The NHL can’t get enough of Bulldog Brandon Saigeon
Almost every NHL team right now is interested in either drafting him or signing him as a free agent
IT’S PROBABLY best he never decides to take up high-stakes poker. His face just wouldn’t allow it since he simply can’t prevent himself from smiling broadly when the chips are falling his way. Stoic in the face of excitement, he is not.
So you can imagine what he looked like as he was sitting in his agent’s office a few days after the Memorial Cup, hearing that almost every NHL team had expressed interest in either drafting him later this month or signing him as a free agent. He would’ve looked less giddy if he’d won the lottery every week for a month.
“Yeah, for sure,” Brandon Saigeon says. “I’m still a little kid at heart who gets excited when things are going well.”
A fantastic regular season followed by a ridiculous playoff run — he had 18 goals in 21 games — had put the Hamilton Bull-
dogs’ forward on everyone’s radar, all-but-ensuring he’d be property of some big-league team later this month. That would be a dream under any circumstance. But when you’ve had to take a long walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Crushing Disappointment to get here, the smile gets even broader.
The Grimsby native, who’d been drafted fourth overall by the Belleville Bulls in 2014, was supposed to be an NHL prospect in the spring of 2016. Except when the team moved to Hamilton, the local face of the new franchise started the year slowly. That caused him to feel more pressure and led to things getting even worse.
“It was just kind of a downhill spiral,” he says.
Just as he was finally heating up and finding his stride, he crashed forearm-first into a goalpost. Really, really hard.
As he got up and skated to the bench he was already thinking this was bad. He’d been dreaming about the NHL since he was 11 or 12, yet in the most important year of his life, nothing was going right. Still, maybe it would just be a bad bruise, he thought. Maybe he’d miss a game or two. No, couldn’t feel his limb, but maybe the trainers were right when they told him he’d be fine. Even as they told him not to look at his arm.
Which he promptly did. It was crooked.
“It was pretty gross, to be honest,” he says.
As he lay in the ambulance with his radius and ulna both shattered and his season done, Saigeon says he reflected on everything that had happened. It was tough. And when he watched the draft that spring knowing some of the guys selected weren’t as good as him — every player who’s ever been taken anything but first overall feel the same way — he knew he wasn’t going to be taken. It was the sour cherry on the top of a horrible year.
“I wasn’t going to let my hockey career slip away because of one injury and a few bad months before that,” he says.
He came back healthy last season. Feeling better, he heated up after Christmas to nearly double his best single-season points total, yet a slow first half again caused him to be ignored in the draft.
This year though, he figured it out. Early on, his agent told him he was getting good feedback from NHL teams. By New Year’s, he’d almost matched his best single-season total. Saigeon ended up finishing second in scoring on the Bulldogs, ahead of guys who’d been drafted. When he got scorching hot in the playoffs, teams really started taking note.
Of course, his story wouldn’t be his story without another speed bump. In the first period of the first game of the Memorial Cup, he took a big hit and sprained a ligament in his shoulder. Suddenly a shooter couldn’t shoot. The joint was frozen before each game and heavily taped, but it made little difference.
After everything else, he admittedly wondered why this had to happen on the biggest stage in front of more scouts than ever before. With his team so close to a national title.
“Yeah,” he laughs. “It wasn’t the best timing.”
But sitting with his agent a few days later, it was clear that wasn’t going to ruin anything. He was either going to be drafted nine or 10 days from now or he’d sign as a free agent with someone. Several teams have told his representative he’s high on their list.
Other guys have had an easier ride, to be sure. Saigeon surely wouldn’t have minded that but says this path has toughened him up. It’s also made him appreciate what’s happening now a whole lot more than he might’ve if everything had come easily.
“I had two goals,” Saigeon says on the day before he turns 20. “To sign a contract and to win a championship. I’ve done one of the two. Hopefully the other will come soon.”