Calgary’s Pathway to the Podium Series highlights 10 local Canadian athletes on their backstories and hopes in Pyeongchang. Brandon Kozun is one of them.
Brandon Kozun was expected by many to make Team Canada’s men’s hockey team in Pyeongchang.
That is, until he wasn’t. Just ask head coach Willie Desjardins.
“He was a top-five player the last two years in the KHL, a leading guy, we thought for sure he’d be on the team,” Desjardins said at the team’s roster announcement last month.
“He’s supposed to be a scorer and he’s not scoring and that’s not good for a scorer.”
Kozun had zero points in November’s Karjala Cup, just one assist in December’s Channel One Cup and didn’t play in the Spengler Cup. It wasn’t exactly what Hockey Canada was expecting from the three-time KHL all-star, who also had two assists in two games in the Sochi Hockey Open last August.
Speaking from Moscow during Channel One, Kozun didn’t have any pre-conceived notions of his fate.
“When we heard that the NHL players weren’t going to go, obviously, it pops into your mind, okay, this is a real possibility,” he said. “But I still have to make the team.”
“I’m just trying to show my best and do my best for whatever I can do to help myself help this team and hopefully to be able to have a chance to be able to skate on that ice.”
That ice was of course in Pyeongchang, where NHL players won’t be. Many of the games best have voiced their displeasure, with Alexander Ovechkin going as far as threatening to defy the NHL and go anyway when the news came out in April. Where many stars voiced opposition, others like Kozun saw opportunity.
“I never thought I would be able to kind of be part of something like this,” he said.
And that chance was slipping. As Desjardins said, the diminutive Kozun has always been a scorer. From the Midnapore Hockey Association in Calgary, to winning the CHL scoring title in 2010 with the Hitmen (en route to a WHL title) and finally to the KHL, the undersized forward simply knows how to get points. Yet he wasn’t during perhaps the most important tryouts of his life.
“And what does he do? He finds another way to make the team,” Desjardins said. “He worked so hard, we had to name him just because of how hard he worked.”
“He had to find a way to make it. He hit guys, Kozie’s about 5’5”, he hit everybody.”
Kozun is also no stranger to Desjardins. They were together on the 2010 World Junior Championship team, which lost a heartbreaking 6-5 gold-medal game to the U.S. that snapped Canada’s streak of five straight titles. Kozun had three shots on goal, including a streaking wrist shot early in the third that went off the crossbar. He was even offered a spot on the US team due to his California roots.
It’s been eight years since the loss in Saskatoon when he last wore the maple leaf in a major tournament.
“A finish like that doesn’t go away,” Kozun said. “We’ve (he and Desjardins) have talked about it before.”
“To get a chance to maybe get a little bit of redemption on that would be pretty nice.”
But Kozun’s Olympic dream isn’t purely linked to hockey. Growing up, he watched both the summer and winter games.
“You always dream of playing in something like that,” he said. “The Olympics are the biggest athletic competition in the world and just to get a chance to maybe be there would be a feeling I don’t know could be describable.”
Like many of his teammates with intricate paths to the Games, Saskatoon to Pyeongchang has been his own long and winding road. After his Hitmen career and the World Juniors, he spent time in the Kings and Maple Leafs organizations for five years before heading overseas to the KHL. It’s been a stark contrast from his early start playing at home, first with Midnapore and then to the Hitmen. But for the now 27-year-old, that travel has shaped him into the man he is today.
“I’ve been lucky enough to see some of these places in the world that you would never dare go into,” he said, (particularly smaller Russian towns that feel like the 1950s.) “I think a lot of guys maybe take for granted sometimes, is the pure fact that you’re able to travel the world and see so many countries while making a living for yourself. It’s changed me tremendously.”
Not taking things for granted is a common theme for Kozun. Now in perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in case NHL players return to the Games in 2022 (which IIHF President Rene Fasel has said is his mission to do,) he and his teammates have their shot.
“To be there is just an honour in itself.”
Lucas Meyer is a reporter and producer for 660News in Calgary. He is also the play-by-play voice of the University of Calgary Dinos basketball teams. Follow him on Twitter @meyer_lucas.
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