Ontario: An integral part of the Kings’ (and hockey’s) backbone

Jake Muzzin was a free agent during the first half of the 2009-10 season and free to sign with any NHL team. The Los Angeles Kings, who kept close tabs on Andrew Campbell, one of Muzzin’s teammates in Sault Ste. Marie, began noticing that Muzzin was cream of the crop amongst the draft eligible players and free agents for the Greyhounds.

The team was highly excited but unwilling to tip its hand out of fear of provoking competition for Muzzin’s services. If scouts were making too many trips to the Soo, roughly three and a half hours by car from its closest neighbors in the Ontario Hockey League, word would start getting out that Los Angeles was investing itself heavily in an area that isn’t scouted to the same degree as the Highway 401 corridor linking Windsor to Toronto and points east, and from which a major portion of Canada’s population is based.

Those cities to the south – Windsor, London, Kitchener, Oshawa, Kingston and Belleville – serve as a constellated talent base centered around the Greater Toronto Area informing one of the world’s premier incubators of tested hockey talent. Compared to some of the smaller cities in Minnesota, Michigan or New England, or the Sun Belt American cities that are beginning to produce a greater share of players, the players from these cities grow up regularly playing with and against other highly talented players who will have opportunities to play professionally. There are other large Canadian cities that produce their shares of talent, but the pressure cooker scrutiny and deep base of talent in and outside of Toronto serves as a rigorous upbringing that molds players well to a hockey lifestyle. There are many within Los Angeles’ hockey management that understand Southern Ontario to be the premier center of hockey talent and development.

“Toronto is seen as this center of the hockey universe,” said Michael Futa, the Kings’ Vice President of Hockey Operations and Director of Player Personnel, and the former general manager of the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack. “It’s where they host the World Cup of Hockey, and if you go and watch a Marlies (AHL) or Nats (GTHL) game on a Friday night you kind of get the same [feel], or a four-out-of-seven series with these teams, and the way the pressure that’s bred for these kids, whether they’re playing pee-wee, minor midget, bantam, it kind of mirrors what you see at the National Hockey League level. There’s such an intense passion for the game that you can’t understate the value of the sport and how much it’s bred in to these kids at a young age. It’s competitive and the rivalries that are stoked at that level in the Greater Toronto Hockey League, it just breeds itself down the road.”

Whether there’s excess pressure or not on the younger players, there is an almost pervasive interest and excitement in young hockey prospects from this area, and Muzzin, who grew up in Woodstock, a small town located near the 401, experienced it firsthand before he left Southern Ontario to play junior hockey in the Soo.

“Nowadays, I think people get caught up in that, to be honest with you,” Muzzin said. “I think as a kid you just got to go out and play and have fun and that’s kind of what I did. Now, kids are working out so young and getting scouted so young, it’s kind of taking the fun away from hockey, and obviously there’s a lot of talent in Southern Ontario and down the 401. Like you said, from Sarnia to Toronto, and Windsor, there’s lots of good programs being put together and good coaches, and it’s showing as the league has gotten younger. These guys are coming right in to the league and they’re skilled and they’re making an impact right away.”

Darryl Sutter hails from Viking, Alberta, which does not have a six-lane thoroughfare bisecting it. As a town of just over 1,000 people, it does produce, by virtue of the Sutter family’s legacy, more NHL players per capita than any other city in Canada.

“[Younger NHL players] come in a lot more prepared in the last seven or eight years than they ever have in terms of being NHL ready, in terms of the whole profile, in terms of lifestyle, in terms of lifestyle, in terms of nutrition, in terms of training,” he said.

While there are also large population centers in the west and east, and the Western Hockey League and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League produce terrific talent without a population center as large as Toronto, there’s still a greater base of high-level talent that originates from Canada’s most populous province, at least if you speak to many in Los Angeles’ hockey operations. It’s somewhat anecdotal, but the Memorial Cup, which places the WHL, OHL and QMJHL champions in a round robin tournament with a host team that cycles through the three leagues, has seen heavy Ontario representation. Six OHL teams have won the tournament since 2002, with all leagues having hosted the tournament the same amount of times since then. OHL teams have played in the tournament’s championship game in 10 of the last 15 tournaments.

Whether the fandom is more intense in Ontario, or whether it reaches fans at an earlier age, isn’t easily determined.

“I think anywhere in Canada a big focus of your childhood is hockey,” Muzzin said. “[Watching] on television, wanting to be an NHL player, looking up to them and growing up in Ontario it’s pretty clear that a lot of guys grow up wanting to be a Toronto Maple Leaf. You know, idolizing those guys, Mats Sundin, and stuff like that. So it has an impact on your childhood, for sure.”

It’s part of the reason why the Kings will look to rebound from a pair of defeats over the last two seasons at the Air Canada Centre. Eight of the 23 players who opened the season with the team hail from Ontario, and Ontario departees such as Mike Richards, Brad Richardson, Kevin Westgarth and Justin Williams have had their names engraved on the Stanley Cup as a member of the Kings.

“Yeah we all get pretty excited for this game with all our family and friends in the stands, for one,” Drew Doughty said. “I think the biggest thing is we all kind of came here watching games when we were kids and this is the NHL team we would watch and to be able to actually play here when you grow up is pretty special. So every time I come back, it’s a special place for me.”

Michael Futa, on how he’d scout Toronto as Owen Sound’s general manager:
It’s the same as the National Hockey League, just a different level where we have guys branch out. You know [Los Angeles has] guys like Tony Gasparini in the USHL and Brent McEwen [in Western Canada], you cover every area in the province. At that stage you’ve got guys with a huge passion for the game. I know Ian McLellan was my guy in the Toronto area at the time and for me that was part of my job as well was to get in to the GTHL and get in to Central Ontario and get up North and get in to Sault Ste. Marie because you couldn’t miss anybody. It’s the same thing, just now it’s become the World and you have to have all those different areas covered because just as Auston Matthews comes out of Arizona, there’s going to be someone that comes out of Wawa in Northern Ontario or something. You can’t miss those kids, you have to have guys in the ranks that, you obviously can’t be everywhere and they’re playing hockey everywhere so you have to have scouts in all different places that are going to be able to uncover those guys and then, it’s funny, they come down and they want to play hockey in the GTA.

Jake Muzzin, on the difference between playing in Sault Ste. Marie and Southern Ontario:
Well it got me away from home and used to long road trips and stuff like that, that’s for sure. There’s not much else going on in the Soo so the hockey is a big part of it there. A lot of people go to watch the games because there are long winters obviously and stuff like that. I mean if you’re a good player and no matter where you play and you’re playing well you’re going to get noticed no matter where you play.