Toporowski didn’t get his father’s ill temper
In Luke Toporowski’s case, the apple did fall far from the tree.
While Luke is playing on the same junior team in Spokane, Wash., his dad Kerry played for about 25 years ago — also the same WHL squad his brother Jake and uncle Brad played on — Luke didn’t inherit his dad’s ill humour on the ice.
Kerry had 505 penalty minutes one season in the early ’90s riding shotgun for Ray Whitney and Pat Falloon, then carried his belligerence into a minor-pro career, mostly in the Quad Cities area on the Iowa-Illinois border, where American winger Luke was born 17 years ago.
Luke isn’t anything like his dad, though. “He didn’t give me fighting lessons,” said Luke.
Whitney said, “Kerry was the toughest guy in the league, while being the quietest in the room.”
Dave Semenko tough? “Yes, in our league. Not even close (with anybody else),” Whitney said.
The WHL didn’t include game misconducts in those 505 penalty minutes, either. As Kerry, who was drafted in the fourth round by San Jose Sharks in 1991 but never played an NHL game, told Bleacher Report’s Adrian Dater, “I had a few dinners bought for me by grateful teammates who didn’t have to do the fighting I did.”
Luke isn’t a D -man like Kerry, who currently works as a financial adviser in Iowa, nor are any of the other Toporowskis who have played in Spokane. He wants the puck too much.
“I love to score goals,” Luke said with a laugh.
Luke, who went into the semifinal against Canada Friday with three goals in the round-robin portion in Red Deer, was drafted eighth overall in the WHL bantam draft in 2016 with Spokane jumping on his talent as much as his lineage.
He was playing bantam hockey for the Chicago Mission, a team coached by former NHL winger Gino Cavallini, before Spokane came calling.
Maybe the Chiefs saw Scotty Bowman’s appraisal of the kid when he attended a U.S. development team camp in Buffalo, N.Y., a couple of years ago.
“One of the best prospects I’ve ever seen,” Bowman told Bleacher Report. “He’s got a terrific stride like (Sidney) Crosby. He’s hard to knock off his feet the way he cuts around the defence and accelerates.”
He’s only five-foot-10 and 170 pounds, but he could be a late first-round pick in the 2019 draft. He plays hard, he knows where the corners are and, as Bowman says, he can really skate. He has also fired thousands of pucks in the basement of his folks’ house in Bettendorf, Iowa. Crosby liked to shoot into a dryer. Luke said he had a shooting wall.
He may have been gobsmacked to hear what Bowman had to say, but he has tried to keep it in perspective.
“A compliment like that is pretty cool, but I try to be my own player,” said the left-winger, who admitted it was like the stars had aligned when Spokane took him in the WHL bantam draft.
A team-first mentality is part of Luke’s DNA, too.
“Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to play there (in Spokane) and when I heard my name called ... yeah, it was cool,” he said.
Luke played last year with 2017 Oilers first-rounder Kailer Yamamoto.
“He’s an unbelievable player. You can learn a lot watching him,” said Toporowski.