DEMKO DAZZLES IN DEBUT
SHINING STAR STOPS SABRES Teammates in Utica were confident their goalie would rise to any NHL challenge. On Friday, he showed them
The journey of any young player is a long and winding road and, as Ryan Johnson knows, you’re never sure where and when it will end.
But there are those rare and wonderful cases where a prospect makes it painfully obvious to everyone in the organization he’s ready for the next challenge. At that point, the guesswork is taken out of the developmental equation. At that point, the only thing to do is turn the kid loose and see if he can fly.
That was the case with Thatcher Demko in Utica, N.Y.
“That’s the dream in development,” said Johnson, general manager of the AHL Utica Comets. “You know this guy is going up and he’s not coming back. That’s Thatcher. In the last two or three weeks we thought any longer and this could go the other way. It was time for the next challenge.”
The early returns seem to confirm everything the Canucks and the rest of the hockey world have thought about the 23-year-old goalie.
Friday night, in his first NHL start of this season, Demko turned in a polished, professional performance in backstopping the Canucks to a critical 4-3 win over the Buffalo Sabres that lifted the locals into the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference.
The San Diego native wasn’t always spectacular over the first half of the game, allowing three goals to the midway point of the second period. But from that point on he shut the door, blanking the Swordsmen over the final 30 minutes, allowing Loui Eriksson’s third-period marker to stand up as the game winner.
“It isn’t always going to be pretty,” said defenceman Troy Stecher, neatly summing up the evening at Rogers Arena. “Some nights it’s going to be ugly but when your best player is your goalie, you have a chance to win and Thatcher was definitely our best player.”
But there’s a larger point with Demko.
From the moment he was drafted in the second round in 2014, the Boston College product has been preparing for this moment and his matriculation into the brotherhood of NHL goalies.
In his three years at Boston College and two-plus years in Utica, he has established himself as one of the game’s premier goaltending prospects and the only question was when, not if, he’d move up to The Show.
Shortly after the calendar turned over to 2019, the call came. Now fully seasoned, he joins the Canucks’ young core. He’s just done it a little differently.
“He’s a great example for our other younger players,” said Johnson. “His talent is obvious. He has the ideal body type for a goaltender. But his work ethic is second to none. He puts a lot into his craft. You put that with his physical skills and you have the makings of a really good goalie.”
This is Demko’s first year with Canucks goalie coach Ian Clark, who has worked with some of the game’s best over his two decades in the NHL. Here’s Clark’s take on the kid:
“When you look at a prospect you look at the physical package and there’s a check mark,” Clark said. “Then you look at his makeup. Check mark. Then you look at his work habits and there’s a check mark.
“You go through this whole laundry list of things. From my experience with Thatcher, he has all the checks. Now we have the job to do.”
At 6-4 and 200 pounds, Demko has the requisite size and athleticism for the position. But that’s just one part of the goalie puzzle. The larger, and more important, aspect is the mental game and dealing with the violent swings the game delivers.
Demko’s role with the Canucks, for example, represents unchartered territory. For the last five-plus seasons, he’s been the No. 1 netminder for his team and his workload has been steady.
Now, he’ll be asked to start one game every 10 days or two weeks for a team that suddenly finds itself in the thick of a playoff race. It would be a daunting assignment for the most experienced ’keeper but Demko approaches it the same way he has approached every stage of his career.
“That’s the circumstance I’m in right now and that’s fine,” he said. “I’m up here. I’ve got a lot to prove and I’m more than willing to do that. I know it’s going to take work and results. I’m very OK with that.”
Demko’s win against the Sabres was his first start after more than two weeks of practice with the Canucks.
“When you’re in this position, you have to treat your practices like games and just have that intensity. I felt good. I didn’t feel very rusty at all. Just some nerves.”
Not that you’d know.
“He’s got the gift of ice water in his veins,” said Johnson. “The bigger the game the more calm and confident he is.”
He’s not a finished product. Clark talked about the need to process the game at NHL speed and that showed up in Demko’s one NHL start last season, a 5-4 overtime win against Columbus. But his most impressive save Friday might have came late in the third period when he read a cross-ice pass and stopped Rasmus Dahlin’s one-timer with his mask.
“We monitored what he did in Utica very closely,” said Clark. “Watching his games down there we felt, OK, he’s graduated from this level. So let’s do this.”
Sounds like a plan. Maybe because it is.