THE NATURAL
From a young age, it was clear Auston Matthews was destined for the top of his class.
BUFFALO, N.Y.— It is, in many ways, a prodigy story the hockey world has heard before. Auston Matthews went to his first NHL game as a toddler, fell in love with the bang-and-crash beauty of the sport, and decided not long after to devote absurd swaths of time to his freakishly driven pursuit of on-ice greatness.
On the days when he wasn’t scheduled for a trip to rink, he’d indulge his passion by shooting pucks in the driveway of his childhood home. The only twist to the familiar tale was the geographical location of the residence.
Very little grows in the desert on which Matthews’ native Scottsdale, Ariz., is built. Maybe that makes it an unlikely place for a future Maple Leaf to sprout. But when the heat got too oppressive in the Valley of the Sun, young Auston would simply move his puck- shooting into the relative cool of the garage, where he’d occasionally strap on in-line skates and play keepaway against his dad.
“Needless to say, our garage has gone through a couple of renovations,” Brian Matthews, Auston’s father, was saying recently. “We were fixing everything from the drywall to lights to the garage door itself, to the garage door opener . . . We finally said, ‘Enough. Hockey’s expensive enough. You’re destroying the house.’ ”
All these years later, unless you’ve been residing under a cactus in the boonies, you know Matthews stands to become a cornerstone in the ongoing reconstruction of a long-time house of hockey horrors. Barring an unlikely 11th-hour change of heart in Leafland, on Friday night he is expected to join the Maple Leafs as the franchise’s first No. 1 overall pick since Wendel Clark in 1985. He’ll also become the first player raised in a sunshine state to be the NHL’s top draftee.
How did he do it? There are plenty of reasons under the sun. But Russ Courtnall is convinced a good part of the credit should go to a Scottsdale-based skating coach named Boris Dorozhenko. Courtnall, a Maple Leafs first-round draft pick in 1983, met the instructor about a decade ago, when Courtnall enrolled his son, Lawton, into one of Dorozhenko’s camps at the recommendation of fellow NHL alumnus Claude Lemieux.
Auston, about a year younger than Lawton, was already a star pupil. Lawton Courtnall remembers an 8- or 9-year-old Auston eagerly demonstrating Dorozhenko’s drills to fellow students about a decade his senior.
“Auston was always a special player,” said Lawton, now a freshman forward at Western Michigan University.
Dorozhenko’s ways are unconventional. Russ Courtnall, who was known as one of the NHL’s best skaters during his playing days, said he once partook in a weeklong camp “and couldn’t do any of the drills.”
The array of exercises — many of which push students to try moves they’d likely never try in a game — is vast and difficult to explain in words. But Russ Courtnall offered an example: While most players grow up skating circles leaning into the turn balanced on the inside edges of their blades, Dorozhenko demands his students skate circles leaning the opposite way while balancing on the outside edges.
Dorozhenko, a former pro in Soviet-era Ukraine who first met Auston around age 6 or 7, remembered a fast learner who hated to waste precious ice time. When most pupils did a drill once in the span of, say, 30 seconds, young Auston would typically do it three times — once before the group, once with the group and once after the group, while most of the players were sipping water.
“He did this for many years,” said Dorozhenko.
There are those who attribute Auston’s now-explosive stride to all that extra work.
“It’s a good thing they met,” Russ Courtnall said of Matthews and Dorozhenko. “If their paths didn’t cross, I know Auston would have been good — I just don’t know if he would have been this good.”
Auston might not be this good if he hadn’t spent untold hours at Ozzy Ice, a rink a 10-minute drive from his home featuring two small-sized ice pads, 85 feet by 65 feet. Mind you, Sean Whyte, an ex-NHLer who coached Auston on those pads, said he probably would have made it as a pro “no matter what he did.”
“He was just that driven and that passionate and that skilled — whenever he was taught a skill, it was pretty much embedded in him,” Whyte said.
Still, there was something to be said for the hundreds of 3-on-3
“For me, within three or four days, it was . . . ‘This is a spectacular player.’ ” DON GRANATO U.S. DEVELOPMENT COACH
games a year Matthews played on smaller ice, dominating players four and five years older.
“He was still scoring five or six goals a game,” Whyte said. “If you learn how to stickhandle in the phone booth, when you get out into the open ice it’s that much easier.”
Matthews played plenty of fullsheet hockey, too. But for at least a couple of seasons, around the time he was 10 or 12, his parents eschewed the time and expense of joining one of the AAA travel programs that flew around the United States and Canada playing tournaments.
“We focused more on the development side, skating with Boris, skating with other coaches. And I think it’s kind of paying off now,” Brian Matthews said.
Brian Matthews, the chief technology officer for an entertainment company, said when Auston eventually joined a AAA team, the annual bill came to anywhere between $15,000 and $20,000 depending on the year and the amount of travel. He called it a “considerable” expense for he and his wife, Ema, neither of whom knew much about hockey in the beginning. Ema, who often worked as a server at a highend restaurant during Auston’s youth, grew up on a farm in Hermosillo, Mexico. Brian, a junior college pitcher who said Auston was more talented on the baseball diamond but was won over by hockey’s faster pace, describes himself as “just your standard white guy” who learned Spanish after he met Ema.
Auston — or Papi, as he is better known to friends and family — is the couple’s second of three children and only son. Alexandria, about three years older, is a student at Arizona State University. Breyanna, about five years younger, is an aspiring competitive golfer.
“We’ve made sacrifices, both Ema and myself, for our kids. But we’ve done so happily,” Brian Matthews said. “Our family is all about sacrifice. There’s not a lot of taking. There’s a lot of giving, though.”
Certainly Auston was gifted with his share of natural prowess. Around age 12 or 13 he crossed paths with a Phoenix-area strength coach, Marcos Esquivel, who still remembers how the young hockey hopeful “was as strong as my football guys.” Esquivel’s colleague Marcus Brunson, a former pro sprinter who once ran 9.99 in the 100 metres, remembered Matthews displaying mental focus that recalled Olympic track greats like Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt.
“You can almost see it in their eyes — they just go to a different place,” Brunson said.
Ron Filion, who coached Auston when he made the jump to AAA, saw a fluid athleticism.
“Everything seemed so effortless, so natural to him,” Filion said. “And such a humble kid, humble family.”
Filion, who played junior hockey in Quebec with Sidney Crosby’s father, Troy, eventually alerted Crosby’s agent, Pat Brisson, to Auston’s vast potential. And if Brisson said that he never expected Matthews, at age 15, to be the No. 1 overall pick come 2016, the growing buzz around the desert-raised gem didn’t escape the U.S. developmental program, which soon enough invited Auston to take up residence at its base in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“For me, within three or four days, it was ‘Oh my gosh.’ We have a lot of special players. This is a spectacular player,” said Don Granato, who coached the program.
After a couple of seasons in Ann Arbor — one of which was interrupted by a broken leg — Auston veered from the usual developmental path that would have seen him play junior hockey and found a place in the Swiss pro league, where, as an 18year-old playing against men, he racked up 24 goals and 46 points in 36 games.
“He just wanted the challenge,” said Granato.
How good can he be in Toronto? Granato says he has the “inner drive” of Jonathan Toews and Crosby and puck-possession skills to rival Pavel Datsyuk. And while some have likened his two-way commitment to that of Anze Kopitar, Marc Crawford, who coached Matthews in the Swiss league and a young Kopitar in the NHL, said that the comparison doesn’t go far enough.
“Anze was good,” Crawford said, “but Auston is remarkable.”
Crawford said Matthews’ heavy release is likely to put him at the top of his rookie class in shots on goal, which is to say nothing of what his vision and passing might do.
“I’ve coached the Sedins, and they’re, to me, the best passers I’ve ever seen. But Auston, he passes like they do,” Crawford said.
If that’s huge praise, Matthews has broad shoulders. Says Crawford, speaking of a frame that measured six-foot-two and 216 pounds at the draft combine: “He’s already NHL supersized.” As an unlikely prodigy completes his journey from a driveway in the desert to the glare of the NHL spotlight, he and his family are prepared for the heat.
“The possibility of going to Toronto excites us as a family,” said Brian Matthews. “We’ll wait and see who calls his name, and then that will obviously become our most favourite city.”