If you spend enough time in NHL dressing rooms, you cross some where players are all business, others where there’s a sense of shared inconvenience and hardship, and a very few where there’s something else entirely, something approaching family. There’s been a sense of the rarest bond in the room occupied by the Philadelphia Flyers and it’s not the product of cultivation by management, some sort of team-building exercise. It has come by a family atmosphere honestly.
The camaraderie tracks in large part to a trio of players at very different points in their careers: Sean Couturier, at 19 the youngest player in the room; Claude Giroux, an emerging all-star; and Daniel Brière, a veteran and the team’s highest-paid player. It’s not just that Brière mentored the younger players. He welcomed them into his home.
Brière makes an unlikely patriarch. Though 34 years old, he’s still trying to get past his rookie hockey cards from when he was starting out in Phoenix in the late ’90s—it looked like someone had slipped a photo of a peewee player into the run. Even in his late 20s, he looked young enough to get carded. And still today, his playoff beard looks like a thimbleful of iron filings.
Youthful looks aside, Brière has managed to carve out a significant NHL career. His basic stats line (280 goals in 813 career regular-season games) isn’t the best measure of his value. Brière struggled to get established in the league. After six years in the Phoenix organization, the Coyotes waived him. It seemed like he was a fringe NHLer at best. After he was traded to Buffalo, his career took off, especially with the rule changes put in place after the lockout. Since 2005, Brière has been a point-a-game player and a superior performer in the playoffs. He parlayed a 95-point season with the Sabres in 2006–07 into an eight-year, $52-million contract with Philadelphia.
The Flyers knew they weren’t buying skill alone. They were getting a pro with an impeccable reputation, a team leader. Brière didn’t have baggage. He didn’t have issues. At least until two seasons ago.
It seemed Brière struggled with injuries in the 2009–10 season but he bounced back with 30 points in the post-season when Philadelphia made a run to the final. Behind the scenes, though, he struggled mightily. His teammates and management knew that his marriage had fallen apart and two years of emotional erosion was ending in divorce. He was even taunted by opponents about it on the ice. “Anyone who has been through it or knows someone who has been through it knows how difficult it can be,” Brière says. “It was tough but especially tough with my three sons.”
By agreement with his former wife, Sylvie, Brière had the boys, Caelan, Carson and Cameron, when the team was at home and they went with her when the Flyers took to the road. It weighed heavily on Brière at the start of the 2010–11 campaign. “Truthfully, I had lonely times through this and I worried about the impact it would have on my sons,” Brière says.
By way of coincidence, just about that time, Giroux was looking for new digs. In his first full year with the Flyers, he had scored 16 goals during the regular season, staying in an apartment on his own. Brière’s home had been extensively renovated and it often felt empty, especially if his sons were out with friends. Brière offered Giroux a place to stay and they came to an arrangement on a handshake. “We knew each other from Gatineau,” Brière says. “It’s my hometown and Claude played junior there. We golfed during the summer. There’s about a 10-year age difference but we were good friends.”
Two NHLers, three boys and two dogs: It had the makings of a sitcom. There were a few comical moments—it’s not every day that you’d see two hockey stars out shopping for furniture like a married couple. And there were a few Oscar and Felix conflicts, although, by their accounts anyway, mostly small-scale. “We had a great time,” Giroux says. “We played ball hockey in the driveway and fooled around all the time.”
A young player moving into an older teammate’s home is standard stuff in the NHL. Brière had done just that with the Coyotes. “When I first turned pro I struggled living on my own, moving back and forth between the Coyotes and the minors,” he says. “My family moved down for a while to try to help out but it was tough. I really benefited from moving in with Jeremy Roenick and his family. He’ll hate me for ruining his image as a wild man but J.R. was very different at home than he seems on TV. And he was a good family man.”
Many people would have trouble working up sympathy for someone making an NHL wage and having difficulty living on his own. The league, however, is littered with casualties, rookies who fell into bad habits, ran with a bad crowd and, as a result, never fulfilled early promise. They’re no different than teenagers who go off to college and struggle with newfound independence.
Veterans have taken in younger teammates countless times but the dynamic never worked better than in Philadelphia with Brière and Giroux. Both thrived. “I learned so much about how to be a professional from Daniel,” Giroux says. “Eating well, getting rest, being responsible… just being good with other people. They’re things that don’t seem like they have anything to do with what you do on the ice but they have everything to do with it.”
Brière says he never thought of himself as Giroux’s mentor. “I don’t know that Claude needed anything from me to become a better player,” he says. “He’s become a better player every year he has played. In that year, Claude helped me so much, and really he helped my boys in a tough time. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
The arrangement worked so well that Brière was disappointed when Giroux told him last summer he wanted to get his own place this season. Then last fall it seemed likely that the Flyers’ first-round pick Sean Couturier was going to stick with the team and would to need a place to live. Again Brière rolled out the welcome mat.
Brière says the chemistry is different but it has worked out well just the same. “Claude is an extrovert and Sean is a lot quieter,” he says. “For my boys, Claude was more like a fun uncle. Sean’s much closer in age to them. Caelan is 13, Carson 12 and Cameron 11. Sean’s like a big brother. He’ll sit with them and play video games, but he’d be playing video games anyway.”
By extension, Brière was something of a father figure to Couturier. “I was going to need help,” Couturier says. “It was my first time spending a season [in a city] where they speak English, so I needed help with the language. And when I was in Drummondville [playing junior], the family I stayed with made my meals and looked after things like the laundry and shopping. With Danny I learned about organizing.”
The care, feeding and lodging of young players would seem of little consequence without results on the ice. It’s impossible to pinpoint or measure the effect that Brière’s relationship has had on either Giroux’s or Couturier’s game. Conversely, there’s no knowing how much they lifted Brière’s spirits and his play. “It couldn’t have hurt,” he jokes.
Well, it did hurt the Pittsburgh Penguins in the opening round of the playoffs. All three took lead roles in Philadelphia’s win over its cross-state rival. Brière set the tone for the series, scoring two goals in the Flyers’ come-from-behind overtime victory in game one. Giroux effectively snuffed out the Penguins’ hopes in the first minute of game six, sending Sidney Crosby reeling with a clean open-ice check and then bursting into the Pittsburgh zone, wiring a wrist shot past Marc-André Fleury. Couturier had a larger role than many anticipated, drawing MVP nominee Evgeni Malkin as his defensive assignment, a tall task for any player, never mind a 19-year-old.
The trend continued in game one of the second round against New Jersey with Giroux scoring his seventh goal of the playoffs in the third period to break a tie, Brière notching the overtime winner and Couturier playing almost 15 minutes, including penalty-killing shifts.
In the Flyers’ dressing room you hear the happy chatter, Brière playing the elder statesman talking to reporters, Giroux taking a few jabs at the Penguins, and Couturier quietly taking it all in, knowing that his role is only going to grow. It’s easy to imagine this was a scene that would play out around a dining room table. To some extent it has. They say you shouldn’t take your work home with you, but the bromide doesn’t apply here. If you had an impression that this team is tighter than most, a large part of it comes from three players bringing home to work with them.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.