Friendly rivals team up for Canada
Marner, Strome expected to play together on a top line along with Lawson Crouse
Mitch Marner and Dylan Strome have gone from being fierce rivals to being best friends who have won the Stanley Cup together.
OK, not the real Stanley Cup. But a mocked-up one that’s in the Strome household in Mississauga where Strome holds summer road hockey tournaments and Marner plays net.
“I started off in net, but he pulled me,” Strome said.
It’s clear Marner and Strome, along with Lawson Crouse, will form one of Canada’s top lines as the team holds camp this weekend in preparation for the world junior hockey championship, which starts Dec. 26 in Helsinki.
The team will play an exhibition game Saturday night against a team of Canadian university all-stars, but the Crouse-Strome-Marner line won’t play.
There’s no real need for the coaching staff to see them play, not when there are players beneath them on the depth chart trying to make a good enough impression to stay.
“I like their speed and their size and obviously their skill,” said Canadian coach Dave Lowry, adding it was a no-brainer to pair Marner with Strome. “I think usually guys who are friends (and) have passion for the game are talking about it regularly, and that’s how they find and create their chemistry.”
They’re on-ice chemistry is obvious, their off-ice bond is charming.
“I didn’t really like him very much back when we were younger,” Strome said.
They were fierce rivals, each striving to be the best, each standing in the way of the other.
“I’ve played against him my whole life,” Marner said. “I know how to get under his skin pretty well.
“We both want to be the best. We both want to win games. We hate losing. When we finally got playing together and knowing each other, we kind of realized that we were good buddies and had the same kind of personality and it all kind of clicked.”
That happened in 2013 in the world under-17 challenge in Yarmouth, N.S., when Ontario was down three goals in the second game of the tournament.
“The coach switched things up and put us on the same line and he (Marner) ended up getting a hat trick in the third period, tied things up,” said Strome. “Ever since then, we started to bond at these kind of events, play cards, do stuff all the time.
“It translates over the summer. I know his friends, he knows my friends. We find a way to hang out over the summer. Road hockey comes in with that. It’s all fun. We just get out there on the weekend and hoist that little Stanley Cup that we made.”
Strome calls Marner a jokester. Marner says Strome can get “grumpy” if things don’t go his way.
Their rivalry has gone from fierce to friendly. Each measures himself against the other.
Marner held the OHL scoring lead last season until the last game when Strome scored a remarkable six points to edge him by one point (129128).
Strome got bragging rights again when he went third overall in the summer draft to the Arizona Coyotes, one spot ahead of Marner, who was taken by the Maple Leafs. Marner can brag that he’s a Leaf, though, the favourite NHL team of both players growing up. And Marner is ahead of Strome in OHL scoring so far this year (58 points to 53).
Strome got another one-up on Marner, when Strome’s Erie Otters beat the Marner’s London Knights in the first regular-season game between the two teams this season.
“Right now I’m going to try to boost him as much as possible, make him feel good about his game,” Marner said.
“No, he’s got the lead right now,” said Strome.
The two got to know each other even more in the spring, during the run-up to the draft. They travelled together to the NHL Combine in Buffalo. They were among the handful invited to a Stanley Cup final game by the NHL. Then, of course, there was the draft, where the two forged a pact.
“What we were trying to do at the beginning of the year is to play good enough for our junior teams to have a good record and also to get invited to this camp,” Strome said. “We both did a good job of that. Our teams are doing well and it worked out in our favour that we got invited to this camp. That’s what we wanted to do, ever since the draft. It’s working pretty well so far.”