Arizona kid puts on historic show at his NHL debut
TORONTO — In the middle of the Arizona desert was a rink, if you could call it that, with a sheet of ice about a third the size of regulation. And above the rink were some bleachers. And in the bleachers would sit a kid. And next to the kid would be a duffel bag. And in the duffel bag would be a dozen hockey jerseys, each a different color, with “OZZIE ICE” and a logo of a snarling grizzly bear. And the kid would sit there until, inevitably, a couple of kids, usually older, would be short a player for their 3-on-3 game.
And there, in the bleachers, in the middle of the Arizona desert, young Auston Matthews would start digging through his bag.
For that kid to become what he is today, a 19-yearold rookie sensation who has arrived at the shores of Lake Ontario to help lift one of the most storied franchises in hockey out of the bleakest era in its history, a combination of both unknowable fate and cold, hard calculation was required.
If he had been two days older, he might have been subject to the 2015 NHL draft, instead of becoming the top overall pick in 2016, and thus would have wound up with someone besides the Toronto Maple Leafs.
If he hadn’t defied decades of convention by playing professionally in Switzerland as an 18-year-old, he might not have sparkled into the NHL with the greatest debut in league history — a four-goal game Oct. 12 in Ottawa.
But of all the twists and turns in Matthews’s story, the most remarkable — and ultimately the most significant — is where he came from. “He’s an absolute trailblazer,” said Mike DeAngelis, the director of hockey for the Arizona Junior Coyotes youth program. “Auston is the outlier.”
Because it was always understood that among the list of things you can’t grow in the desert, at least without an inordinate amount of resources and care, at or near the top was this: hockey players.
And because young Auston Matthews had another duffel bag back home, stuffed with baseball gear, and had this been the 1980s, say, instead of the 2000s, the kid might have never been in those bleachers with those hockey jerseys. There might not have been enough resources or care in the entire Valley of the Sun to grow and nurture a hockey phenom out of the desert sand.
Twenty years earlier, Auston Matthews almost certainly would have played something else.
Going pro
It was a phone call Don Granato had never had to make in 20-plus years of coaching, including five years as coach of the U.S. National Team Developmental Program. He had seen NHL firstrounders come through the program. But he had never seen anyone like Matthews. Granato figured if the kid was his own son, he would want to know what they were in for. So he called Auston’s father Brian Matthews. He said they needed to talk.
“I just had a gut feeling — I gotta call Brian and the family, right now, because their world is going to change, and fast,” Granato recalled of that conversation in 2014, when Auston was 16 and still nearly two years out from the 2016 draft. “I just said, ‘Do you understand how good Auston is?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure, Coach.’ I explained to him, ‘Well, he’s got a chance to be top in the top two or three in the draft two years from now.’ ”
The idea to take Matthews to Switzerland, instead of the NCAA or Canadian juniors, came from his agents at Creative Artists Agency. The Matthews family quickly got on board, and on Sept. 17, 2015, Auston’s 18th birthday, he made his debut for the Zurich Lions of the Swiss National League.
DeAngelis, the Junior Coyotes director, had spent time in the Swiss league during his playing days, and said, “It’s a grown man’s league. People were saying, ‘He should be playing junior hockey.‘ But Auston would have destroyed junior hockey.”
And nearly four months after the draft, Matthews stepped onto the ice in Ottawa for his NHL debut. By the end of that night, Auston had done something unprecedented in league history — four goals in a debut — and his mother’s tearstreaked face, up in the stands, had become famous across North America.