EDMONTON — Some players take your breath away. Some, you hold your breath as they wheel over the centre line with the puck on their stick.
“When he gets the puck, everyone on the bench just exhales,” said centre Curtis Lazar. “We know he’ll do the right thing with it.”
Sure, but it’s not like he’s been that guy for very long. Just 1,000 NHL games.
As the baby-faced Nugent-Hopkins gets ready to become the first player ever to play his first 1,000 games in an Edmonton Oilers jersey — game No. 1,000 goes Sunday versus St. Louis, barring injury Saturday in Vancouver — we look back on a No. 1 overall pick who, somehow, remained an Oiler when so many around him did not.
Like the last needle on Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, Nugent-Hopkins survived the 2010’s in Edmonton, hockey’s Hunger Games. Fresh, young faces showed up every year, and soon another was being shipped out in the other direction.
It was peak Decade of Darkness, an eat-your-young era that was survived by few.
“There were definitely moments where I thought I’d be getting the call,” Nugent-Hopkins, 32, said this week. “I was really good friends with Justin Schultz, and things went from really good to pretty sour pretty quickly for him here. Then Jordan (Eberle), and Taylor (Hall), and a lot of other guys left too.
“Yeah, there were moments when I thought I could be next on the block. I’m sure there were offers.”
Yet somehow, where Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr et al. each managed to depart before playing 1,000 games — Kevin Lowe played his 1,000th game as a New York Ranger, then returned to Edmonton and reached 1,037 games in an Oilers uniform — Nugent-Hopkins becomes the only one to play 1,000 games an Oiler, start to finish.
Why was he the one who remained?
“He’s such a good teammate, such a low-maintenance guy,” offered former teammate Sam Gagner. “Maybe when you’re looking for problems or looking for change, he’s the last place you look?”
Fifteen years after he was drafted ahead of the likes of Gabriel Landeskog, Jonathan Huberdeau, Mark Scheifele and Nikita Kucherov, Nugent-Hopkins is the fourth-highest scorer from that 2011 draft. He will be the first to reach 1,000 games, and when it’s all said and done, the guy Leon Draisaitl calls “Nuggy” will have 1,000 points, he has 785 now, and be the all-time Oiler, leading his franchise in games played in blue and orange.
And he has done so with a subtlety and professionalism that is most respected by those in his trade.
“He’s got such a good feeling, a conscience for the game. He always seems to make the right play, whether that’s offensively or defensively. He’s just so stable,” said Darnell Nurse, a forever teammate of Nugent-Hopkins.
“He’s one of those guys you’ve got to see every night to see what he brings every night,” Nurse explains. “Those little details of the game that never seemed to waiver for him. The way that Lazar described him? He’s an exhale. I mean, you couldn’t put it better.”
The package is slight. Walking down the street, you’d never I.D. Nugent Hopkins as a professional athlete, generously listed as six-foot-one and 192 lbs. But he’s sly, and early on, Nugent-Hopkins figured out that he would likely not be a prolific enough scorer to live off his points alone.
So he dug in as a defensive centre.
“There was about a four-year stretch where I was really focusing on that, I feel like it’s brought me to this point,” he said. “You had to find a way to keep the puck out of your net, in some manner. And as a smaller guy, I was going to be able to run around, or defend like some of these other guys. I had to use my brain, and the skillset that I have.”
“He’s a smart, cerebral player who can adapt to any role — and he’s been asked to play a lot of ‘em,” said Gagner. “He’s played centre, wing, on different lines with different players, different coaches… he just keeps showing up to work and continuing to get the job done. I’m a proud friend, proud of what he’s done.
“He’s got a 100-point season behind him, gone on long playoff runs. It’s incredible to see the career he’s built for himself.”
Nugent-Hopkins has endured the worst and the best of the Oilers 2.0, missing the playoffs in eight of his first nine seasons.
Like so many before and after, he was a high draft pick in a Canadian city who arrived with suffocating pressure.
Taylor Hall was drafted first overall in 2010, and was supposed to save the day in Edmonton. Then Nugent-Hopkins was picked at No. 1 the next year. Then Nail Yakupov in 2012, Leon Draisaitl at No. 3 in 2014, and of course, Connor McDavid at No. 1 in 2015.
As it turned out, “saving the day” in Edmonton took many hands and many years. The expectations arrived much more swiftly than the results.
-
32 Thoughts: The Podcast
Hockey fans already know the name, but this is not the blog. From Sportsnet, 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas is a weekly deep dive into the biggest news and interviews from the hockey world.
Latest episode
“We felt a little bit of that (pressure), but we understood where the team realistically was,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “And we were kids, trying to get our feet in the NHL, trying to enjoy it as much as we could. And we did that, no question.”
There were the early years, spent at the Cactus Clubs and other spots with Hall and Ebs. And now, a home in Laurier Heights, a wife and child, and a contract that will keep him in town for three seasons after this one ($5.125 million AAV).
The lessons along the way were stark for an 18-year-old from Burnaby, B.C., whose favourite player was Pavel Datsyuk.
Today, the Oilers are a good enough team that they can, on some nights, play less than a full game and still win. The way the Blackhawks could do against those old Oilers teams. Or Vancouver, when a solid period by the Sedins and a few Roberto Luongo saves were enough to whip Edmonton on any given night.
“Every time you’d go into St. Louis, you were losing 3-1 or 2-1 and just getting beat up the whole night,” he recalls. “L.A. was the same thing. Anaheim. When I first came in, Vancouver was tough, with the Sedins. Chicago would outskate you every night…
“It’s extremely nice to be on the other side of it now.”
And he didn’t even have to leave town to get there.
