HELPING HAND
Parise gets cathartic goal on his father J.P.’s birthday
When Zach Parise showed up to the rink on Saturday, he had a good feeling.
The date, Dec. 11, is one he’ll always have marked: his late father J.P.’s birthday. After a bout with lung cancer, J.P. Parise passed away in 2015. He would have been 80 on Saturday.
Zach Parise, instead, had to settle for positive thoughts. That ended up being enough.
At 16:33 in the second period, Parise scored what ended up being the gamewinning goal over the Devils after Jean-Gabriel Pageau found him on a shorthanded breakaway. It was his first goal as an Islander, for the team’s first win at UBS Arena, coming after nearly two months of frustration at the perfect time for Parise.
During his slump, Mathew Barzal said Parise never showed his frustration outwardly, staying level-headed even as the missed chances piled up.
“But when you look back on games that you lose by one goal,” Parise said after the 4-2 win, “and you have opportunities that you don’t score, everyone wants to contribute.
We’ve been working hard trying to win games. From an individual standpoint when you’re not producing, you’re losing by that one goal or one shot, it starts to get a little frustrating.”
On the heels of losing 11 of 12, Saturday’s game was, “as close to a must-win as we’ve had all season,” Parise said. That it came in such a fashion was a bonus.
To understand Zach Parise, or for that matter, to understand hockey in the state of Minnesota, J.P. Parise is an essential starting point.
A native of Smooth Rock Falls, Ontario, J.P. Parise played nine seasons for the Minnesota North Stars, starting with their expansion 1967-68 team, scoring 154 goals with 242 assists for the team and earning two all-star nods. (He also played several seasons with the Islanders during his 14-year NHL career.)
Parise served as an assistant coach for the North Stars from 1980-88, except for 1984, when he coached the franchise’s minor league outfit, then served as hockey director at Shattuck-Saint Mary’s, an elite prep school in Fairbault, Minn., that has churned out talent such as Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Toews. One of the rinks at Shattuck-Saint Mary’s now bears J.P.’s name.
“Every kid’s dad is their role model, but it goes beyond that with him,” Zach Parise said the September before J.P.’s death. “It’s so much more. The life lessons he taught me have been unbelievable.”
When the family stopped chemotherapy on J.P.’s lung cancer, Zach told the Minnesota Star-Tribune it was, “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life.”
“Hockey was our thing,” Parise said then. “Him coming to every game or watching every game and talking to him after every game and talking hockey, that’s not there anymore. I don’t know how else to put it, it’s been brutal.”
So, yes, Parise finally scoring on Saturday had an air of preordainment.
Though he of course knew the date, Parise didn’t realize anyone else was aware. He kept it to himself, but others around the team knew the significance.
“Zach Parise scoring a shorthanded goal, you saw the reaction of our bench,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said. “Zach’s dad’s birthday is today, so he got a little help today.”
And when the puck went in, Parise’s reaction — two clenched fists and a roar of elation — said it all.
“There’s not a day that really goes by that I don’t think about him,” Parise said. “What he did for me as a person and as a player. … It was pretty emotional when that puck went in, of course, my mind goes right to him.”