“I WAS BORN TO PLAY THIS SPORT”
T he first goal Jake DeBrusk conjured up in a Vancouver Canucks sweater came much the same way his big-league career did — stepping up at the right moment, weathering the blows, and making something out of nothing. It was late September, beneath the Abbotsford Centre’s lattice of steel-grey beams. Sixty-five-hundred fans had packed into the stands to see the club’s marquee summer signing make his pre-season debut in their colours. It took less than two periods for DeBrusk to prove his worth.
First came the point shot, a Hail Mary of a wrister from defender Vincent Desharnais, tossed on net as he drifted toward the right wall and ran out of real estate. As he’d loaded up, there was DeBrusk, floating towards the Flames’ netfront and earning a stiff crosscheck for encroaching on Calgary’s cage, the knock shaken off with the nonchalance of one who’s eaten hundreds of them.
The puck approached on a wild trajectory, careening through the air, destined for the glass. DeBrusk contorted his body, twisting to his right, flipped his stick upside down and swiped at the rubber with inch-perfect precision. The deft deflection altered the puck’s course, caused it to bank right and bounce first off an opposing defenceman, then the goaltender, and then the post, before settling comfortably in the back of the net. Cue the fans on their feet, the kids jumping into the aisles, the Canucks faithful suspecting they might’ve got a good one — all this before the new guy tucked home an overtime game-winner for his second of the night.
For those who’ve been by DeBrusk’s side since the early days of his journey, it was a familiar sight, his ability to redirect anything in his airspace honed long before he was ever in the big leagues.
“When I was playing down in Virginia Beach for the Norfolk Admirals … we’d put Jake in baseball down there, and he had to learn how to hit,” remembers DeBrusk’s father, Louie, a veteran of 14 pro hockey seasons himself, now a broadcaster for Sportsnet. A teammate at the time, who’d played baseball in college, gave Louie the skinny on how to improve his son’s hitting. “He said, ‘You’ve just got to pitch him a lot of balls, just repetition.’ So, I went to the Walmart and I bought one of those big bags of whiffle golf balls, the practice golf balls, and I would throw those on the beach to Jake batting. And he would smash those out of the air — they would catch the wind, and they would move, and they would curve. Within a month of doing that regularly, he was smacking those things. He was just hitting them easy. I threw a baseball in there every once in a while, and it was like a beach ball coming at him.”
Louie still sees that drive to improve in his son. “He doesn’t miss many,” he says of Jake’s efforts in front of NHL cages. “He worked on that.”
Trace the younger DeBrusk’s journey from those afternoons in Virginia Beach, and that determined approach has been at the core of it, passed down by the man who first bore the family name under big-league lights. The message delivered from father to son was clear: give nothing less than your best, be nothing less than relentless every time you step on the ice. In truth, that was the only way DeBrusk could get there at all — the smallest kid on every team he played for growing up, a longshot even for the WHL when he turned up in junior, a life in the big leagues was far from a lock for No. 74. But like his father before him, and in no small part through an effort to emulate him, DeBrusk fought tooth and nail for his shot, wrestled his dream into a reality, and turned himself into a household name. Now, he arrives in Vancouver an established vet, a bona fide threat, and the potential missing piece for a puck-obsessed city with lofty dreams of its own.
I n the beginning, DeBrusk had a simple goal: “Honestly, I just wanted to be like my dad,” he says. “I loved the game from the very start. Every single [childhood] picture I’ve seen of myself, I was trying to get on skates. It was just a pure love for the game — I really looked up to my dad.
“So much, in fact, I actually used to be a right-handed shot. I turned into a left-handed shot, because that’s what he was. I just wanted to be like him.”
“I always told him he should have stayed right,” Louie says with a chuckle. “There were less right-handers — he would’ve gotten more opportunity.”
The elder DeBrusk still remembers his son’s first hockey stick, the one he clutched while taking his first spins around the sheet back when Louie was playing for the Phoenix Coyotes. “Wayne Gretzky had this package of equipment you could get through Hespeler,” he says, “and it was everything — shoulder pads, elbow pads, pants, shin pads. It was the whole nine yards. He went to skating classes in Arizona, and he just loved it. But we put him in full gear right away, so he felt like he was invincible out there.”
While his dad was a decade into his own pro hockey journey by that time, it was DeBrusk’s mother, Cindy, who first nudged him onto the ice. “I think I was probably a little bit more reluctant to throw him into hockey early,” Louie remembers. “My wife got him his first hockey gear, she got him set up with skating lessons. … I didn’t want to force him into that area. We tried a lot of different sports: baseball, soccer, he was in gymnastics for a little bit, he did badminton, tennis, he had a set of little golf clubs — I mean, you name it.
“But hockey was his sport. Once he got a stick in his hand, he never wanted to let it go.”
DeBrusk just remembers the rinks — the ice, the lights, the crowd. “I just have a really big appreciation of how it was growing up in that atmosphere,” he says. “I was around the rink a lot. I think I went to my first ever NHL game when I was two or three days old. It was right away. I was pretty much born to play this sport.”
There was one other thing back then that left a lasting imprint: his dad’s undying love of the game. “It was just how passionate he was about it,” DeBrusk says. “Obviously now he’s a commentator … but I’ve been hearing it my whole life. He’d be rewinding plays — you know, it was just how much he loved it. He was a big-time fan of the game even after he was done playing, and he just wanted to teach me in little ways. I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am today without him.”
It didn’t take long for the elder DeBrusk to see that same passion for the game taking hold of his son. “He loved being on the ice. That was where he loved to be the most,” Louie remembers. “He would go out on the outdoor rinks [in Edmonton] in -20, -25 weather with his friends, and they would skate all day. They would be out in that cold weather, and they’d be crying at night because their feet were frozen.”
Louie can picture his son, pint-sized, putting his first puck in the net during those early days, can still remember the joy that followed. “It took him a while to score his first goal,” Louie chuckles. “He wore No. 94, because he liked Ryan Smyth, who played for the Oilers. And he went to the net like Ryan Smyth, scored a goal bashing away — three backhand whacks at the puck, and it finally went in. He fell down three times in the celebration. It was a pretty emotional day for us.”
Milestones aside, the DeBrusks didn’t measure success in how many goals could be tucked away by the game’s end, how many assists could be collected each night. “The only time he ever gave me a talking to is if I didn’t really try hard, if I didn’t give my best effort,” DeBrusk says of his dad. “That’s all he cared about, was just always giving it my all. It wasn’t about points, stats, anything like that.”
Lucky for DeBrusk, because it took time for the numbers to come, for his passion to translate into performance. Those early years were marked by uncertainty, DeBrusk unsure if he had enough to reach the heights his dad had. “Honestly, I actually didn’t really know,” he says. “I didn’t know until I was probably in my draft year. And even during that you don’t know. I wasn’t really one of the better players growing up, to be honest with you. I was kind of a late bloomer. I always believed in myself and I believed in my game, but there were always players that were better than me.”
“He was a small kid,” says Louie. “He was the smallest kid on his team, or the second-smallest, for five years in a row. And because of that, he had to learn to do some things a different way. He had to be a little smarter, he had to be a little more positional. He had to learn to, kind of, sneak in and do things differently. … When you’re the smallest guy and you’re playing up against big guys and, you know, your head’s where their elbow is, it’s an intimidating game.”
Dan Glegloff saw DeBrusk navigate that minefield firsthand, coaching the winger during his under-15 and under-18 stints with Edmonton’s South Side Athletic Club. “He was the smallest kid on our team both years I had him,” Glegloff says. “He was tiny, but man, he was so skilled. And just a really, really competitive kid. … He wasn’t afraid to go to the hard areas of the ice. He had great hands, really good vision. He was quick. I remember him being able to do things with his stick that other kids at that age couldn’t do.
“He had one play with a defenceman on our team, when he was 14. He would be at the far blue line. The defenceman would just take a wrist shot down the ice. And he could knock it out of the air, get it right on his stick, stay onside, and somehow end up with a breakaway or a two-on-one.”
It was in moments like those that Glegloff felt he saw DeBrusk’s true potential, glimpses of the skill he’d one day flash at the game’s highest level. Still, there seemed so much stacked against him. “He was fourth or fifth on the team in scoring — he was one of our better players, for sure, but you know, I don’t think he would’ve been the kid the scouts picked out as the one who was going to play in the NHL one day,” Glegloff says. “The thing about him is he was a really resilient kid. He knew he was a little bit smaller than other guys, he knew he was a bit of an underdog, so he had that mentality where he just worked. He just kept working and every day just got a little bit better and kept his nose to the grindstone. He never was a kid that pouted or complained about opportunities or ice time or anything like that — he just kept working and kept earning his spot every day.”
Even so, the obstacles kept coming. After playing for Glegloff’s U-14 team, DeBrusk tried out for the SSAC’s U-16 team and didn’t make the cut. A year later, though, he earned his way onto the U-18 squad, and it was during that redemption campaign that it started to turn for the teenager. “I remember we were facing elimination in a game against Sherwood Park, and we went to five overtimes,” Glegloff says. “He was all over that game. He took a penalty in overtime — we killed it off. He had a penalty shot in overtime — he didn’t score. And then he ended up with the game-winner at, like, one o’clock in the morning. … He scored the game-winner in that game, and then he scored the game-winner the next game, the deciding game. And then he actually scored another overtime winner, which put us into the finals in the next round.
“If there was a big moment in the game, he was always around it. He wasn’t afraid of pressure. He wanted to be the guy that made the difference in the game. I just remember feeling pretty confident that if Jake was on the ice, something positive was going to happen in the big moments.”
Of course, even after that world-beating minor-hockey run, as DeBrusk set his sights on the WHL, he found himself facing a familiar conundrum. Each step up brought bigger and bigger opponents. The jump to junior meant trying to make his name against kids twice his size.
“I’ll be honest, when he was drafted to the Swift Current Broncos, his mom fudged the numbers,” Louie says. “He was four-foot-11 and 119 pounds, I think she put five-foot-two and 125 pounds on the sheet. She said, ‘He’ll be that big by the time he gets there,’ and I was like, ‘Well… okay.’ He was really small. I had aspirations for him to go to school, go to college, but he wanted to play in the WHL. He felt that was the best league. You know, Cindy and I were like, ‘I don’t even know if he’s going to be good enough to play there.’”
“I was a seventh-round draft pick, and I was just blessed to get drafted,” DeBrusk says. “I was probably the most excited guy to get picked at that point, because I didn’t know if I would.”
Off the ice, he settled into the Swift Current routine — eggs and bacon with the squad at local breakfast mainstay, Louie D’s, before every home tilt, video games at billets’ houses every other day, his happy-go-lucky vibe quickly winning over his new teammates — but on the ice, Year 1 brought only more tests, only more growing pains. He finished the season with 15 goals and 39 points to his name — a solid effort, but not one that brought visions of draft-day glory.
But DeBrusk came back stronger, taller, and hungrier in Year 2, his draft year, eyes trained on that far-off shot at the big leagues. And it all clicked. The sophomore dominated to the tune of 42 goals and 81 points, pacing the Broncos offensively and more than doubling his rookie totals.
Coda Gordon remembers the moment it all shifted for his young teammate. A former Flames draft pick, Gordon was a leader on that Broncos team, and the club’s second-highest scorer the year before DeBrusk’s breakout. “A quarter-way into the season, we were doing a three-on-three game in-zone,” Gordon says. “I was a 20-year-old that year myself — the 20-year-olds tend to be the stronger guys on the team in general in the WHL. And I remember battling with him quite a bit in that one [practice], and being like, ‘Oh, this kid’s pushing me around now. He’s beating me in all the battles, making me look silly.’
“That was the year I noticed a big jump in his game, and realized how good he actually was. Especially growing an extra foot, getting strong — I was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s going places.’”
It wasn’t just one summer of bulking up that spurred DeBrusk on to that breakout campaign, though, says Gordon. It was the uncanny balance of his approach that made him a handful. “Just his all-around game; the little details that most people don’t notice, he picked up, and he was good at them,” Gordon says. “His strength on the puck was a big thing. Trying to knock him off the puck, even just stick battles, lifting his stick up, he was strong. Obviously, that translates to being good around the net, being good with the puck, and his natural goal-scoring ability took off then too.”
For DeBrusk himself, what mattered most wasn’t the numbers, or even the battles won against locker-room vets — it was the progress, the feeling that his success on the ice was finally aligned with his dedication off it. “It was exciting. It was probably one of the better years of my life, in general,” he says. “I felt like my game was just taking off, and obviously I had a goal in mind. You know, I was motivated and determined to get [to the NHL]. Lots of players have all different roads. Obviously, just even knowing my dad’s — it doesn’t matter how you get there, it matters if you do. I was just trying to get better each day.”
B y the time they were sat in the BB&T Center stands in late June for the 2015 NHL Draft, DeBrusk’s family was more nervous for their young big-league hopeful than he was for himself. “I had no illusions that he was going to be a first-rounder,” says Louie. “I thought he was going to get drafted. I had no idea where. … It was nerve-wracking.”
“I was actually weirdly prepared for it,” says DeBrusk. “I was actually pretty calm. You know, at that point, it’s out of your hands. … I definitely was nervous, don’t get me wrong, but I felt like I’d done what I needed to do, you know?”
The top of the draft played out as expected — Connor McDavid going first overall to Edmonton, then Jack Eichel, second to Buffalo. As the picks came off the board, DeBrusk noticed something. The cameras. “When you’re watching it on TV, there’s a camera crew that has the camera for reaction,” he says. “I knew Connor was going to go first overall, and I had a pretty good view of them, so I was looking to see where the camera went. … I just kept following [the camera] around. And sure enough, it was the 13th pick, and he was staring right at my section.”
Louie was seated on the aisle, with DeBrusk between him and the rest of the family. “The picks started to happen, and he leaned over to me,” Louie remembers. “He says, ‘Listen, when I get drafted, I’m going to go that way and hug all of them, and then I’ll come back to you and I’ll hug you.’ And I just started laughing. I’m like, ‘I’m glad you’re confident, kid.’”
The Bruins, who owned the next three picks, took Jakub Zboril at No. 13. “And, like, my heart dropped,” DeBrusk says, laughing. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get myself checked in here. I’ve got to get myself together.’ But sure enough, the camera guy didn’t move. And I heard my name.”
With the 14th-overall pick, Don Sweeney took to the mic and called DeBrusk down to the stage, announcing him as the newest member of the Bruins.
“After that, it was pretty much a blur.”
As joyous and overwhelming as the moment was, it was only the first step. And if DeBrusk’s journey to that draft-day stage had taught him anything, it was that the next step wouldn’t come easy. True to form, before he could get a sniff of the big-league action he craved, first came a return to junior, a trade to Red Deer, and a year toiling in the minors.
“It’s not easy. He spent a full year in the American Hockey League, and I think he was a little bummed out about that, to be honest,” remembers Louie. “He saw 10 or 11 guys get called up and get opportunities to play in an NHL game. He saw college kids come in, sign a contract, and get an NHL game right away. And he didn’t get one NHL game that year. They left him down in Providence the entire year.”
And then there was everything away from the ice: moving to a new country, going out on his own, venturing beyond the bubble of junior hockey. “It was a big-time learning year for me,” DeBrusk says. “You know, you’re playing against men now. In terms of hockey, the level of play is obviously a step up. The road schedule, the three-in-threes. You’ve got to figure out how to get your apartment all set up, get all the furniture, you’re trying to build things from IKEA. … It just forces you to take care of yourself, you know? It forces you to mature.
“It’s just a lot of new things to get used to. … It took me some time, it honestly did.”
Even so, those in AHL Providence at the time caught glimpses of what was to come. “Right away, you could see the raw talent, the speed,” says Kevin Dean, head coach of that Providence team. “He could see the ice and make a play really, really well. So, I took the tack that he needed to learn how to be a good pro — you know, how to block shots, how to stop in the D-zone, those little finer points. And he embraced it. … To his credit, he dove in. He’s a very versatile player, and I think it’s because he’s an intelligent kid. He’s an intelligent player.”
DeBrusk started to find his way by the midway point of his first pro campaign. Louie remembers a conversation between Dean and the young rookie that turned the season around, that pushed DeBrusk into a dominant run to close out the year. “You know, even as a 20-year-old rookie in the American League, he could take a game over, with his speed and his ability to protect the puck and make a play,” Dean says. “My conversation with him was: ‘Listen, we will go as you go. If you really raise your game, and play at a real high level, our team is going to win.’ I don’t know if he took that as a challenge or it just gave him some confidence or what, but he became a real good player down the stretch for us.”
One night in particular, late in the season, still stands out to Dean. “By Thanksgiving, he only had three or four goals. And then I remember in Utica, in the middle of November, he had just a huge game,” the coach says. “He scored a goal, had a huge block at the end of the game to preserve a one-goal lead. We were struggling as a team at the time, and he had just an unreal game at both ends of the rink, and we won. … I remember that game in Utica as kind of a turning point for him. He just kind of took the game over.
“We had really been struggling. And the fact that he just, without blinking, got in that lane, blocked that shot, I remember that. I said, ‘Oh, this kid’s got a chance to be a really good hockey player.’ … Going forward, he got some confidence. Like, ‘I can make a difference.’ And he did most nights.”
“It hardened him,” Louie says of his son’s year in the AHL, a league in which he himself logged parts of seven seasons. “He played 17 three-in-threes that year in Providence. They went far in the playoffs. And he grinded. It really made him have to buckle down and understand how to be a pro player. And I think that was the reason he stepped in and made the [NHL] team the next year. And he’s never looked back. He’s never been down in the minors since.”
It was everything he learned from the stumbles that came with jumping to each new level that prepared DeBrusk for the biggest step of his career. It came on Oct. 5, 2017, when the 21-year-old stepped out onto the ice at TD Garden, an NHLer at last. “It was a special moment,” DeBrusk says. “Every single player remembers their first game. Everything leading up to it, all the times you’ve been cut — it just brings back all the memories, all the bad and all the good of your journey.”
The level of the squad he’d joined only added to the pressure — not a rebuilding project, but a contender stocked with future Hall of Famers. “I knew them a little bit, but you’re still in awe of them, you know?,” he says. “It’s Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara, David Krejci. I was with Krejci on a line — I was more nervous about if he liked me than I was for the game.”
Even before he took a single shift, it all felt different. “The way that they prepared and everything, it just felt like the NHL, you know? It just felt like where I should’ve been at that point in my life,” DeBrusk remembers. “Seeing the jersey on, getting the nod that you’re playing, home opener. … You just want to start off on the best note that you can. You just try to control your own game. You don’t want to overthink it, but you’re going to overthink it. You’re on the ice, you’re looking at guys you looked up to, you’re playing with guys you looked up to — you know, you try to not get lost.
“It’s something that I’ll never forget. Being in the tunnel, just trying to enjoy it. Just trying to get through it. And as soon as that puck drops, everything changes.”
Louie, Cindy, and the rest of the family were up in the stands, ready for whatever would happen next — maybe more growing pains, maybe some magic. Halfway through the night, DeBrusk chose the latter, collecting a one-touch pass from Krejci in the slot, sweeping it backhand-to-forehand, and going top shelf on perennial Vezina nominee Pekka Rinne. One big-league game, one big-league goal — and just like the very first one he potted, he marked the occasion in style.
“I did a huge celly — almost blew my arm out,” DeBrusk remembers with a laugh. “I was pumped. Coming back to the bench after scoring a huge goal, the boys were all pumped up. It just felt right.”
Up in the stands, the DeBrusks were on their feet, caught up in the moment, Louie’s eyes blurred with tears. It wasn’t just the goal, or the game. It was the whole journey, how far their son had come. “It’s a special, special moment I’ll never forget. That our family will never forget,” says Louie. “I remember sitting around afterwards in the hotel. He came, and we had pizza, and we kind of had the feeling like, ‘The kid didn’t look out of place.’ It was like, ‘He was okay there. I think he’s going to be okay this year.’ And he was.”
Fast forward seven years, to DeBrusk’s Canucks debut this week, and it feels like a big-league lifetime has passed. His time in Bruins colours brought seemingly the entire gamut of NHL experiences — from breakout campaigns, game-breaking playoff goals, and a run to the Stanley Cup Final to high-stakes stumbles, summers of trade chatter, and Game 7 heartbreak.
For Dean, who was with DeBrusk for the first five seasons of his NHL run, moving up to the Bruins bench after that Providence season, the impact the scrappy winger had in Boston was no surprise. “The speed was not going to be a problem for him, the skill wasn’t a problem — I think the strength early on was tough for him. He was getting bounced off some pucks a little bit. … But he trained well, he got stronger and quicker, and then all of a sudden, he’s in Boston’s top six, on a really good team,” the coach says. “That says a lot, right? You don’t get a top-six role on a Stanley Cup-contending team if you’re not a good player. And he fit in there pretty seamlessly.
“He was important for us, including the year we went to the Final. I think his ability to score big goals is part and parcel with just his natural God-given ability on the ice. And I think he likes it,” Dean continues, “Some kids don’t like the limelight — I think Jake is not afraid to be in the limelight, enjoy the moment, and show some emotion. He’s not just going to sit on his hands and bob his head — he wants to show he’s got some personality in those big moments, show he’s got some game.
“And he did.”
N ow, a new chapter beckons. Eight years into his NHL career, DeBrusk stepped into this summer with his first chance to choose the crest that will adorn the front of his sweater. Offers from half the teams in the league came in. He chose Vancouver, inking a seven-year, $38.5-million deal with the Canucks on the first day of free agency.
After the long road that led him here, he arrives at this moment not just a seasoned pro, not simply well-adjusted to the bright lights of the big leagues, but as a bona fide difference-maker — perhaps with more still to give than most realize. “He’s got really deceptive speed,” says Dean, now an assistant coach in Chicago game-planning how to stop his former star forward. “He’s fast. You know, he’s top 10 per cent in the league, probably. You don’t see it a lot, just the way he plays, because he’s a winger, but he’s extremely fast. And he can make a play at high speed — not everyone can do that.”
Like that first time down the tunnel in Boston, though, DeBrusk’s trying to stay in the moment, trying not to overthink it. “I’m just going headfirst into it,” he says. “I’m just going to try to do whatever I can to help, you know? I know what kind a player I am. I know what kind of player I want to be. And I hope it all comes to fruition this season.”
That the Canucks entered this season with a better shot at chasing down some real glory than at any point in the past decade played a key role in DeBrusk’s off-season decision, a glimpse of last May’s playoff frenzy fresh in his mind when he put pen to paper.
“That’s something that really, really excites me,” he says. “I know what it’s all about, being a fan in Edmonton. … I know what it’s like when a city surrounds a team, and I think that’s what happened here last year. The guys who were playing here, they’ve talked about it a lot since I’ve been around, how awesome everything was. The fans are loud. The Canadian market just hits different. My dad got to play in one — obviously it comes with different things, pros and cons, but I’m really looking forward to the pros. That’s what you want as a player.
“You want to play in the loudest buildings. You want to play in the places that are the most passionate.”
Still, DeBrusk isn’t getting ahead of himself. He’s well-aware of what brought him this far, of the approach that’s allowed him to reach so much further than he was ever expected to: head down, nose to the grindstone.
“I look at things pretty short-term,” he says. “I look at things on a month-to-month basis. Three years ago, if you told me this was going to happen, or how it was going to happen, let alone with Covid in there — there are just so many things that can happen in this game. … So, I actually haven’t looked at the big picture.”
But if he does stop for a moment, take a step back, and imagine what his legacy in a Canucks sweater might one day look like, the vision is clear as crystal.
“I want to help bring a Stanley Cup here,” he says, matter-of-factly. “That’s why I signed here — to win. That is always the main goal, and that’s what it is long-term: To help this team get there.”