New Jersey's Johnny Gaudreau is turning into a shining star for goal-crazy Boston College
End Zone: The undersized teenager - now up to 5-8 and 153 - has emerged as one of the elite players in college hockey, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi with blades and a stick, a kid you can’t take your eyes off because he might do something that will be all over You Tube by the morning.
Comments (1)
BY WAYNE COFFEY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
PUBLISHED: SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 2013, 5:10 PM
NEWTON, Mass. — He comes from South Jersey, this kid they call Johnny Hockey. He looks like a minnow in a helmet, shaves once a week and has the diet of a finicky fifth-grader.
“I pretty much hate vegetables, all of them,” Johnny Hockey says. “I can’t even get them in my mouth.” You keep looking at Johnny Gaudreau, who was 5-7 and maybe 140 pounds when he arrived at Boston College 18 months ago, and you wonder:
Could this really be the prodigy who sparked the U.S. to the gold medal in the world junior hockey championships earlier this year, scoring a tournament-leading seven goals in a four-game span?
The left wing who rung up 27 points in BC’s 19-game winning streak last year, a run that culminated with the program’s third NCAA title in five seasons?
The undersized teenager — now up to 5-8 and 153 — who has emerged as one of the elite players in college hockey, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi with blades and a stick, a kid you can’t take your eyes off because he might do something that will be all over You Tube by the morning?
In the third period of the NCAA title game last April, BC was leading Ferris State by a goal with just over three minutes to play when Gaudreau (GOO-dro), No. 13 in gold and maroon, corralled a loose puck near his own blue line. He accelerated by one Ferris State player, then completely deked another, switching from forehand to backhand, going in alone and then wristing the puck into the upper left corner, five seconds that yielded as pretty a goal as you will see.
Says Pat Mullane, BC captain and Gaudreau’s centerman, “What he can do with the puck is incredible. His offensive talents are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”
Phil Housley, a veteran of 20 NHL seasons who scored 388 goals as an offensive defenseman, was the U.S. coach in the world junior tournament. Housley may never before have coached a player whose favorite food was M&Ms.
“When I first met him I was pretty shocked,” Housley says. “He looks like your little brother. (Then) he got on the ice and right away you could see that he plays the game in a way very few people do.”
John Michael Gaudreau grew up in Carneys Point, N.J., a small town not far from the Delaware Memorial Bridge, known principally for being the birthplace of Bruce Willis. Gaudreau watched most of Willis’ “Die Hard” films, but spent much more time on the ice at Hollydell Ice Arena, where his father, Guy Gaudreau, is the director of hockey. The son of a New England dairy farmer, Guy Gaudreau learned both French and English in Beebe Plain, Vt., where the main street is Canadian on one side, and American on the other. Guy Gaudreau fell in love with hockey and went on to play for Norwich University, before ultimately making his way to the rink in South Jersey, where he had Johnny on the ice at age 2, getting his son to skate by sprinkling Skittles on the ice in front of him. He used the same technique with his younger, son, Matthew, who will be joining Johnny at BC next fall.
“They’d crawl, skate, do whatever he had to do to get their Skittles,” Guy Gaudreau says. “They both picked it up pretty quick. Soon they didn’t need the Skittles anymore.”
Now a 19-year-old sophomore, Johnny Gaudreau was almost always the smallest kid on the ice, but his quickness and stickhandling and what Housley calls his “escapability” enabled him to flourish. Northeastern offered him a full ride at age 17, and the Calgary Flames made him their fourth-round pick in the 2011 NHL draft, no matter that he was 5-6 and in the 130s at that point. Still, Gaudreau had plenty of doubters along the way, and was cut from several U.S. national teams.
“All my life I heard about (my size),” Gaudreau says. “I kind of believed (it would stop me) at times. But I wanted to prove them wrong. It’s a thinking tool for me.”
Gaudreau spent his senior year in high school starring for the Dubuque Fighting Saints in the U.S. Hockey League, helping his team capture the USHL title and being named rookie of the year, before his hockey life took an unforeseen turn. Greg Cronin and his assistant, Albie O’Connell, the men who had recruited Gaudreau for Northeastern, left for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Harvard, respectively. Gaudreau was in play again, and quickly found a new landing spot with BC coach Jerry York, who has not only won more NCAA hockey games (932 going into the weekend) than any coach in history, but also has a long track record of getting big results from small players — among them 5-5 Nathan Gerbe of the Buffalo Sabres and 5-7 Brian Gionta of the Canadiens, along with Brian’s brother, Stephen, of the Devils. The leading goal scorer on this year’s BC team is a 5-7, 165-pound right wing, Steven Whitney.
The difference between BC’s other undersized stars and Gaudreau is that he is a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t wisp, with neither slabs of muscle nor any sort of stoutness. Watch him on campus in jeans and a hoodie, and you wouldn’t be sure if he could even play for an intramural team.
“When I first saw Johnny come through here,” says Russell DeRosa, BC’s strength and conditioning coach for Olympic sports, “he was somebody you were worried might get hurt. I didn’t know if he’d be able to get through the season.”
York is no less amazed by Gaudreau, even after watching him pile up a snowbank of achievements for almost two seasons. Gaudreau was the MVP of both Boston’s fabled Beanpot tournament and the Hockey East tournament as a freshman. He was the most prolific late-season weapon on last year’s NCAA title team, and with 17 goals and 29 assists in 31 games — including two goals and four assists in Saturday’s 7-2 win at Vermont — this year, has more points per game (1.48) than any sophomore in the country.
“You walk into the locker room five minutes before a game and you look at their faces all around the room and you think, ‘Who’s going to have the biggest impact on this game?’ ” York says. “You see this young kid, a little kid who looks like he’s 15, and it’s hard to believe, but he is the one who has that sort of impact, shift after shift, game after game.”
More even than his skating and his stickhandling, Gaudreau’s greatest assets may be his patience and his gift for reading the game, creating on the fly. Housley still marvels at a goal in the world juniors where Gaudreau went 1-on-1 on a defenseman, deftly went backhand to forehand, then waited and waited until the defenseman was screening the goaltender, and fired the puck into the top corner.
“Johnny’s just incredibly dynamic, had game-breaking ability, could do something once or twice a game that would just make you shake your head, and make you wish that you could do it,” says Rangers rookie Chris Kreider, who teamed with Gaudreau last year. “He’s an unbelievable player, unbelievable skill, and he’s an even better person.”
Says Pat Mullane, the BC captain, “Great chess players play four moves ahead — and that’s how Johnny plays hockey.”
With the postseason days away, the Boston College Eagles (20-10-4) are struggling to find their best form. They lost a standout forward, Kevin Hayes, a first-round pick of the Blackhawks, to suspension and then season-ending surgery. They are thin along the back line, and have gone 3-3-2 in their last eight games, following this weekend’s series at Vermont.
Johnny Gaudreau won’t despair, though, not as long as there’s a sheet of ice nearby. The little kid they call Johnny Hockey likes big theatrics, and the personal spotlight, about as much as he likes broccoli. He doesn’t want to be anything other than one of the guys. Gaudreau was flattered, but also embarrassed, when he first heard himself called Johnny Hockey; you can be pretty sure he won’t be trying to trademark it the way Johnny (Manziel) Football has.
The Hockey East quarterfinals begin Friday, and the NCAA Regionals are at the end of the month. If the last two seasons are any indication, look for Johnny Hockey to do what he does best, eluding and electrifying and excelling, a minnow amid much bigger fish, darting here, deceiving there, daring to swim way ahead of the school.
“I love it so much it’s hard to describe,” Johnny Hockey says. “Every day, being on the ice, it doesn’t ever get old for me.”
Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:11 pm
