By Gare Joyce
SPORTSNET.CA
All kinds of skill and spunk, a world junior gold around his neck, a six-figure and soon-to-be seven-figure bank account in the offing: Stefan Legein was just about the last 19-year-old you’d have expected to give up the game.
Yet a couple of weeks back, it was widely reported that Legein, a high-scoring winger with the Niagara IceDogs and a second-round draft pick of the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2007, was done. Hanging up the blades: That was the word that his agent Doug Woods hung out there.
Later, Legein’s father told reporters that maybe the whole thing was over-blown or at least premature, that they should check back when the NHL and junior camps revved up. He suggested Stefan show up at Columbus’ camp after all or wind up with the Blue Jackets’ affiliate in Syracuse. Door open to re-consider: That was the word from Mr. Legein.
How will this play out? Just one person will know the answer and that’s Legein himself. Will is the word I’m choosing carefully, because we have no way of knowing if even he knows at this point.
Legein isn’t shedding any more light on the story. He didn’t answer email messages or return a phone call this week. No confirmation, no denial, no qualification. He might even be a little uncomfortable about all the attention given him in the past few weeks. That would be understandable.
If we weren’t talking about junior hockey, no one would be surprised if any 19-year-old had changed his mind about one of those life decisions. To change majors, to take a year off school, to look for a job, to get with the program, to rebel, to fall in love, to fall out of love: It’s a volatile age. As the father of a 19-year-old I speak from white-knuckled experience.
But when Legein’s name landed in sports sections and on broadcasts recently, the fact that he is 19 was lost in the mix. The emphasis was on all those other things – his four seasons with the IceDogs, the prankster and quote machine with the Canadian world under-20 team, a future pro in the Tucker-Avery mold.
Dozens, probably hundreds, of 19-year-olds hang up their skates; some for a while, some for good. It’s an age when the game that they’ve loved stops loving a lot of them back, when the dreams get pushed aside for often harsh reality, when the intensity of action on the ice rises above their comfort zones like few imagined. Which is to say, most who give up the game at 19 are out of options.
At least a couple of pundits have suggested that Legein’s case is all about burn-out and that he’s living, non-skating proof that junior hockey pushes teenagers too hard. This is laughable. It’s just Legein’s story. One prospect out of hundreds. Don’t read too much into it. You can make a better case suggesting his hockey card and his dance card are clinical evidence for this only-in-Canada clinical research.
It’s fair to say Legein was never like everybody else. From the time he joined the IceDogs in Mississauga through last season when the franchise moved to St. Catharines, he was never a bad kid, just a brash one off the ice and sometimes a reckless one on it. All that was fundamental to his game. When I spoke to him after the Blue Jackets selected him 37th overall at the 2007 draft in Columbus, I figured he was going to go straight to the team staff to get a parking pass and the keys to the arena. One-hundred seventy pounds and not an ounce of doubt; he was a perfect fit for a Columbus team that needed a pest with talent, a competitor.
It looked the same when he went to the Blue Jackets’ prospects camp a few weeks later and to the Canada-Russia eight-game under-20 series after that. It looked like he was making a huge jump as a prospect with his performance at the world juniors last winter.
Where did it go sideways?
There were a few red flags along the way.
A couple were pretty plain. First, he suffered a shoulder injury one shift into the gold-medal game at the world juniors, one that sidelined him for much of the second half of the IceDogs’ season. His play tailed off when he made it back into Niagara’s lineup. Then, when he went down to Syracuse, Columbus’ affiliate, during the AHL playoffs, Legein made it into only a couple of games in a very limited role. A black ace being pushed through practices, he got a glimpse of glamour-free pro-hockey life. And he asked the team to let him go home.
That lost half-season seemed to be left behind when he reported to Columbus’ summer camp in July. He was playing well and saying all the right things. “There are a lot of young guys here, so it shows a promising future for the Blue Jackets,” Legein said on the Blue Jackets’ website. “These are the guys we’re going to grow with, and hopefully play our professional careers with, so it’s nice to have them all here.” It looked like he turned the page.
Stop there, though, rewind. Go back to the start of last season. Legein asked the IceDogs to trade him. When the team was in Mississauga he was able to commute from the family home in Oakville. He didn’t want to make the move to St. Catharines, not quite an hour away. (What you don’t hear in the background is the sobbing of a player from White Rock, B.C. packing his bags to play in Prince Albert or Brandon.) He didn’t get his way.
Keep rolling forward. Junior hockey fans saw Legein buckled over with his arm hanging out of his shoulder socket, but that was just one of the injuries he suffered last season. No, his style of play, his willingness to mix it up in the corners with opponents 20 and 30 pounds bigger, caught up to him. He had led a mostly charmed life to that point. Playing hockey at all when you’re hurt is always tough; playing his game banged up was no fun.
And that’s what it comes down to: Fun. Notwithstanding the accolades, the medals, the money, it comes back to fun. It’s easy to see how the game ceased to be fun for Legein. (Some would suggest that the fun ran out at the NHL combine last year: Wait for it after the three-minute mark.)
It’s an unusual case to be sure – a player who was King of the World one season and feeling beaten the next. Most juniors’ careers follow straighter lines than Legein’s but a lot of them end up in exactly the same place, the point when the fun is sucked out of the game.
The hockey media loves to beat up major junior hockey but it’s a leap to suggest that Stefan Legein is an example of what ails the game, that his story proves that prospects play too many games, get too little time off, face too much pressure. A 19-year-old got a little down on himself and changed his mind. It signifies nothing more than that. And if he changes his mind and plays again, it signifies nothing at all.
You can try to read between the lines of what Legein said at the Blue Jackets’ camp in July. “(The world-junior tournament) was great; I’ve never really played in big games before,” he said. “I learned so much about big games and pressure. That’s what the NHL is all about.”
If he finds fun in those big games, if he can thrive under the pressure, he’ll be back. If not, he’s a 19-year-old with the rest of his life ahead of him and he should have no regrets and no one should judge him.
“I’m sticking around this season because the game is still fun for me. No matter what I’ve done at the rink, I’ve had fun.”
No, not Legein, but Brian Kilrea, Hockey Hall of Famer who announced Wednesday that this season will be his last behind the bench of the Ottawa 67’s.
I’ve had a chance to cover Kilrea’s teams in years past. I can confirm that he had fun and that the majority of those who played for him had fun too. His best players over the years have remained unfailingly loyal to him. That’s rarer in the game than it sounds.
“If I wasn’t having fun, I wouldn’t coach this year,” he said. “I’m staying on because I want it to be an easy transition for the team and the players. Next season I’ll stay on as a general manager and I’ll spend more time coaching.”
Old School. Lifer. Legend.
I asked Kilrea about Legein this week, not for any scuttlebutt, only to find out if he thinks the game places too much pressure on players these days, if he believes the pressure has mounted unhealthily in recent years.
“The players and the game haven’t changed much from what I can tell,” Kilrea said. “I can only speak for our team but I’ve always operated with the idea that it should be fun for everybody.
“I’ve probably had a couple of players who’ve gone home or given up the game but (Legein) stands out. He was always a good player and he always played the game the way I like to see it played.”
Gare Joyce will be writing on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey’s Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.
