CANADA TO GOLD
HUNTER BROTHERS JUST THE GUYS TO PUSH
The Hunter family has a standing annual holiday tradition.
They get together with friends and play hockey.
What else?
“We used to have it on a little pond out by my house,” said Mark Hunter, who lives on a farm just outside of Petrolia in southwestern Ontario.
A couple of years ago, their Christmas session moved to Budweiser Gardens, the 9,000-seat downtown London home of their successful Knights franchise in the Ontario Hockey League.
“We needed a bigger ice surface,” Mark, the club’s GM, said. “It’s a little warmer, too.”
There is a lot of chirping, especially when a brother or cousin — or maybe even a Mcrae of longtime associate Basil Mcrae’s kin — tries a fancy-pants toe-drag or shoots and misses, providing the perfect setup for some can’t-hitthe-broadside-of-a-barn jokes.
Dave Gagner, the former NHLER who worked with the Knights as an assistant coach for a couple of seasons, had the Hunter clan pegged long ago.
“They spend 95 per cent of their time talking about hockey,” he observed, “and the other five per cent is about farming.”
This year, though, it’s 100 per cent puck talk.
Dale and Mark Hunter, junior hockey’s most successful operators, will oversee an Olympic-sized sheet of ice in Ostrava, Czech Republic. On it, they hope to restore Canada’s world junior reputation.
A proud sampling of the Hunter clan will head to the Czech Republic to form the roots of a pro-canada cheering section to see, up close, if the best coach (Dale) and top recruiter (Mark) of teenaged hockey talent over the last 20 years can get the job done.
Dale’s face lights up at the thought.
“It’s great so many are going,” he said. “They’re using it as vacation. Everybody watches the tournament. It’s tradition in Canada, even if you’re not a hockey person. It’s a commitment and that’s what you sign on for.”
It’s been 42 years since this family has represented Canada at the under-20 level. Dale and Mark’s older brother Dave, a hard-working cog in the Oilers’ Stanley Cup dynasty, played in the first official world junior tournament in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
He brought home a silver medal. “I remember Mom (the late Bernice) and Dad (Dick) went over and left us here for Christmas alone,” Dale said. “It was pretty special. They sent the (Memorial Cup champion Hamilton Fincups) team and picked up guys (including Dave from Sudbury) and played. It was quite an honour for him and (special) for Mom and Dad to leave the farm.”
And every Boxing Day since, the family has paid close attention to
Canada’s fortunes.
At first, Dale and Mark watched their NHL peers play in it. Dale’s own career lasted 19 seasons, most famously with Quebec and Washington, and he retired as the league’s second-most penalized player in history (and first all-time in the playoffs).
Based on how the game has evolved, he’ll stay in that spot, likely forever.
Mark was a first-rounder with the Canadiens and later scored 44 goals with the Blues. His playing days were cut short by injury, but he was on the 1989 Stanley Cup champion Flames.
He started on the coaching track, first at home in Junior B, then with the nearby Sarnia Sting and later with the St. John’s Maple Leafs. When the chance to buy the Knights popped up, the brothers went all-in on their hockey passion.
It took them a little more than three seasons to assemble a masterpiece — their 2004-05 Memorial Cup winner recently acknowledged as the Canadian Hockey League’s team of the century.
They won another in 2016 with a first line of Mitch Marner, Matthew Tkachuk and Christian Dvorak. Almost every year, they put bigname players in the world junior tournament.
The first notable was Rick Nash. Corey Perry and Danny Syvret played on the fabled 2005 Canadian squad that hammered Russia in the finals at Grand Forks. Goalie Steve Mason was the MVP in 2008 in the Czech Republic. John Tavares arrived in London after leading the charge a year later in 2009 at Ottawa, then old London D-man John Carlson scored the golden goal for the United States in Saskatoon.
Knights import goaltender Igor Bobkov saved the day for the Russians in their shocking comeback win over Canada in 2011. Max Domi, the London captain, was the top forward in his Toronto hometown tournament in 2015 on a winning team that included Connor Mcdavid.
Now, it’s current London forwards Liam Foudy and Connor Mcmichael’s turn to wear the Canadian jersey. They will try to live up to the Knights legacy at the event.
“It feels like every NHL game I watch, there’s at least one Knight in it,” Mcmichael, a Capitals first-rounder said. “The Hunters have such a rich history of being winners. They can build a good roster and hopefully, win a gold medal for our country.
“There’s no one else better to do it.”
Only two men — Brian Kilrea and the late Bert Templeton — have won more OHL games than Dale Hunter.
Should this opportunity have come sooner?
Of course. Every year Canada stumbled, there was a cry to enlist the Hunters.
They’re not worried about timing. It’s enough to have it now.
“It’s exciting,” Mark said. “If you enjoy hockey and of course, we do, it’s on the big stage and we’ll see what we can do with it. We’ll see if our group can perform in times where all the eyes of Canada are on us.”
This isn’t some career stepping stone, like it has been for so many other coaches. Dale went to the NHL eight years ago, coaxed the Capitals one victory shy of the Eastern Conference final, then quickly left.
He reasoned that he enjoyed working with the junior-aged players and being close to home.
His coaching stint made an impression on Washington’s most famous player. Earlier this year when asked how Toronto star Auston Matthews could go about improving his two-way game, Alex Ovechkin cracked to “call Dale Hunter”.
Mark joined the Leafs in 2014 to become a talent-identifying pillar for the Shanaplan. He returned to London shortly after fellow assistant GM Kyle Dubas was elevated to the big job.
“There are lots of things that were going on when we were there — we hired a new coach and changed things around in the organization,” Mark said. “All of that stuff is good for you to learn. Being around a guy like Lou (former GM Lou Lamoriello, now with the Islanders), who has a ton of experience, you watch him and he’s calm. He takes everything in stride and deals with it. You’ve seen almost every situation so you can handle it and feel comfortable. That’s what experience brings.”
The most important decisions for Canada now will come at ice level.
That’s Dale’s domain.
Shortly before his retirement as a player, his daily routine in Colorado was to sit down with goaltender Patrick Roy, who had a stake in the Quebec Remparts junior hockey club, and watch their games. He was breaking down the tendencies of teenaged hockey players before even considering a coaching job.
Video, he believes, is a great equalizer and a crucial teaching tool.
Some of the European coaches he will face, like Russia’s Valeri Bragin, are full-timers with their national program. Hunter, busy with the Knights, didn’t have that luxury.
To catch up, he requested to be on the bench for all six games as the Canadian Hockey League’s Canada Russia Series toured around the country in November. He alternated days of London prep work with world junior cram sessions.
“I wanted to make sure I saw every player,” he said.
That habit became contagious. His assistant coaches in London, including son Dylan, started following along with him.
“I think I’ve seen a Finnish-sweden game from the Four Nations tournament four times,” Dylan joked. “We all share the coach’s office so you tend to watch what he has on the screen. We’ll start arguing about it. He loves tape. He’ll watch guys individually and all the European teams. It’s a different game on the big rink and he wants to be prepared for it.”
Six years ago, Dale Hunter coached the Canadian under-18 squad to gold at what’s now called the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. It didn’t start well, but it ended with the desired result.
“Technically, he’s strong and knows who he wants to put on the ice,” Mark said about Dale. “There’s a respect he holds behind the bench that a lot of coaches don’t have. The players that are around him long enough can see. He’s not an in-your-face kind of coach, but he’s a coach who gets his point through by ice time and his presence on the bench and in the dressing room.”
His most important quality? He’s not afraid of change. His teams are constantly evolving — game-to-game, sometimes shiftto-shift. This year in London, he used a three-defencemen wrinkle on the power play. Other seasons, he deployed five forwards. He’s constantly experimenting with lines and chemistry.
“It’s the world junior and you get to have the elite group of guys in the country,” said Dylan Hunter, who is running the Knights in Dale’s absence. “It’s always fun to coach good players and find out who’s going to be that go-to guy. I think he’s pretty excited about it.
“But it’s crazy to think this time, I won’t be watching it with him on Boxing Day.”
Maybe next year.
It’s time to make the family — and country — proud again.