The eighteen-year-old ice-hockey player Matthew Schaefer, the No. 1 pick in the 2025 N.H.L. draft and a rookie defenseman for the New York Islanders, skated around the team’s practice rink in East Meadow, on Long Island, the other day, pursued by a cameraman in a rolling office chair. Schaefer, who is six feet two, with a childlike face and fluffy brown hair, was shooting his first major TV commercial, for Nobull, an activewear brand; the objective was to show him training like a champ and refusing to lose. A dozen people (including a rep from Schaefer’s agency, from Toronto) watched from the bleachers as he skated backward, did laps, and took slap shots. Then he gathered the pucks with his stick and skated to the rink door. “Hi, I’m Matthew,” he said to a visitor, extending a glove. “It’s a little fun day.” It was not his first office-chair experience on ice: a couple of years ago, on a picture day, he said, “Me and my buddy were spinning each other around.” He was feeling good despite a loss the night before, in Florida, to the Panthers—and despite having gotten a rare penalty, following a subtle trip-like collision and a dramatic fall by the beloved and beloathed “rat” Brad Marchand. Had Marchand taken a dive? “No comment!” Schaefer said, laughing. He added, “I always try to give the baby face to the refs—it never works.”
Schaefer was drafted in June, at age seventeen. He grew up in Stoney Creek, Ontario, in a close-knit family: his father, Todd; his mother, Jennifer; and his big brother, Johnny. In an old video, Jennifer dances with joy at a rink. She died, of breast cancer, when Matthew was sixteen. Onstage at the draft, Gary Bettman, the N.H.L.’s commissioner, presented Schaefer with an Islanders jersey embroidered with a lavender memorial ribbon and Jennifer’s initials. (All three Schaefers cried.) Schaefer regularly meets with grieving and sick kids, hugging them and encouraging them to talk about their feelings. He also delights retired players by busting their chops on TV, including the broadcasters Henrik Lundqvist (for being a Ranger); Paul (Biz Nasty) Bissonnette (for having a short career); and Chris Chelios (for his famously absurd cardio routine). “One thing that’s helped is me doing the bike in the sauna before games,” Schaefer recently told Chelios, looking sly.
Such qualities, in addition to his stellar two-way defensive play, have brought great joy to Long Island. Schaefer skates fast, with a creativity, elegance, and zest that gets jaded fans yelping in falsetto disbelief. He can seem to defy physics; he also scores goals. He’s broken rookie records, including some of Bobby Orr’s. Fans and teammates are protective. When he’s checked roughly, the home crowd boos; when he dusts himself off, it roars. Todd Schaefer attends games frequently; at one, after his son took a big hit from a bruiser, “everybody’s eyes were on me,” he said, during a phone call. “So I did the, you know, cradling a baby and rocking it, like, ‘My baby!’ ” He laughed. “Then they booed the player for, like, two games straight.”
Lunch was a buffet in the lobby of the Northwell Health Ice Center, which also serves as an Islanders-themed community rink, with fifteen-foot sculptures of players, a wall of fame, and a pro shop. (Schaefer merchandise was sold out.) Schaefer ate a salad piled high with chicken cubes in a locker room. He said that, on a typical day off, “I sleep in, have a breakfast sandwich—gotta have the egg and bacon—and play with some of the kids.” He’s living with a family: the retired Islanders enforcer and current front-office employee Matt Martin, Sydney Esiason Martin (daughter of Boomer), and their two young girls and twin baby boys. “I have sisters now,” Schaefer said. “I’m also kind of the babysitter, I guess.” On social media, he can be seen skating with Winnie, five; pushing Alice, three, in a tiny car; and playing games. (“Pretty Pretty Princess can get competitive,” Matt Martin said.) Schaefer also has fun borrowing Martin’s clothes, “beating Matt at video games, like golf and FIFA soccer—I like to chirp him when I win,” and wrestling. “I fake-wrestle the girls, and they’re always beating me up. If it’s me and Matt wrestling, the girls are sticking up for him and hitting me.” He wrestles Martin? Where? “Like, anywhere—the basement, the kitchen floor, just all over. I’m always looking to mess with him and annoy him, so sometimes he gets fed up and then we start a fight.” (Martin, smiling: “We do wrestle a lot, unfortunately.”)
