“Lowry. And that’s a break. Here’s a chance. SCORES. Jansen Harkins with his first Stanley Cup playoff goal.”
Confined to the press box for the opener of the Winnipeg Jets’ qualifying-round series against the Calgary Flames, it took Jansen Harkins only until the 7:18 mark of the first period of Game 2 to justify coach Paul Maurice’s decision to give him an opportunity.
And when Harkins gets opportunities, he doesn’t let them go to waste.
Such opportunities have been hard to come by for the 23-year-old, who received his first call-up from the AHL’s Manitoba Moose on Dec. 18 after two and a half seasons in the minors.
And it was only through hard work and perseverance that the 2015 second-round pick finally secured his spot with the big club. Despite limited ice time, Harkins notched his first assist in his first game, his first goal a little more than two weeks later and had seven points in 29 games before the NHL hit pause due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Then he went top-shelf past Cam Talbot on a breakaway in his post-season debut Monday.
“I don’t know that I’ve had a player that has been given less opportunity and stayed in the fight and competed as hard as this guy has,” said Jets coach Paul Maurice in an off-the-cuff ode to Harkins’ dogged determination on Monday. “Like, he had no chance of making our team. He had a good camp, but he’s not a first-overall pick, so he doesn’t have 10 guys pounding the table for him to give him that chance. He’s been given nothing here, but what he did was he forced an opportunity. So with the Moose, like there was no choice but to call him up, right? And then he gets in the lineup and he gets into practice, he works so hard you just have to play him.
“So all he does is – no matter what the situation – he just catches your eye, right? He was clearly the first of the three in for us because of his training camp. That goal he scored, he might’ve scored that 10 times in the last three weeks. Really, he has. It’s off his stick before you think it should and it’s bar down. So I think what you’ve got with Hark is a guy that’s going to get into the National Hockey League and he’s probably not going to come out for about 14 years. I think it was Kevin Dineen that said to me once early on, ‘Young players don’t understand the value of an opportunity,’ but Jansen Harkins is the exception to that rule.”
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It’s an understanding that Harkins came to, in part, while growing up alongside his older brother, Nicklas, 25, who was born with MPS I — a rare genetic disease caused by the lack of an enzyme needed to break down sugars, resulting in damage to cells.
On Monday, the elder Harkins was watching his brother’s game alongside a mutual friend in the basement of their family’s North Vancouver home. And though Nicklas had seen Jansen score that type of goal countless times across various levels of competition — from atom to the AHL — he couldn’t help but fear the play would get whistled down.
“‘Oh God, (he’s) probably offside’ — that’s the first thought that came to my head, and then before you knew it, he shot it and it went in,” Nicklas recalled in a phone interview Tuesday. “I just started laughing because I thought it was gonna happen sooner or later, but just that type of goal with that speed, with that shot — no words can really explain that.
“I couldn’t believe it.”
The sport has always been central to the pair’s relationship, and a big part of Harkins family life in general. Nicklas, Jansen and eventually Jonas (the youngest, who ended up playing in the WHL) all grew up dreaming of the NHL. Like many other hockey families, the boys spent many hours getting shuttled to and from rinks by their mom and dad, Todd Harkins, a former NHLer himself who ran the local North Shore Winter Club and later served as GM of the Prince George Cougars.
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While Jansen was a natural athlete, Nicklas always had to go above and beyond to match his brother’s accomplishments. But MPS didn’t stop him from having a “normal” life.
“It was a lot of fun,” Nicklas said earlier this year of his childhood playing with and competing against his brothers. “For me, it definitely made me work even harder to try to be like, ‘Hey, if you could do that, I could do that better.’”
MPS can result in a wide spectrum of symptoms. With Nicklas, who was diagnosed at the age of five, his fingers curled, he couldn’t raise his hands above his head, he experienced joint stiffness and pain, and doctors pegged his life expectancy at 10 years.
Fortunately, Nicklas was admitted to a clinical trial studying the disease in Vancouver and got access to groundbreaking, weekly sessions of enzyme replacement therapy, which he still undergoes to this day (they used to take eight hours at the hospital, but have been scaled back to three-hour home treatments).
“When I was growing up, my parents were always like, ‘No, no, (dying young) is not going happen to you,’ but they’ve come around to, when I was older, just make sure I really appreciate it, which I do,” said Nicklas, who commended his family for never treating him “like a kid with a disease.”
“But even when I was younger,” he added, “I never really had an age restriction, how I saw it. I just tried to live my life how it was and that made me pretty positive. It just keeps me chasing for things.”
While he no longer laces ’em up, Nicklas, who graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in political science this spring, helps his father with coaching and team management at the St. George’s School in Vancouver, although that’s been scaled back amid COVID-19. He also worked part-time for the Cougars when his dad was overseeing the club and Jansen was starring for the team.
He’s now taking a securities course while interning at a finance firm and studying for the LSAT.
“After a month and a half of just sitting around watching Netflix, you have to do something. You can’t just do nothing,” Nicklas said Tuesday of his pandemic pursuits.
But some things don’t change — Nicklas and Jansen’s connection through hockey remains strong. Back in March, Jansen joked his older brother is both his biggest fan and biggest critic.
“I don’t like to think of him as any different. I think he was kind of dealt a tough hand and he loves hockey. He knows everything about the game,” said Jansen. “He’s always texting me after my games, before my games, trying to get updates. He asks me questions all the time about what it’s like compared to what I thought.”
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Given the health issues that prevented Nicklas from chasing his NHL dream, Jansen knows how important it is to not only cherish all of his new sights and sounds, but also to share them with his brother.
“I wouldn’t say he’s living it through me, because that’s not fair to him, you know? He’s got his own thing going on,” said Jansen. “But … I know that he likes to experience the things that I get to experience just because he was denied that opportunity. So it’s special for me to get him back.”
Jansen has waited his whole life for his NHL opportunity to knock, and now it’s here, even if his chances still remain in short supply — he played 9:29 in Monday’s 3–2 win and 11:50 in Tuesday’s 6–2 loss. But if growing up alongside Nicklas has taught him anything, it’s that there’s no time to be complacent or satisfied.
“Everyone has good days and everyone has bad days, but when you’re living carefree and you’re healthy every day … I think everyone takes it for granted — me included,” he said. “(But) I think (I’m) just trying to take advantage of those little opportunities that some people don’t get.”
