An atypical development path made Jonathan Huberdeau into an ‘unorthodox’ superstar
Jonathan Huberdeau was 16, barely had learned to speak English, and Gerard Gallant wanted him to save the Saint John Sea Dogs’ season.
Mike Hoffman was one of the best goal scorers in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, but he was slumping at the wrong time and and the Sea Dogs needed to get him going to keep their playoff run going. To keep St. John’s season alive, Gallant decided to put Huberdeau, one of the youngest and smallest players on the team, with Hoffman.
“Normally, you put a guy like Hoffman, who was 20 at the time, with a guy like Huberdeau to get him [Huberdeau] going,” Sea Dogs assistant coach Greg Leland said. “No offense to Mike, but Turk said, You know what? We’ll put Jonathan with Hoffman and he’ll find him.”
Huberdeau was one of the best rookies in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) all year long, but this playoff run, with 18 points in 21 games, was what really finally put the winger on the map. A few years earlier, he was mostly an unknown and certainly overlooked — sound familiar? — but his natural gift for playmaking and the way he always made linemates better was getting too tough to ignore, even if he wasn’t as big, fast or strong as a typical elite prospect.
Hoffman, who later played two seasons with Huberdeau on the Florida Panthers and now plays for the Montreal Canadiens, was not the first to learn firsthand how unique Huberdeau’s gifts are and he was far from the last. At every step of his career, Huberdeau has been the type of player who becomes easier to appreciate the more people watch. It’s why now, nearly 11 years after the Panthers took him with the No. 3 pick in the 2011 NHL Entry Draft, he’s finally in the hunt for the Hart Memorial Trophy, headed to the 2022 NHL All-Star Game on Saturday as one of the main attractions and Florida’s lone player representative at T-Mobile Arena.
“It’s about time he starts getting recognized more and more,” star center Aleksander Barkov said.
At one time, Barkov and Huberdeau could have shared the label as the league’s most underrated. Florida consistently missed the Stanley Cup playoffs throughout the first halves of their ongoing careers and Sunrise, of course, is not a natural hockey town, so it could be difficult to appreciate the little things both did to be great.
Barkov’s greatness was a bit more obvious with his 6-foot-3, 215-pound frame. Huberdeau, now a late-blooming 6-1 and 202 pounds, swears he never even thought he would play in the NHL, and now he leads the league with 64 points and 47 assists at the All-Star break.
“I’m kind of an unorthodox kind of player,” said Huberdeau, 28. “I’m not the quickest, but I make it work.”
‘How is he doing that?’
There are moments — usually at least one per game — when Huberdeau makes a pass that leaves his teammates, often even the ones on the receiving end, wondering how it was possible.
There was the one last season against the Carolina Hurricanes, when he led the rush, stopped on a dime at the right faceoff circle, then spun to his left to knock a perfect backhand pass over to forward Alex Wennberg. There was another a few months back when he got the puck at the left point, did the same sort of spin to his left and made a whirling pass across the ice to star defenseman Aaron Ekblad for a goal against the Tampa Bay Lightning. He even had an obvious one as recently as Saturday when he set up behind the San Jose Sharks’ goal, did a fake “Michigan” move — pretending like he was going to lift the puck onto his stick and carry it into the goal — and used the sliver of space it created to set up forward Sam Bennett for a game-winning goal in overtime.
The reaction is always the same: His teammates hug him and smile like they would after any goal, and then, Barkov said, someone thinks, “How is he doing that?”
“I think it’s mostly natural,” Huberdeau said earlier this week, as he got ready to travel to Las Vegas for his second NHL All-Star Game. “I try to look one or two plays ahead.”
It’s a hard question for even him to answer and it makes him one of the hardest superstars in the NHL to fully appreciate.
“I played so many sports,” is the answer he eventually comes up upon. “I think that helped me with like vision, coordination.” Combine it with his slender frame and “that’s probably why I became that type of player,” Huberdeau said.
He’s a known golf fanatic, although he said he plays less now than he did when he was young. He grew up playing basketball, soccer and tennis, too. He’s even known to pop up at a Miami Dolphins game here and there, learning to love football the longer he lives in South Florida.
There’s pieces of all of them in his game.
His repertoire of no-look passes and creative fakes make him something like Steve Nash on ice. His ability to know where players are going to be rather than where they are is like something off a soccer field. He even uses angles and spin like a tennis player trying to place the perfect shot.
Throughout his childhood, Huberdeau played everything and didn’t worry about playing in the biggest, most competitive leagues in Canada. Winters were for hockey, but falls were for soccer and springtime for tennis. He didn’t spend his summers traveling for different hockey camps and showcase events. Instead, he spent them at his family’s cottage on Lake Nominingue. One year, Huberdeau even skipped out on tryouts for a high-level AA minor ice hockey team because it would’ve cut the summer short by two weeks.
It kept him out of Canada’s typical scouting and development timeline until he was 15.
“I know that was popular, but my dad was like, You’re coming to the cottage, spending the summers with us,” Huberdeau said. “I was just playing for my hometown, just having fun. ... That was perfect. I had fun, I was having a blast out there. I didn’t really think I was going to go to the NHL. Obviously, you have a dream, but you just go out there, have fun, don’t think about it.
“I would get sick of hockey if I played hockey all the time.”
At 15, he finally gave it a shot. He showed up at tryouts for the Saint-Eustache Vikings and, as Vikings coach Dave Theriault recalled, he was one of the smallest kids on the ice. Saint-Eustache, about 30 minutes from Huberdeau’s hometown, is a AAA minor team — the highest level of youth hockey in Canada — and Theriault remembers not even being sure Huberdeau was going to make the cut, but, “The more he played with good players, the better he was,” Theriault said.
“We had a lot of veterans that were 16 and 17 years old,” Theriault said. “In October or November, the guys came to me: ‘Hey, Dave. We want to play with Jo.’”
‘A different level’
The same thing happened for him in the QMJHL, where he showed up at about 140 pounds and barely speaking a word of English to becom the league’s best prospect, and it’s happening again now.
“He’s always been a good player,” said Gallant, who coached Huberdeau in St. John and then again for three seasons with the Panthers, and is now the coach of the New York Rangers. “Now he’s taken it to a different level.”
It’s obvious in the statistics, but even more obvious through the team results. Florida enters the break in first place in the NHL and is on pace to shatter franchise records for wins, points and goals. Huberdeau has been the driving force as the only forward to play in all 47 games.
With Huberdeau setting the tone, the Panthers have 13 players with double-digit assists and six with at least 20.
“It rubs off on other guys,” said interim coach Andrew Brunette, who will coach Huberdeau with the Atlantic team at 3:15 p.m. “If you play with really good players, if you can figure out the patterns and where to go, it’ll make you a better player because you’ll see the game in the same light they see it.
“It is very infectious to the rest of the group.”
Huberdeau is thankful it has come to be because of how fragile it once seemed, when interminable trade rumors would chase him, Barkov and Ekblad.
Now they’re all but guaranteed to stay together through at least next season to keep chasing a Stanley Cup and Huberdeau doesn’t hide what he hopes for beyond next year, when his contract runs out.
“I want to play in Florida for the rest of my career,” Huberdeau said. “We knew it was going to turn around. The owner believed in us. We could’ve been split up. Especially when you don’t win, they don’t keep you. We’re fortunate that they believed in us.”
