What makes a highlight reel save?

By Brent Gwidt

Development quote of the month:

“I love everything about hockey.”

            -Wayne Gretzky

The Road Less Traveled Proves To Be The Smart Road For Auston Matthews                                                                                                                                         

“This is a story about the road not often traveled. It’s an original story that makes little sense to many people. An 18-year-old kid from Scottsdale, Ariz. – a place known for its cacti, golf courses and desert nightlife develops himself  into the best prospect in hockey and the projected savior of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But to fully understand how Auston Matthews got to where he is, you need to know that when he was a boy, he spent thousands of hours on tiny rinks – not much larger than an end zone – crowded with other kids, stickhandling in and around masses of skates and sticks and working on his game.

You need to learn about his skating coach, a Ukrainian named Boris who made players work and train for countless hours until they sometimes couldn’t walk the next day.

You have to recognize Matthews as one-of-a-kind kid who focused so intensely on every aspect of his development .

The next star of one of the NHL’s historic franchises will come from the U.S. Sun Belt and has made headlines ever since the Leafs won the draft lottery in April to get the top pick. A No. 1 has never come from a warm-weather city.

But what makes Matthews’s story exceptional is that growing up in a city with few rinks and little hockey history never held him back. He took a road less traveled, when compared to all the other young aspiring players he competed against. And it paid off.

“It’s a pretty amazing story,” said Mike DeAngelis, director of hockey for Arizona’s Junior Coyotes program. “How does a kid become that good, the best teenager in the world, and ready to step into the NHL, coming out of that type of development schedule? The word outlier comes to mind.”

The beginning

It started at Ozzie Ice.

Built by wealthy oil-pipeline entrepreneur Dwayne Osadchuk, Ozzie Ice was created to showcase a type of cutting-edge synthetic ice that he had patented. The facility had two small rinks – one synthetic and one real ice – with regulation nets and boards.

Auston Matthews was its best customer. He trained there early and often. Matthews played with anyone and everyone. Kids his age, kids younger, kids older and many of them varying in talent level. He loved it.

Matthews family was committed to his training at Ozzie Ice regardless of the doubters . While other parents were skeptical of the small sheets, Auston’s father wasn’t.

Brian Matthews grew up in Scottsdale playing competitive baseball, a pitcher at a top junior college. He blew out his shoulder early on, but he knew how important development is.

What he didn’t know was the typical development path for NHL prospects. He saw other youth parents in Arizona paying more than $20,000 a year for their kids to travel across the country on AAA teams and he figured that there had to be a better way, or at the very least, a more affordable one.

Having his son train on the smaller sheet, for hours on end against all kinds of competition, made sense to the new hockey dad. He thought that it was similar to how so many soccer greats started in the slums and gyms of Brazil with their own makeshift games of futsal, the 5-on-5 version of soccer.

“When they played games, the score on the small sheet was always like 45-42 or 31-30,” Brian Matthews said of Ozzie Ice. “You couldn’t go anywhere on the ice where someone wasn’t within 20 feet of you. You had to learn how to use your hands, how to think ahead, where the puck was going to go, who was coming, how to turn, how to get away from traffic, create space – all of that stuff – in such a small little window of ice. A lot of kids here developed a lot of really good skills there. They were forced to.”

“People thought it was a joke,” Brian Matthews said. “They said, ‘How do you teach kids hockey without going the full length of the ice? This is ridiculous.’”

Then Auston Matthews began showing up at tournaments and filling the net. Ozzie Ice started to catch on with parents desperate to find ice time in the desert.

Everyone believes that some of the magic Matthews displays on the ice today came from those small ice sheets. “He learned how to stickhandle in a phone booth, then all of a sudden he was put out in a full sheet of ice,” he explained. “You’ve just got that much more time to react and execute.”

Matthews’s coaches can see that influence too.

“His puckhandling skills are off the chart,” said Marc Crawford, who coached Matthews last season in Switzerland’s top pro league. “I’m always amazed at the things he can do. And it really translates in a game. His short-area game is at an NHL level for sure – and it’s at an NHL elite level. I believe that’s a lot of what the game is becoming. 

Paying the price

When it became clear that his son was smitten about the game, Brian Matthews tried to pick up as much as he could about hockey and support his son in a variety of hockey skill camps. 

However, the financial burden of raising a hockey player in Arizona was a constant. Matthews has a good job – as the chief technology officer with a manufacturing firm – but because ice time is expensive in Arizona, there were sacrifices.

At one point, Ema Matthews worked two jobs – at Starbucks and as a waitress at a high-end restaurant – to help pay for Auston’s hockey.

There were two years where Auston was unable to join a travel team and instead skated with Boris or on his own. Explaining to him that he couldn’t play the game he loved, the way his friends were, wasn’t always easy.

“It was difficult,” Brian Matthews said of making the costs work. “… There were times where it was like, ‘How are we going to do this?’ But you find a way. Our son had a passion and one way or another we found a way to get things done.”

An incredible rise

Everyone in Arizona’s tiny hockey community always knew Auston Matthews had talent. But because he bounced from team to team, and wasn’t always in the high-profile programs, few had him pegged as a potential NHL star.

That began to change as he got older and people began to take notice. Matthews eventually played AAA in Arizona and gained the attention of the U.S. National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Coach Don Granato invited him for a tryout that summer and realized Matthews’s potential right away. He became the first player from Arizona to join the program.

A few months later, Granato felt compelled to call Brian Matthews. To warn him.

“Brian, I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to give you a heads-up here,” the coach said. “I’ve been around hockey a long, long time, and you’ve got to start preparing for your life to be pretty chaotic.”

“What are you talking about?” the alarmed father asked. Auston Matthews had blown expectations away. Matthews played with the under-18 team and produced nearly a point a game. He was doing things with the puck Granato hadn’t seen from a player that young. The veteran coach began to believe he had one of the best American players – ever – under his watch.

The top U.S. college programs began lining up, hoping they could get Matthews to commit. The WHL’s Everett Silvertips, who had drafted him, were pressing for him to play his draft year there.

Matthews once again took a path less travelled by signing professionally in Switzerland. He turned pro and earned one of the higher salaries in the Swiss league – rumoured to be $400,000 (U.S.). 

Again, he shone. Matthews scored 24 goals and 46 points in 36 games for Zurich – the highest totals in league history for a player under 20 years old.

The future face of the Leafs?

Those who know Matthews well don’t worry that the limelight in Toronto – with the expectations that would come with being the franchise’s first No. 1 pick since Wendel Clark in 1985 – will overwhelm him. They believe that he has the right disposition – humble, hard-working and disciplined – to excel under that pressure.

“Without a doubt in my mind, he can handle it,” Granato said. “Whatever’s thrust on him, he’ll always expect more of himself.”

Back in Arizona, Matthews’s former coaches and teammates are rooting for him. If he succeeds the way they expect, it will send a message that kids from the Southwestern United States deserve more attention from the development program and top colleges.

But what Matthews also proves, they argue, is that you can train your way to become an NHL superstar. It’s not all about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment and travel teams.

There is something to be said for taking the road less travelled, for focusing on skill development and having fun instead of a few short bursts of ice time in game after meaningless game. There is something to be said for what Matthews has become, when where he is from and the resources he had were supposedly stacked against him.

This kid grew up in a non-traditional southern market and really had a non-traditional development path. It basically flies in the face of any parent who’s spending tens of thousands of dollars on their child’s development to play AAA all over the country. He’s really turned the hockey development model upside-down. Let's hope some other young hockey players will learn from Matthew's development-first journey.” 

Taken from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/why-everyone-in-hockey-is-talking-about-auston-matthews-toronto-maple-leafs/article30508528/