on the horizon? No chance.

Or how — an hour earlier — Cooke had one foot out of the arena when he had to turn around. The Growlers’ young Russian goalie Vyacheslav Peksa was called up to the AHL for the first time.

Cooke had to coordinate with the arena staff and ensure doors wouldn’t be locked so Peksa, 21, could return to collect his gear. Cooke answered Peksa’s questions and reminded him to bring a suit, a tie and enough clothes for what could be a multi-week trip.

Oh, and here’s the time you probably need to wake up and be out the door to catch the 5 a.m. flight.

“They don’t know,” Cooke says. “I need to make sure that as he’s leaving here we have at least somewhat prepared him.”

To return to hockey’s biggest stage, he wants Matt Cooke the communicator to replace the image of Matt Cooke ingrained in the hockey world.

“Communicating is one thing I feel I overdo at times,” he says, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

His office door is open. He extends his arms to two plush off-white couches for discussions. During practice, Cooke buzzes around, chattering and smiling.

“It’s my job to make sure (players) understand little nuances I’ve learned throughout my playing career,” Cooke says. “It may not be that a player can’t master those nuances. They might not even know they exist.”

Cooke hopes to follow two of his former assistant coaches, Tony Granato with the Pittsburgh Penguins and Darby Hendrickson with the Minnesota Wild. They backed him while also delivering important direction from coaching and management. Lines were never crossed and trust was never broken.

“I view myself as that guy,” Cooke says. “I feel like I’d be an awesome assistant coach in the NHL.”

Ironically, Cooke’s most meaningful impact could be if his players don’t follow his lead.

Earlier this season, 2018 second-round NHL Draft pick Serron Noel threw a hit that looked like a Matt Cooke special. Noel skated from behind into the back of Trois-Rivières Lions forward Anthony Beauregard. The boards shook violently from the force of it.

Noel vehemently protested his two-game suspension to Cooke, who listened patiently. “But it’s the right call,” Cooke told him. “You have the ability to limit the risk (to other players) and still be physical.”

Cooke placed an arm around the player as they slowly reviewed clips of Noel’s physical approach. Cooke instructed. Noel listened. Different skate positioning and improved movement will lead to better results. The goal: Apply physicality without malice.

“If a guy needs direction on how to reign in physicality, then it’s my responsibility to make sure he gets that support,” Cooke says. “Because that may be the only thing holding him back.”

---

The 2,693 raucous fans at Mary Brown’s Centre who welcome the Growlers are a fraction of the number of fans Cooke used to play in front of. But in this cheerful coastal town, the Growlers are beloved.

“Our fans put up with us playing horribly the last time we were here,” Cooke tells players before puck drop on a Thursday night against the Worcester Railers. Veterans nod to his messages about responsibility. He stresses that without the fans in the small town, his players would not have a job.

Fans bark at referees, players and Cooke, and $5 beers disappear when the “Chug Cam” flashes onto a video screen above the sheet of ice.

The fans’ anger at the team is justified. The Growlers were not ready to go and trailed 2-0 after the first period.

Often, that kind of performance would lead an NHL coach to avoid the dressing room, leaving players to sort out their failures. Cooke contemplates that approach.

But he reminds himself that most of these players have rarely faced off against veterans clawing for paychecks to feed their families. So Cooke wonders aloud if his players are prepared to be professionals.

“The worst part?” Cooke says to his team. “This should bother you.”

His younger players keep their eyes glued to the floor.

“Unless you put your pride on the line,” Cooke says, “the result will be the same.”

The message lands: The Growlers storm back to tie the score before they give up a late goal and lose 5-4. The loss is a blow for a team on the ECHL playoff bubble.

Cooke knows he needs their ears at a more private moment soon enough.

“That feeling when you’re lacing your skates should be, ‘I can’t wait to go out there and compete,’” he says of his team. “Some of them have it. Some of them, it has to be at a whole other level.”

Well past midnight, Cooke remains in his office delivering updates to the Leafs organization. His voice grows hoarse as the hours pile up. He contemplates sleeping on the couch in his office.

“Engage. Be present,” he tells himself as his eyes grow heavy. “When they come in in the morning, I can be the first person they see. I need to get to know where they’re at and get to know them personally.”

And so as the final revelers leave nearby pubs, Cooke remains in his office, thinking about how he can help each player advance on their hockey journey.

Cooke wants them to craft stories they’re proud of. Maybe when they do, his own story will change.

“There comes a point in time,” he says, “when people know you’re in this realm for the right reasons.”

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Present-day Matt Cooke images, Jeff Parsons / Special to The Athletic; with Penguins, Gregory Shamus / NHLI via Getty Images)

It was in the Toronto Maple Leafs locker room that Ike Werner first allowed himself to believe he would survive.

After his throat was accidentally slit by a skate blade during a Sunday afternoon game at the NHL team's practice facility earlier this month, a terrifying experience became surreal when the 37-year-old looked over and saw Maple Leafs forward Nick Robertson receiving treatment . in an adjacent room.

“That was my image,” Werner said The Athletics. “He's a work in progress.”

Werner had noticed the luxury cars behind the closed section of the parking lot as he drove into the Ford Performance Center that afternoon. The Zamboni also hit the ice earlier than normal, so he figured the Leafs had skated at Rink 2 before his “Prestige Worldwide” team faced the “Jagrbombs” in the True North Hockey League.

That fact became much more important to him when he suffered a gruesome cut during his third shift of the game and screamed for help, only to end up under the care of Leafs athletic therapists Paul Ayotte and Neill Davidson.

“They were so good,” Werner said. “They were so calm and that helped ground me a little bit, if you will, because I was spiraling.”

It's not a place a rec-leaguer could reasonably imagine being in — even after the October death of former NHLer Adam Johnson while playing professionally in England.

This tragedy shed light on the need for more cut-resistant equipment in the sport and has led to players at all levels starting to wear it. Werner recalled the topic discussed among his men's competition team in the fall and said he had even tried to purchase a neck protector at the time without success.

As one of the older players in a moderately competitive league, he was more careful than most when it came to his equipment. He wore wrist guards and cut-resistant socks and, after previously wearing a visor (pictured at top), recently moved to a full face shield.

“When Adam Johnson died, you couldn't buy neck guards,” Werner said. “I tried. That was a few months ago, and I probably could have continued with it, but I didn't.

“One of the things I said to my wife was, 'It's rec league. It's not that fast. The equipment is not at that level. The skates are not that sharp. That's not going to happen in rec league.”

Except when that happened.

NHL player survey: Why 78 percent say there should be no neck guard mandate

— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) February 2, 2024

---

Werner has no memory of what happened. None of his teammates were sure immediately afterwards.

It wasn't until Werner's league president sent a clip from a 360-degree camera installed in the arena on Tuesday night that anyone got a clear picture of what happened.

The piece looked as innocent as can be. Werner stood in the slot in front of his own goal and poked at a loose puck when an opponent came at it, throwing him off balance. As the opponent fell to the ice, his right skate kicked up and struck Werner under the face mask.

Incredibly, the force of the impact did not knock Werner over, even though it left him with significant bruising to his chest and neck, which persisted for a week after the February 4 incident. An incision was also opened that required twelve stitches to close.

The video clip confirmed the only aspect of the sequence that Werner clearly remembered: he picked up his fallen stick after the collision and skated to the bench under his own power.

What also stood out in his memory was how little pain he felt in the immediate aftermath of the play and how little blood there seemed to be. He says it felt like a minor scrape or jersey burn. Except when he returned to the bench, a referee told him to leave the field of play immediately.

Old teammate Jack McVeigh accompanied Werner to the dressing room after briefly seeing what his pal was dealing with.

“It was quite shocking that he was still alive when you saw the injury,” McVeigh said. “He took his hand off his neck and you said, 'Oooooh. Holy f—.”

“I don't even know what was going through my mind other than 'You have to deal with that.'”

Werner only lost his cool once he caught a glimpse of the cut in a mirror once back in the dressing room. According to McVeigh, he immediately turned white.

There was a brief discussion about calling an ambulance and reaching the arena lobby until Werner remembered the Leafs were in the building. He caught the attention of cameraman Armando Cavalheiro, who works as a cameraman for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and was standing nearby after covering the training. Cavalheiro started banging on a back door of the locker room until it opened and Werner was let in.

He was immediately attended to by Davidson and Ayotte, the Leafs' medical staff, who applied pressure to the neck area and examined the injury. They eventually closed it off with Steri Strips and bandaged Warner after determining he needed to go to the hospital for further testing before stitches were placed.

Just as importantly, they provided reassurance that everything would be okay.

“They were so good,” Werner said. “Ask me a few questions: 'Can you breathe well?' 'Can you swallow well?' Like that kind of thing to rule out serious, serious things.

“They say, 'You're lucky to be alive.'”

Under normal circumstances, they might not be around to help someone who was injured during a rec league game at 4 p.m.

The Leafs typically practice at noon, but did not skate until 2:45 p.m. that day because the team was returning from the All-Star break and league rules dictated that no mandatory activities were scheduled before mid-afternoon.

Werner, the father of a three-month-old, went to St. Joseph's Hospital alone with just a quick message to his wife that he had been circumcised and would be OK. He was immediately admitted to a hospital bed and received his stitches at 5.15pm – just an hour after leaving the ice.

Because the ray that grazed him was so sharp, the cut was clean and easy to sew up. A local anesthetic was applied and Werner began bleeding profusely while doctors examined the depth of the wound. He had to throw away the shirt he was wearing in favor of one McVeigh dropped off for him at the hospital.

However, it was a scene of good news. A CT scan showed that the skate had cut into the muscle, but not through it, making surgery unnecessary.

One of the emergency room doctors told Werner that she plays high-level recreational hockey and vowed not to return to the ice without first purchasing a neck protector herself.

“It missed my vocal cords, my esophagus, arteries, veins, everything,” Werner said. “I'm just lucky. I'm just lucky.”

He didn't even spend the night in the hospital.

---

Werner's brush with death brought him into contact with five different highly trained medical professionals between the time he was cut by the skate and the time he finally returned home for a long embrace from his wife.

Each of them told him he was lucky to walk out the door.

That made him think about all the what-if questions from a day that will almost certainly stay with him for the rest of his life.

For one thing, the weather had been unseasonably nice that Sunday, and while walking with his newborn baby, he considered skipping the hockey game altogether. What if he chose to stay home?

What if his team was short of a defender for that match and he played in his normal position as a forward instead?

What if he had gotten up and tried to get back into the game instead of skating to the bench after being cut? Would his body be able to handle the continued exertion?

What if the cut was just a little deeper or was an inch or two in a different direction?

What if the Leafs were operating on their normal schedule that afternoon and the medical staff wasn't still in the building to answer his call for help?

“I thought I was going to die and they said, 'You're not going to die. You are very lucky.' And they patched me up,” Werner said. “I appreciate them just making sure everything was OK. At that point I wasn't bleeding that much, but if I had just taken myself to the hospital, who knows what would have happened?

“In the end it was a lot of blood.”

He doesn't consider himself a religious or spiritual person, but he certainly has family and friends who believe a greater power was looking out for him that day.

It was not easy to calm his mind long enough to get a good night's sleep in the immediate aftermath of a situation in which Werner himself notes, “I almost had my child orphaned and my wife was going to be widowed.”

About the last place he expected to find when he showed up for a league game on Sunday was the Maple Leafs locker room.

He got lucky.

“I'm not a Leaf fan – I'm a Calgary fan – but I was just joking, 'Maybe I'm a Leafs fan now,'” Werner said. “Not from a team perspective, but from a behind-the-scenes perspective.”

(Photos courtesy of Ike Werner)

One day, the brilliant TV executives will all unite and bring their programming under one roof. It solves all your sports watching problems. They'll call it cable.

This new venture from ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. It's not Discovery. At least not yet.

It's still important that three of the biggest brands in sports are teaming up this fall to give fans another option. The Great Rebundling is just around the corner, but it is far from being resolved.

This does not apply to the consumer need this venture will be named later and my first guess is that most of you will choose that option. The service will be equally owned by the three parties, but each partner will receive the same compensation as they earn through cable or YouTubeTV, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. Only ESPN, the unique network, receives about $12 per month from cable subscribers.

So what does that mean for you? The estimated price for the new venture if you add ESPN, Fox and WBD Sports together will likely be around $40 to $50 per month. There are probably sports fans who want to save some money with this scheme, but it's hard to believe there are many.

You can already watch almost everything this trio offers through places like YouTube TV for around $70 and change per month. If you want this option, it's already available, with even more channels to boot.

After a year of talks between the three parties, it is valuable to see these superpowers coming together, and it is very understandable why they did so. It is not a risk at all for them, but a reward. This “sports skinny bundle” – as the cool media kids like to call it – is worth a try.

With this small step, Fox Sports is entering the sports subscription space for the first time. They've been the ones to watch their competitors sink billions into subscription streaming while patiently waiting their time on the sidelines. Their executives thought rebundling was the best choice, so this gives them a first chance.

ESPN plans to go direct-to-consumer with its entire product by 2025, with the possibility of 2024. Now it will start with tag team partners this fall.

This new arrangement does not deter ESPN's previous plans. The network still plans to have a standalone ESPN direct-to-consumer product next year. Additionally, it could still move forward with an equity partnership with the NFL or other leagues and/or digital players.

WBD Sports has an ever-underrated menu of rights for its new product, from the NBA and MLB playoffs to March Madness.

But the reason these entities don't have anything complete here yet is the exclusion of other major players – like CBS for example.

This “sports skinny bundle” is a little too skinny to include Patrick Mahomes, Christian McCaffrey, and Taylor Swift this weekend since CBS has the Super Bowl this year. More problematic when you compare this new product to YouTube: If you want to watch March Madness, the CBS games aren't on it. It won't be one-stop shopping.

The significance of this deal could increase over time, as the names in the press release suggested. The quotes were from the top: Disney's Bob Iger, Fox's Lachlan Murdoch and WBD's David Zaslav.

However, if they want to fight the almost unlimited pockets of Amazon, Apple or Netflix, if these digital giants become even more serious about sports rights, Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav as a trio could have a stronger hand.

The new entity will have its own CEO and will reportedly operate independently. However, his or her bosses will still be Iger, Murdoch and Zaslav, so how independent will it be? What could this lead to in the future? Will they get along? If the questions can be answered positively, it could lead to something even bigger.

For you, the fan, maybe this new CEO will find a way to bring everything you want to watch under one simple service. Until then, this endeavor won't change much for most of you.

(Photo of Fox Sports' Michael Strahan interviewing Christian McCaffrey of the San Francisco 49ers after last month's NFC Championship Game: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)