Hockey Confidential (19 page)

“All I was told when I was a young guy was, ‘Be home by dark,'” Orr said. “We'd go out on the pond all day. That was it. Times change. The world is more organized now. There are more distractions. The Internet, Twitter, rankings and ratings, haters, coaches, friends . . . what kids go through today is incredible. I never had to worry about any of that in Parry Sound. TSN wasn't coming to Parry Sound. [He laughs.] Our job [as McDavid's representatives] is to just make sure he's able to play to his level, play at the level he's capable of playing consistently, play to his strengths. That's it.”

It's easier said than done. Sometimes, the enemy lies within. Which is to suggest that a teenager's desire, even that of an exceptional one, to just be a teenager can be problematic. And that's something Orr can mostly certainly identify with.

“That part hasn't changed,” Orr said. “I tell him, ‘Connor, you have to get your sleep because the level you are expected to play at it is a great responsibility. If you're tired, you can't do that. I was in the same position as you. I know you want to be with the guys, have fun, go here or there, but between the bus trips, all the games and practices . . .' These kids, they want to be on the ice all the time. In the summer, they want to go to this camp or that camp or this event. . . . I never went to a summer hockey school until I turned pro, and I went as an instructor, not a student. There are just so many things that can make them physically or mentally tired, and if he's tired, he can't play to his level, and his level is high and so are the expectations.”

It's a message that has been received loud and clear by Connor.

“If I'm talking to Bobby for five minutes, he will mention five times I have to get my rest,” Connor said, laughing. “We talk a
lot
about sleep.”

That's because talking about sleep habits is more productive than talking about, say, pressure that is ubiquitous and always will be. McDavid and Orr know it's always there; they don't dwell on it. But Orr knows if McDavid takes care of himself, his ability and passion will make the pressure manageable.

“He'll have a chance to be a very good player,” Orr said. “He's not Sidney Crosby. Sidney Crosby is Sidney Crosby. Connor McDavid is Connor McDavid. He's 16 years old; give him time to put his own stamp on the game, whatever it is. Lots can happen. He's got a lot to learn, but that will come. He's so smart. Watch how he gets up on his skates. How he sees the ice, how he passes the puck, how he shoots it. He just loves to play. As long as he keeps that passion and never loses it, as long as he is able to play at his level, that's all he needs. Our job is to talk to him, keep his feet on the ground. I'm certainly not going to tell him how to play. The pressure is always going to be there—it's everywhere he goes. I never had to deal with that. No one in my time did. So we'll all work together to protect him as best we can from that.”

Of course, there's only so much anyone can do. He can't be put in the mental equivalent of bubble wrap. If a pressure-free existence were the goal, McDavid wouldn't have played hockey. Pressure has been a constant companion since he started playing. At times, he even welcomes it, uses it as fuel. Other times, though, he knows it can gnaw at him.

“Honestly, I felt pressure more when I was a lot younger,” McDavid said. “I never played against my own age, and I was one of the best players. That's when I would get really nervous, maybe not sleep the night before a game. I still feel pressure—I'm sure everyone who plays feels pressure—but I don't feel as it as much now as when I was younger.”

Still, he welcomes those rare moments, the so-called “quiet times,” when he's hanging with teammates, grabbing a bite to eat, horsing around and thinking or talking about anything other than hockey.

Most of the time, though, Connor McDavid is constantly being figuratively weighed and measured. If you get exceptional status, if you get called a generational talent the likes of which hasn't been seen since Crosby burst onto the scene, every time you step on the ice is a test. Someone is seeing you for the first time; someone is making a judgment: What's all the fuss about?

Growing up exceptional is like a Canadian torture test. The bar is set high, perhaps unattainably so, on an endless series of challenges. Crosby never escapes the scrutiny. Regardless of what level McDavid finds for himself, that, too, will be his lot in life. Some days, he'll come out on the right side of the ledger; sometimes the wrong side.

He passed his first major test after getting exceptional status by playing well in his OHL rookie season. He scored 25 goals and 66 points in 63 games as a 15-year-old with the last-place Otters. Phenomenal numbers. He might have made it look a lot easier than it was.

“It was hard,” McDavid said. “I was putting up numbers. I started a 15-game point streak in my second game of the [rookie] season. It was amazing, I loved it, but it wasn't easy at all. It was hard. The league was so fast. The physical demands were really tough. I wasn't that strong, and I was going up against Dougie Hamilton, Cody Ceci, Scott Harrington and Olli Maatta. I didn't do a very good job of taking care of my body. I let little injuries slip by.”

And while his season totals were terrific, the 15-year-old suffered more than enough angst over the course of a tumultuous rookie season in Erie, as the Otters finished with only 47 points, second-fewest in the entire league.

His dad can laugh now about Connor's first few days in Erie, coming out of the dressing room after three consecutive lopsided preseason losses.

“He comes out looking pale and distraught,” Brian said. “He's saying, ‘I can't take this, I can't take all this losing.' It was the preseason. I told him, ‘It's early. It's going to get better.' He told me, ‘It's gonna be a long year.'”

And it was. In late November, head coach Robbie Ftorek was fired by the Otters. Kris Knoblauch was hired as his replacement. There was more losing; it seemed like the team was spiralling downwards. Connor called home late one night. He was homesick, sick of losing, feeling like he was on a sinking ship where some of the players had checked out. In that regard, there was nothing exceptional about a homesick 15-year-old. His was a call that lots of parents get from their kids playing junior hockey. Brian McDavid drove to Erie that next day to make sure his son was okay, settle him down and help him work through his upset feelings.

At Christmas in that rookie OHL season, he played as an under-ager for Team Ontario at the World Under-17 Challenge. It was a disaster of sorts for what many thought was a stacked Ontario team that should compete for gold. They finished a disappointing sixth. McDavid led his team in scoring with six goals and nine points in five games, but he took it as a failed test.

“He was crushed,” Brian McDavid said. “He took that all very personally.”

By all accounts, the team was plagued by jealousy and infighting. McDavid was often the target. A couple of teammates reportedly rode him hard on the exceptional angle, and as the tourney wore on, Team Ontario more or less unravelled.

But there were many good times for a 15-year-old kid, occasions when the perks of being Connor McDavid paid big dividends. Like in February, when McDavid and a couple of Erie teammates got to go to a Pittsburgh Penguin game. And watch the game with Pens owner Mario Lemieux in a private suite. And meet Crosby after the game. And get a picture taken between Mario and Sid, a photo that was widely circulated in the media and on the Internet, dubbed by many as “The Past, Present and Future of Hockey.”

“It was weird, it was wild,” Connor said. “It was pretty cool.”

It was, however, also an illustration of how a simple “cool thing”—getting a picture taken with a couple of your hockey superheroes—can amplify the pressure and expectations. As in the “Past, Present and Future” angle. Mario did his thing; Crosby's doing his; where's the new kid going to fit into that pantheon of greats? Is he worthy of being in their universe?

The truth is, there's no escaping it. The photo was, on one level, just McDavid being the same as any teenage kid getting to meet his hockey heroes. But McDavid isn't just any teenage kid, so there's always another layer to it.

The Crosby comparisons are inevitable. McDavid grew up idolizing Crosby; Crosby saw McDavid play once and immediately pronounced that he reminded Sid of himself. They have different body types—McDavid is going to be taller and rangier than Crosby—but their dynamic first-step acceleration, otherworldly hockey IQ and insane ability to score or make plays can't be ignored.

Oh, there's one other thing they share. Crosby is one of the most superstitious players in the NHL. McDavid will challenge him for that title.

“He's got his lucky underwear, and they could walk out of the arena,” Brian said. “If we drove to the rink, we had to listen to the same songs and drive the same way because we won or he had a good game when he did it that way last time. We would have to park in the same spot. He packs the bag exactly the same way every time: left shin pad, right shin pad, he zips it, he unzips it—he has his routines. When he gets dressed, it's always in the same order—one side, and then the other.”

“If Brian and Connor drove to the game together last time and they won,” Kelly added, “Connor would tell me I'd have to sit in the backseat because he didn't want to change things up. Good luck with that. It's not happening.”

The best part of that OHL rookie season, as fate would have it, was that the Otters were a non-playoff team. So Hockey Canada added McDavid to its roster for the 2013 World Under-18 Championships that April in Sochi, Russia.

McDavid turned the hockey world on its ear. A double under-ager, two years younger than everyone else in the tourney, he shredded the competition, leading Canada to a gold medal and being named tourney MVP, scoring eight goals and 14 points in his first five games before being shut out in his final two contests. A number of the games were televised nationally in Canada on TSN.

As well known as he already was, it was a huge coming-out party for him. NHL scouts returned from Sochi raving about his dynamic play, mentioning him as a challenger to inherit Crosby's “best player in the world” mantle one day. They declared him the prohibitive favourite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2015 NHL draft. It was all quite heady stuff, even by exceptional-player standards.

“It was such a good end to a season that was a lot more difficult for him than people realized,” his father said. “When he came home, he was so tired. The first thing he said to me when he got back was, ‘My legs are done.' He was gone for a month. He said it was the biggest grind he'd ever been through. It was so intense. But he loved it.”

McDavid spent the summer of 2013 working hard with fitness guru Roberts. He took to heart Orr's pleas to take care of his body, to get rest, to eat properly, to train hard and get a lot stronger.

Again, a positive performance by McDavid presented new challenges. He was so dominant, so off-the-charts good at the Under-18 World Championship, it set the bar that much higher again.

The following October, early in McDavid's second OHL season, a Canadian sports magazine came out with a front cover sell line boldly stating: better than crosby.
It wasn't a question; it was a declaration. The story inside the magazine was a fine and reasonable account of McDavid's exploits at the U-18 tournament and how not even Crosby at the same age had done what McDavid did in Sochi, how McDavid was, in the eyes of some NHL scouts, perhaps tracking ahead of No. 87, who had been playing prep school hockey when he was 15.

Still, Brian and Kelly McDavid cringed when they saw the magazine cover.

The
New York Times
,
USA Today
and
Sports Illustrated
had all published McDavid stories and features in the spring of 2013. But that one magazine headline—better than crosby—left a mark.

“We were really upset by it, Connor was upset by it,” Brian said. “The story was fine, but it was referencing just one tournament where Connor did something Crosby didn't. That's all it was.”

The McDavids went into protective mode. A scheduled interview for a feature story on CBC's
The National
was cancelled by the McDavids after that. So were a number of other interviews that had been arranged.

“We just felt we all needed to take a step back and give Connor some space,” Brian added. “Connor's focus was trying to make Canada's team at the World Juniors, and we didn't need to be adding to the pressure. Connor can be a sensitive and introspective kid. He's very guarded about attention being on him. He doesn't crave to be the exceptional guy all the time.”

There's no avoiding it, though.

It was demonstrably clear early in the 2013–14 OHL season that McDavid was so much bigger, faster and stronger than he had been in his rookie season. He struggled to score goals in the first half of his OHL sophomore season, but his improvements in speed and power were noticeable.

“It's weird looking back on that first year,” McDavid said. “I felt like a little rat on the ice. I felt that way all season. It bothered me. This year, I can challenge people physically. I can hold off a defenceman and drive the net. Last year, I would have just got pushed outside. Last year, when we played three games in three nights, it was embarrassing. I might as well have not even played that third game. I had no legs.”

Erie went from being one of the worst teams in the Canadian Hockey League in McDavid's rookie season to being ranked No. 1 in the CHL on and off in 2013–14. It wasn't all because of McDavid—the Otters assembled a deep, talented lineup from top to bottom—but McDavid was clearly the catalyst.

In his second OHL season, McDavid achieved one of his goals by becoming only the sixth 16-year-old to play for Team Canada at the World Junior Championship, joining the exclusive company of Crosby, Eric Lindros, Jason Spezza, Jay Bouwmeester and Wayne Gretzky. But it was a difficult tournament for Team Canada, who finished fourth and out of the medals for the second consecutive year. And it produced, at best, mixed results for McDavid.