Knight vision
Goalie helps Team USA barrel past Canada for world title
The barrel is important. Not as important as the gold medals hanging around the neck of the goaltender from Darien and his American teammates — yet still important.
The barrel helped deliver a focused message, helped inspire, was misconstrued as a slight to another nation and, ultimately, helped Spencer Knight lead Team USA to the world junior ice hockey championship in Edmonton, Alberta.
“One of the people on our staff, not a player, legit ordered a barrel on like Amazon and got it shipped to our hotel,” Knight said Tuesday. “A brand-new barrel; it came in and our team doctor was walking around the lobby with this ginormous box. Everybody’s like, what the heck does this guy have?” He had the barrel.
“Each morning,” Knight said, “we’d get this newsletter, with quotes and updates, and one of the first ones right before the start of the tournament was the story of crossing the Sahara Desert.”
After Knight had stopped 34 shots in the 2-0 victory over heavily favored Canada last week for the Americans’ first world junior title since 2017, coach Nate Leaman explained the story in the postgame news conference. Ron Rolston had told it when Leaman was an assistant at the 2007 tournament:
Deep in Algeria, there’s a flat, remote area called the Tanezrouft of more than 500 miles with no water, no grass, nothing except sand that shifts to cover up tracks. The legend is that migrating birds land by people just for some com
pany. More than 1,300 people had perished along its way. So the French placed 55-gallon oil drums at intervals of five kilometers, the maximum that can be seen on the horizon either way before the earth starts curving away.
The message, Leaman said, was they weren’t going to talk about the final destination. They weren’t going to talk about any gold medal. They were going to keep their eye on one barrel at a time.
“It was,” Leaman said, “a great image.”
“We weren’t looking at the gold medal, we were looking at the next game and we barely remembered our previous game,” said Knight, 19. “It was a mentality we really rallied behind, really got behind it.”
And one that would serve Knight well. This was the Boston College sophomore’s third international tournament. The 10th American goalie ever taken in the NHL draft (13th overall by Florida in 2019), Knight is expected to have a strong professional career. He started four games last year in the world juniors and helped lead the Americans to a bronze medal finish in the world U18 in 2019.
“Each year I know we’re going to have a team that’s very competitive,” Knight said. “My mind is on the first game, not the end result. I look at the games more individually. Going into it, I knew we had a great team, a lot of talent and depth.”
That doesn’t mean he can’t have a bad game. Before each game in the tournament, the Americans would affix a logo of the country they were playing to the barrel. The first one was Russia. It wasn’t pretty for Knight. He allowed four goals on 12 shots before giving way to Dustin Wolf.
“It obviously was a tough game,” Knight said. “There were also some bad bounces, right? People think it’s perfect all the time and forget you’re human and you make mistakes. In those times of adversity, you learn a lot. The team responded really well. I thought I responded pretty well. You’re going to face adversity in a tournament, and we faced it early, which was good, I thought. It actually almost helped us. After that we hit the ground running and became closer as a group and got better each day.”
Knight says he “always does 24 hours.” That’s his decompression period.
“It’ll usually bug you for that amount of time,” he said. “It was tough. Everyone’s watching. I deleted social media (for the tournament). Last year, I did, too. So many people have so many opinions. You’re looking at stuff that can bother you and take you away from the goal. At first, I was a little rattled, but then I got over it. I told myself, ‘It really can’t get worse than this.’ Go out there and try to have fun when you get another chance.”
He had to wait a game. Wolf shut out overmatched Austria, 11-0, before Knight returned to stop 22 shots in a 7-0 victory over Czech Republic and made 27 saves against Sweden in the 4-0 group finale victory. Now, he was stopping everything.
Still, one barrel at a time. “It does kind of show what goaltending is,” Knight said. “You can be a detrimental factor that can kind of ruin the game for a team. Everyone’s kind of looking down upon you and the next thing you know you’re on top of the world. That’s kind of how it is. That’s why you can’t let the highs get too high or lows get to low. Things bounce back. You’ve got to trust the process. Act like you’ve been there before.”
The USA tournament record shutout streak reached 218 minutes, 53 seconds before Matej Kaslik scored on Knight in the 5-2 win over Slovakia in the quarterfinals. After a win over Finland in the semis, Teams USA was on the ice the next night. Knight’s third shutout against Canada set a record for an American goalie in the tournament.
“That day I was just telling myself, this is a great opportunity, these are moments we’ll never forget, we’re loose, have fun, right?” Knight said. “We were playing one of the best Canadian teams ever, so much skill, talent, structure. I don’t think anyone felt bad pressure, everyone went into it with an open mind.”
Tyler Zegras, from Bedford. New York — a halfdozen miles from the Connecticut state line — scored yet another goal in the finale and was named tournament MVP. The Anaheim Ducks draft pick had 18 points in seven games.
“He was amazing,” Knight said. “I’ve been playing with him for a very, very long time. Since like squirts or peewee (at MidFairfield Youth Hockey), we always played together. Through Avon Old Farms (for sophomore year), the U.S. Development Program until the time he went to BU and I went to BC. We’re great buddies. So it doesn’t surprise me he got this good. I think there’s a lot of upside to his game still that people don’t know about it.”
When it was over, when the Americans had rejoiced and began taking the photographs that last a lifetime, out rolled the barrel.
“I understand why people were upset,” Knight said. “I get it.”
People only saw the Canada logo. They hadn’t seen the countries on the barrel from previous games. And they thought it was a trash can. They thought the Yanks were being terribly disrespectful. And you know what that means?
Twitter and social media went nuts.
“It wasn’t even our first team picture, it was like our 14th and last one,” Knight said. “Obviously, it didn’t look good, but it was something, I guess, only our team really understood. There was no shot at Canada intended. They probably were the best team on paper in the tournament and have tremendous players. Amazing players for years to come. It just got misconstrued. I hope people can see it was only something we had rallied behind.”
Knight’s dad had gone to last year’s tournament in Czech Republic, but COVID erased those plans. Spencer returned Wednesday to Boston, his iPhone bursting with messages of congratulations from folks back home, friends, family, guys he has played with in the past. With the BC dorms not open yet, it was back into the hotel. He didn’t play against New Hampshire at home Friday, but he returned for a 3-2 overtime win at New Hampshire on Sunday. Great save in the last minute of regulation, 1,000th career college save during the game and a 14-game unbeaten streak (13-0-1) for BC dating to last season. He’s rolling like … yes, a barrel.
“Now,” Spencer Knight said. “I’ve just got to find a way to get my laundry done.”