#draft era jhughes

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June 20, 2019 | The day before the draft Jack Hughes to the media crowd: “Ready?”

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Archive: In 2019, Devils' Jack Hughes Was On Precipice Of Beginning His NHL Career

New Jersey Devils center Jack Hughes is one of the NHL's up-and-coming superstars. In this 2019 story, Hughes pulled back the curtain on his life as a fledgling force to reckon with.

May 3, 2024

Vol. 72, No. 14, May 13, 2019

The Hockey News Archive

Although his New Jersey Devils didn’t make this season’s Stanley Cup playoffs – and despite his injury that forced him to have surgery in early April – center Jack Hughes is one of the NHL’s rising young superstars. 

In this cover story from The Hockey News’ May 13, 2019 edition (Vol. 72, Issue 14), contributing writer Giovanni Siciliano profiled Hughes as he began his NHL journey.

Before Hughes was picked first overall by New Jersey in 2019, he was a much-hyped youngster who dominated for the USA Hockey National Team Development Program. And while some said he was born to play hockey, Hughes had a confidence in himself that extended beyond the hockey world.

“I feel like I could be successful in a lot of things,” Hughes said. “I love playing baseball. I was a pretty good baseball player, and if I put as much time as I did into hockey into golf, I could be a pretty good golfer. If I wanted to do something smart, I could probably do that, too.”

Hughes is currently on an $8-million-per-season salary that makes him one of the NHL’s best bargains. He doesn’t worry about the money he’s making, but instead, he simply focuses on the game itself and being ready night in and night out to be a difference-maker.

“That’s really the only thing you gotta do,” Hughes said. “Every player in the NHL deals with it. I mean, they’re getting paid, and they have to live up to what they’re getting paid.”

JACK HUGHES: BORN FOR THIS

Vol. 72, No. 14, May 13, 2019

By Giovanni Siciliano

Two months before the NHL draft, Jack Hughes is sitting at the dining room table in his family’s home in Canton, Mich. A continuous loop of the NHL Network is playing on the big-screen TV in the family room just a few feet away, where his father Jim is relaxing in a recliner. “First five picks in 2013. Go!” Jim says. “OK. MacKinnon, Barkov, Drouin, Jones…” Jack replies, stuck on No. 5. “If you give me the team, I think I can get it,” he says. He’s told it’s Carolina. “Oh yeah, then it’s Lindholm. And Monahan sixth, right?”

There are some people who were put on Earth to play hockey. Jack Hughes is one of them. One of the first photos of Hughes is of a chubby, bald, 12-day-old baby in a Detroit Red Wings jumper sitting in the Turner Cup. A few years later, when Jim was an AHL assistant coach in Manchester, Jack would quietly sit in his seat and eat popcorn, enraptured with what was going on in front of him the way most toddlers are possessed by Sesame Street. As a youngster growing up in Toronto, he would tag along with his father on scouting trips and diligently write notes in a hardcover book about the players he watched. When he was old enough to take part in the family’s fantasy draft, he would dress in a suit and walk around telling people he’d be a GM in the NHL one day. He even made his own business cards.

Born in the U.S. and assembled in Canada, Jack has been on the path to stardom from the time he could walk. There was no escaping it. Jim played defense for four seasons at Providence College, captaining the Friars in his senior year. According to Jack, legendary USA Hockey coach Ben Smith once referred to Jim as “the biggest hack of all-time, like the dirtiest player, but then he said he was a really good player, too, and a good puck-mover.” Jack’s mother, Ellen, is in the University of New Hampshire’s Sports Hall of Fame for both hockey and soccer. She played for Team USA at the 1992 Women’s World Championship and, along with Hall of Famer Geraldine Heaney, was named to the all-tournament team on defense. (Her silver medal from that tournament went to the Massachusetts Sports Hall of Fame but has since gone missing.) 

William Nylander lived with the family for a month when he first came to play in North America and often took Jack and the other Hughes brothers, Quinn and Luke, out on the ice to do drills. “We still do them,” Jack says. “We call them ‘Willy drills.’” In Jake Gardiner’s Twitter profile, his bio photo shows the Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman on the ice at the 2014 Winter Classic at the University of Michigan, flanked by Jack and his two brothers.

Hockey is all over Jack’s DNA, beginning with his father. After winning the International League’s Turner Cup as an assistant coach with Orlando in 2001 (the IHL’s final year), Jim moved his family to Boston and then Manchester for assistant coaching gigs, and finally to Toronto in 2006, when then-Leafs GM John Ferguson Jr., an ex-teammate at Providence, hired him as an assistant coach with the Toronto Marlies. (Jim later became the Leafs’ director of player personnel before being fired in 2015.) The family settled in Toronto for the better part of a decade. 

There, Jim presided over all three of his sons’ minor hockey careers in the Greater Toronto Hockey League, as well as spring hockey, and exposed them to the best on- and off-ice resources in the world. There are photos of all three boys outside on what they call the ‘ODR,’ or outdoor rink, with Jim leading them in drills, every one with a purpose. So, clearly, Jack is one of those rare few who was born to play hockey, right? “I don’t know what I think about that,” Jack says. “I feel like I could be successful in a lot of things. I love playing baseball. I was a pretty good baseball player, and if I put as much time as I did into hockey into golf, I could be a pretty good golfer. If I wanted to do something smart, I could probably do that, too.”

Hockey world, meet Jack Hughes, uber-modern athlete and one of the most laidback teenagers you’ll ever meet. If he’s feeling the pressure of being the top prospect for the 2019 NHL draft and likely the future of the New Jersey Devils, there isn’t a single crack in his facade that would suggest that’s the case. When talk of the upcoming draft lottery arises at the dining room table, he picks up his phone to start searching for a draft-lottery simulator website. “Let’s do it!” he says. “What’s it called? Screw it, why not?” Then he gets giddy as he goes through it 10 times. (For the record, the Devils won three times.) What kind of teenager does that?

Hughes is a player the NHL needs. And he’s more than ready to become the first player to jump from USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program directly to the NHL. Patrick Kane, Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel would’ve been the first, second and third, but all three are late birthdays, so they had to spend their draft years playing elsewhere. When it comes to comparisons, Hughes falls in that netherworld of prospects. He’s not considered a generational talent in the Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid sense, but he’s not far off. Picture Kane playing center, and that’s as close as you’re going to get to putting a label on Hughes. 

Like Kane, he’s immensely skilled and fast. And even though he’s a little undersized, Hughes is about to enter a league where players who like to carry the puck can skate through the neutral zone without fear of having their heads taken off. “To me, Hughes could be superior to every other (draft-eligible) player in every skill attribute,” said TSN scouting director Craig Button. “The only thing he’s not better than other players with is his shot, which can be improved. But there’s no other area of the game where he’s not better than every player, in my view. He’s better than everybody.”

And it’s been that way for a few years now. Those who follow the game have known about Hughes since his days as a minor hockey phenom in Toronto. In his final year of midget – a year he played at that level because Hockey Canada denied him exceptional-player status to play in the OHL as a 15-year-old – he had 58 goals and 159 points in 80 games. He’s more likely to pass than shoot, and his speed and smarts set him apart from his peers. His array of offensive talents even prompted a “Lose for Hughes” campaign, which the Devils won in early April.

One day, teammate Matthew Boldy showed up at the team’s training base at the USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Mich., wearing a “Lose for Hughes” T-shirt with the ‘O’ replaced by a USA Hockey logo. A company in Buffalo was distributing the shirt, but as confident as he is, Hughes wasn’t about to add one to his wardrobe. “I just feel like that would be super cocky,” he says.

Hughes has been the unanimous projected No. 1 selection for most of the season, save for a blip around the World Junior Championship when he was playing hurt and was limited to four assists in four games. Finnish phenom Kaapo Kakko, meanwhile, scored the winner in the gold-medal game against Team USA. Hughes had an assist in that game, but the sense was that Kakko’s performance had narrowed the gap between them. Kakko has three inches and 23 pounds on Hughes, and not only did he spend 2018-19 playing against men, he excelled against them, with 38 points in 45 SM-liiga games. His 22 goals broke Aleksander Barkov’s record for goals by an 18-year-old. 

But do you want to talk about records? Going into the world under-18 championship, Hughes had already set the NTDP’s all-time points record, a mark that had previously been held by Kane, then Phil Kessel, then Clayton Keller. His 197 points were 30 more than Matthews and 58 ahead of Jack Eichel’s numbers with the program. Hughes also holds the single-season mark for assists and is second in points.

Led by Hughes, the group of 2001-born American players on that team has blazed a trail that could end up with every single player being drafted in 2019. Every. Single. One. There could be as many as seven first-round picks from the team, one that also lays claim to the program’s all-time leading goal-scorer in Cole Caufield. “I’ve seen every iteration since Day 1, every single team since Day 1,” Button said. “This team, the 2001-borns, they’re the best team that has ever come through this program. They are unbelievable. Last year, five of their players from the U-17 team went up to the U-18 team and played prominent roles.”

Things are going swimmingly in the Hughes household when, all of a sudden, there’s a rumbling down the stairs and in walks Jack’s younger brother, Luke, confident and buoyant. At 15 years old, he’s all arms and legs at the moment, so he has a lot of filling out to do, but anyone who has seen him play claims he’s better than their oldest brother, Quinn, was at the same age. At 5-foot-11, he’ll also be the biggest of the three. 

Like his two brothers before him, Luke is off to the NTDP in the fall, where he’ll play for the next two years before going in the 2021 draft. If he goes in the top 32 (that will be Seattle’s first draft), the Hughes will become the second family to have three brothers picked in the first round. (Four of the six Sutter brothers were first-rounders in the late 1970s and early ’80s.) “Hey Luke, you want to come and sit over here, bud?” Jack asks. “Come on over here, big dog.” 

There’s clearly an ironclad bond among the brothers, one that was forged on the ODR back in Mississauga, Ont., when Luke desperately tried to keep up with his siblings. Both Quinn and Jack were born in Orlando when their father was coaching there, and Luke was born in Canton just weeks before Jim started as an assistant coach with the Bruins. When their father was with the Leafs and the Marlies, the boys didn’t actually have tickets for the games but would show up early and go and stake out a spot in the standing room area with Kody Clark (the son of Leafs legend Wendel), who was drafted in the second round by the Washington Capitals in 2018. 

The Hughes brothers had every resource at their disposal wherever they went, but it was in the fresh air of Canada where they learned to exploit their talents. “You never get tired on an outdoor rink,” Jack said. “You hear a million people say that, but once you experience it, you realize, ‘Holy crap, it’s true.’ Being out there for hours, then going in and watching the Leafs games with my buddies at my house, probably eight or nine kids, and playing mini-sticks until we go to bed. It was always hockey, hockey, hockey.”

While Jack is speaking, Ellen approaches with her open laptop. She has some home movie footage of Jack to share. In one video, he’s a five-year-old playing against six-year-olds, wearing a Marlies helmet and using a pro stick. As he watches himself cut through his opponents with ridiculous ease, he makes an observation. “I look like Jack the Monkey,” he says, comparing himself to the star of the movie Most Valuable Primate.

It’s an exciting time for all three brothers. A couple nights earlier, Quinn appeared in his first NHL game with the Canucks and registered an assist, and Luke, who just finished training camp with the NTDP and made the under-17 roster, is days away from the OHL draft. In 2015, Quinn was taken in the third round, 49th overall, by the Sarnia Sting. Two years later, Jack would’ve gone first overall to the Barrie Colts, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to play junior hockey. 

That didn’t prevent the Mississauga Steelheads from gambling on him with their first-round selection. Ellen jokes that with their record of spurning the OHL, teams will have gotten the message and Luke will go a lot lower in the draft than his brothers. “That was like Christmas morning for me, man,” says Jack of being picked in the OHL draft. “I went eighth overall. Early morning for me.” He then turns his sights directly on his younger brother and says, “Dude, if you don’t get drafted, 15 rounds, man. Oh my god, you’d better re-evaluate your sport.”

Undaunted, Luke endures the ribbing. (And for the record he does get drafted – eventually. Despite having first-round talent, Luke falls all the way to the 14th round, 281st overall, to the Saginaw Spirit.) After a while he excuses himself. “Nice meeting you,” he says. “But I’m going to rip some ‘Chel.’” For the uninitiated, that means he’s going to play some NHL 19. Until he discovers that Alex Turcotte, the son of ex-NHLer Alfie Turcotte and Jack’s teammate on the NTDP who lives with the family, has gone to visit his grandfather and taken the console with him.

Easy is a relative term. When it comes to Jack Hughes, he knows he’s been afforded a lot of advantages that other kids go without. Like any elite player, though, he has combined his physical gifts with both his opportunities and his passion for the game to get where he is. There have been a fair number of sacrifices. On this day, he and Luke are sitting in their house watching the NHL Network because Jack’s season is still going on and Luke is about to play in the USA Hockey national championships. 

They’re doing that instead of going somewhere for spring break, something they’ve never done in their lives. “Growing up in this house just made all of this really kinda easy,” Jack says. “I mean, growing up has been really easy, and the hockey side has been easy because my parents have been through the same experiences.”

It’s a household where Jack is actually the outlier. Jim played defense in college, as did Ellen, and both Quinn and Luke patrol the blueline. But Jack is a center. He only played defense once, in an elementary school tournament in Toronto alongside Luke. When you have an undersized kid with the puck skills Jack has, that’s not somebody you want to put on defense. And while everyone in the Hughes household has played a part in getting Jack to where he is, Jack brings it all back to his father. 

“I always say none of us would be here without (him),” Jack says. “He was telling a 12-year-old me the same thing he was telling a 21-year-old prospect. We had an NHL coach in our house teaching us the game, going to our games, managing what we do, evaluating us and helping us out on and off the ice. When we’d be watching a game, the first period would take an hour-and-a-half, just from rewinding every play. It’s still like that a little bit, but it was awesome.”

Part of what makes Hughes so special is that his upbringing has left him undaunted. He’s been interacting with adults all his life, many of whom occupy NHL teams’ executive offices and hold the levers of power in the pro ranks. No wonder the kid is so confident. Nothing about the journey he’s about to embark upon intimidates him. He said he was more nervous during his OHL draft year than he has been this season. When you’re 15, he says, you’re worried about how many Instagram followers you have. Having just turned 18 in May, this season has been all about staying more balanced and just going out and playing the games. “That’s really the only thing you gotta do,” he says. “Every player in the NHL deals with it. I mean, they’re getting paid, and they have to live up to what they’re getting paid.”

That day will come when the NHL drops the puck for the first game next season. Jack Hughes will no longer be on the outdoor rinks or playing mini-sticks in the basement with his brothers. He’ll no longer have the protective cocoon that has enveloped him for all of his hockey-playing life, and the father who was always in the front seat of the car will be hundreds of miles away. But you get the sense he’ll be just fine. He’s been preparing for this all his life.

THN May 2019

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ok that terrible fight has piqued my interest pls tell me more about this dude he fights like gumby would if he fought i think...the complete lack of a closed fist in particular also...

OHHHHHH i could say one million hundred gazillion things about henry ALWAYS thank you so much for asking...... the fact that his pathetic little limp wristed slap fight was PLANNED tells you sooo much 😭😭😭😭😭 the main thing to know about henry is that he is a nerd in jock's clothing.... he's like if a smart person chose to be dumb out of their own free will. he was a double major at harvard (where he was also captain of their hockey team for a while) because he finished his first degree too fast (!) and he had to make his psychology minor into a second major so he could keep playing. his main comment on this was that psychology classes are Kind Of Scary... because they make you think about Your Own Brain... look what you did harvard. you took a perfectly good henry and you gave it anxiety!!!! he went to prep school in massachusetts. listening to any sort of media with him is so funny because he says things like "oh gosh" and responds to every question with "great question" like he is just sooo polite... he's not a fighter. that's not his bag!!!! and yet!!! he was also part of the same usntdp era that gave us the jhughes-tz11-cole caufield trio but lowkey no one remembers he was there because he's a little bit irrelevant like that 😭 up until recently i really questioned if anyone on the sharks besides bordy (his usntdp teammate who does NOT want him cramping her style) knew his name because like. he's just henry... he's just there.... but apparently they do? they love their big polite very manly muppet? which they should!!!! but like. i was not sure...... i felt like a mom worried her son wasn't getting along with the other kids at preschool 😭

another important part of Henry Lore is that he was originally drafted by the ducks in 2019, same year as tz11, but before he left college, he let them know he wanted to go to free agency when his rights expired and he ended up becoming a shark!!! he claims it was because he knew and liked a lot of the staff in san jose but idk the ducks seem to have some kind of insane soul crushing thing going on in the locker room that you can't even attribute to not winning because the sharks aren't winning either and they're still full of joie de vivre.... but it did give us this moment which i think about constantly.... henry "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all" thrun <3

he loves his dogs.... he plays a lot of tennis (he would be the art in a challengers situation OBVIOUSLY).... his college bestie mitchell gibson is a goalie which i'm sure has to do with henry's propensity towards masochism but not even in a hot way just in the sense that i think there is still some kind of puritan ghost named like, Chastity Patience residing within him, as is the case with MANY people from massachusetts.... i'm probably forgetting things because it's early but in conclusion:

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Hi I’m Jack Hughes, I’m seventeen years old, and I was born in Orlando, FL.

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-Jack Hughes: in his own words

go lukey go!!

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Jack Hughes is the 'generational' talent who could help save Hockeytown

March 3, 2019

There’s a picture in Jack Hughes’ bed room of Pavel Datsyuk, captioned, “To Jack, see you in NHL!”

Datsyuk, the former Detroit Red Wings star, knew what he was writing.

Jack Hughes has been the favorite to go first overall in the 2019 NHL entry draft for more than a year, the 17-year-old middle child in a family of hockey phenoms. He’s a "generational-type" forward who draws comparisons to Patrick Kane and a self-assured teenager who's grounded by his family even though some project him to impact the league by 2020. 

The Wings, who are headed for a third straight draft lottery, would be fortunate to win the right to select him, as he’d accelerate their rebuild and be a potential franchise cornerstone. Team personnel have scouted Hughes heavily, an easy task with him playing for the Plymouth-based USA Hockey National Team Development Program in suburban Detroit.

“I’ve watched him play four or five college teams this year, play against guys who are three or four years older than him and just physically bigger and more mature,” said Kris Draper, Red Wings assistant to the general manager. “They come after him but I’ve yet to see Jack Hughes back down. He’s a real competitive kid. He wants the puck.

“To me, one of the most impressive things is he is an undersized forward, but he is dynamic on his edges. His quickness, his stops and starts, his change of direction off the rush — he has the ability to create time and space for himself. And then he just knows how to slide the puck. He has that knack of where to put the puck to get it back.”

Hughes put up 116 points last season, starting out with the NTDP's Under-17 team before being promoted to the Under-18 team. 

“There are a lot of players who have high skill, a lot of players who have speed,” NTDP U18 coach John Wroblewski said. “With Jack, it’s his consistency and desire to be the best that separate him from other players that are really good or even great players. He’s at the top of the pyramid.

"There’s a genuine passion to play the game with this young man and a genuine drive to be the best at his trade. But he does have god-given physical attributes. His ability to train and push himself to the limits is in the upper echelon of any athlete I’ve ever seen. He is blessed with a God-given ability to process oxygen or play at a high level with depleted oxygen.”

Jack Hughes was born May 14, 2001, in Orlando, Florida. His older brother, Quinn, is a sophomore defenseman at Michigan who was drafted seventh overall last June, by the Vancouver Canucks. His younger brother, Luke, is a defenseman with the 15U Little Caesars AAA Hockey Club and is expected to continue his development next season with the NTDP.

All three were taught to skate by their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who played hockey, lacrosse and soccer at the University of New Hampshire. Their father, Jim, was an assistant coach with the Boston Bruins from 2001-2003. It was while Jim was head coach of the AHL's Manchester Monarchs in 2005-2006 that Jack learned to skate on outdoor rinks. The family then spent 11 years in the Toronto area while Jim was director of player development for the Toronto Maple Leafs, before moving to Michigan in 2017. Jim played at Providence from 1985-1989.

Their house in Toronto had an unfinished basement by design. It was a hockey laboratory for the Hughes brothers.

“Two-by-fours were doubled up against one of the walls, and they would rifle pucks,” Ellen said. “We broke a lot of glass. There was one window in particular that was constantly broken, no matter what I put up there. We had nets that were all dinged up. One wall we did Plexiglas up to your waist, but then above that it was all holes. It was crazy."

“When we moved and we had a realtor in there, we said, 'Should we get somebody to come in here and fix it?' And they said, 'No, don’t bother. Somebody is going to have to come in and gut this.' We had a lot of fun though.” 

Jack smiles as he recalls those days. 

“Our dad put us through the wringer in that basement,” he said. “There were a lot of holes in the walls. It was a great basement for us. It was awesome what they did for us.”

All three boys have what Jim refers to as “internal fuel," meaning they play "for the love of the game. That's what makes them who they are."

Jim and Ellen wanted to raise well-rounded boys, and athletics was a major part of that. 

They played baseball, lacrosse and soccer.

They golfed, fished and water-skied, too. 

“We always pushed them to be the best you could in anything they did,” Ellen said. “We made them all run cross country and track in Toronto through junior high. They hated it and we made them do it. We thought it was a real gut check. They all did great.”

But hockey was their love from infancy. Ellen recalls Luke trying on his brother’s skates and wobbling around when he was a toddler. 

“They watched what their dad did,” Ellen said. “They were in the locker rooms. They wanted to do what they knew.”

Jack put it this way: “Walking and skating was the same thing for me.”

Seated in a conference room at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth in early February, Jack Hughes was just nearing a return from an undisclosed injury. He'd recently graduated from Plymouth Canton Educational Park.

“I don’t have to wake up at six in the morning any more," he said, "so that’s nice.”

Hughes has been lauded as the prize of the 2019 entry draft for more than a year. That carries significant weight.

In 2016, Auston Matthews became the seventh U.S.-born player drafted first overall in the NHL, and while Hughes appears destined to be the eighth, he is firmly grounded amid such lofty expectation. This is where having been around pro hockey all his life helps. Hughes understands, better than most, how being a highly touted prospect works, including watching Quinn go through it last year.

“They have followed kids that were supposed to have long careers and a lot of them do and a lot of them don’t,” Ellen said. “We’ve always been under the philosophy that nothing has happened yet. You have to work every day and the day you’re not working, someone else passes you by. Be passionate about what it is you choose to do.”

Hughes likes what many teenagers like: playing video games, preferably "NHL 19," often with teammate Alex Turcotte, the fifth-ranked North American prospect in 2019 according to the NHL's Central Scouting Bureau. "All American" and "Riverdale" are favorite TV shows. Kobe Bryant’s "The Mamba Mentality" is on Hughes' reading list. Ellen describes her middle child as very organized.

“He knows where everything goes in his room," she said. "He’s always been very mature, he’s always hung out with older kids. Partly it’s his relationship with his (older) brother, and part of that is how he was born. Jack has always had his head wrapped around being the best. That’s who he is. You can’t make a kid be determined like that. He’s always been so driven. He’s always had a huge engine.” 

His 18th birthday is coming up on May 14. Six weeks later, on June 21-22, he’ll be in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the draft. He’ll know where he’s going by then, as the draft lottery, usually held the last Saturday of April, will reveal who picks first. 

(The Wings entered Saturday with the third-fewest points in the NHL, which means they have an 11.5 percent chance of acquiring the No. 1 pick.)

“It’s what you dream of, right? Being in this position,” Hughes said. “I’ve worked really hard to get here. It’s really cool and a lot of fun. I don’t really see it as expectations or pressure, I just see it as fun. It’s really cool.”

Hughes grew up watching Pittsburgh Penguins superstar Sidney Crosby, but “as I got older, it’s been Patrick Kane. He’s a guy I idolize and love to watch play.” 

The comparisons between Hughes and Kane come partly because both are undersized forwards (Kane is 5-foot-10, 177 pounds; Jack is listed at 5-10, 168). Kane, 30, has won three Stanley Cups with Chicago since the Blackhawks drafted him first overall in 2007. In 2015-16, he became the first U.S.-born player to win the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s scoring leader (106 points). 

“It’s an interesting comparison because there are some tendencies that are the same,” Wroblewski said. “But Jack is moving at top speed almost the entire game, whereas Kane is so good at slowing the game down and drawing in defenders. Jack is going to carve around them and carve through them. They both have acute vision and think the game  a step ahead of everybody else, but the way they dissect the opponent is different.

“Are they going to score at the same clip? I think eventually Jack will challenge some of Kane’s scoring prowess. Jack is a unique generational-type talent, and there are going to be kids today talking about wanting to be Patrick Kane and I think there’s going to be kids in 10 to 15 years talking about wanting to be Jack Hughes.”

Hughes returned from injury Feb. 15 and recorded five points over his first three games back. His overall numbers — 16 goals, 45 assists in 30 games — give him a 1.97 points-per-game average, surpassing last season’s 1.93 average (116 points in 60 games). At 177 points and with seven weeks left in the season, Hughes should surpass Clayton Keller’s NTDP record for career points (189), set from 2014-16, ahead of such NHL notables as Phil Kessel (180 points) and Kane (172). 

“I think Jack’s puck skills have always been tremendous, but when a player is moving as fast as he is on the ice, sometimes the hands and the brain can’t catch up to the feet,” Wroblewski said. “He’s gotten incrementally more fluid with his hand-eye coordination and his ability to corral passes and take a shot. He is moving so fast and for him to continuously catch up with his hands and his brain is something we marvel at on a daily basis.

“His edge work is impeccable and if you look at some of the great players of our game — you don’t have to look much further than Pavel Datsyuk. He wasn’t a guy with tremendous stature out on the ice, but the lower body, his ability to grip the ice with his skate blades, was one of the many marks of Pavel Datsyuk. Jack has that same hockey strength and it’s something he acquires through hours of training and God-given talent.”

Playing against older boys growing up helped Jack realize his identity as a player.

“I’m not going to be able to run anyone into the boards, I’ll tell you that,” he said “I think everyone has their own things that help them become who they are really. I understand my strengths and know the player I can be and the player I am right now. I’m not going to do anything outside my capabilities.”

Some of Jack’s best performances — the ones where his oxygen reserves kick in — have come against NCAA opponents, where he has 17 points in 11 games. 

“Those experiences are huge,” Hughes said. “We’re playing against really tough competition and you get a feel for what it’s like to play older, stronger kids on a nightly basis. It’s really good exposure for us.”

Jack has a competitiveness about him that’s evident in the way he wants to do something every shift. Given his speed and skill set, he should be in the NHL next season. 

“I’m really confident in my abilities,” Jack said. “I know it’s a hard jump, but I feel like I could do it after a big summer. 

“Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve succeeded. Even growing up, I was always playing older kids, playing up a year. I always succeeded. I always found my way.”

It’s that inner drive — that internal fuel — that is at Jack’s core.

“I can’t wait to see him around the world’s best on a daily basis,” Wroblewski said. “I think he will continue to elevate his game just like has from the time he was a boy. Will he run into some rookie slumps next year in an 82-game NHL schedule? Yes. But he’ll impact the NHL right away and he’ll participate and be a key part of any team that he joins next year.”

Tampa Bay Lightning assistant general manager Pat Verbeek, himself a former undersized NHL forward, has scouted Jack numerous times.

“He’s not real big, but with his speed, that gives him room to be able to make plays,” Verbeek said. “He has the puck a lot, and he’s a tough guy to check. I think he’s got a chance to be a special player, but the hardest thing to overcome when you’re 18 years old is, a lot of the guys are stronger. If he can maintain his skating, which he does really well, then he’ll be able to stay ahead of some of the physical play that he could get caught up in. But that’s always the thing you worry about, the physical part. Is he mature and ready for that? If he is, he’ll do well.”

It’s Hughes' self-awareness that has helped propel him to the first-overall favorite.

“What I like about him is, he knows he can’t go to the net and hang around and think he is going to score a goal there by out-battling a defenseman,” Draper said. “He uses his smarts. He’s a dart-y player. He gets in, he does what he has to do, and then he gets out and makes his play. He realizes what he is and he knows how to score.

“There are nights where you walk away from having watched him play and he’s done some things that are real special and puts a smile on your face.”

[whirlpool-blogs]

“What if that becomes the Devils’ dance after wins?”

[whirlpool-blogs]

June 19, 2019 | The Day Before the Draft | Jack Hughes

[whirlpool-blogs]

An Inside Look at Jack Hughes, the Top NHL Draft Prospect Flyers Fans Are Craving

Published January 28, 2019

Understandably, John Wroblewski had initial doubts.

Not necessarily about the player as much as the situation. Wroblewski was coaching the 2016-17 U.S. national U-18 team when the little brother of star defenseman Quinn Hughes tagged along for a skate.

That little brother was Jack Hughes and Wroblewski had yet to see him play.

"You sort of ask the questions, OK, well how often do you have a 15-year-old skating with a U-18 team and how good is the kid?" Wroblewski said.

The verdict?

"The answer is he's pretty good, he's pretty good," Wroblewski said with a laugh last Wednesday in a phone interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia. "We've got to keep an eye on him. You get him out there and instantaneously he fits in and exceeds and then also enamors you - all three of these observationalist thought processes come to your senses in that hour and a half skate of this tiny, little kid who somehow comes out and impresses you so much within that short period of time.

"Not only with his skill level, but kind of how some of the great players out there, how they can make the game slow down or speed up at their will. It's tough to describe unless you've been around him."

Wroblewski has been around him a bunch, coaching Hughes for the second straight season in the U.S. national team development program. 

Unequivocally, he now knows all about the 17-year-old, a darting and dynamic center whose playmaking ability can cause motion sickness for opponents.

Before the start of 2018-19, Hughes was hardly a blip on the Flyers' radar. Not with the team signing James van Riemsdyk to bolster an experienced roster and take its biggest step since the 2011-12 season. The NHL draft was an afterthought.

Oh, how things have changed.

The Flyers entered the All-Star break at 19-23-6 and with more points (44) than only two other NHL teams - the Devils (43) and Senators (43). A startling shake-up within the front office and coaching staff became the messy byproduct of another slow start, this one the most impactful of them all.

Suddenly but inevitably, Hughes' name has permeated the fan base. He is widely considered the consensus No. 1 pick for the 2019 NHL draft.

And Flyers fans are astutely aware. 

The golden spot is in sight.

Similar to any NHL draft, the climb of the top overall pick will be debated. Many will line Hughes up against past No. 1 selections - from Patrick Kane (2007) to Connor McDavid (2015) and fellow USNTDP product Auston Matthews (2016).

While Hughes is only 5-foot-10, 168 pounds and turns 18 just a month before the draft, Wroblewski sees him developing into a player of his own mold.

My belief is that he'll be in the NHL next year and there's really not a comparable. You're starting to see more and more of the hybrid type of player - guys that play with speed and skill. One of Jack's unique traits is that even though there are questions out there in regards to his size, he's a true center iceman and he will play in the middle and he will figure out a way to make it work.  You throw him into the blender with wingers like Kane and [Johnny] Gaudreau, but then you have to put him in the middle of the ice, so he's got that speed like McDavid. He doesn't have McDavid's size, but he's got things that I think McDavid would be envious of, as well.  There's a component here that I think has yet to be realized. Like his brother Quinn, young kids are going to look at him and want to be him as a player, sort of revolutionize the position that a quote, unquote undersized centerman can persevere and make it to be a superstar in the National Hockey League - because there's not a ton of them that have done that.

Wroblewski calls Hughes "manicured."

It's an excellent way to describe him. Hughes doesn't sound like a 17-year-old. He's well-spoken because he's well-groomed, unfazed by the hype of being the top-ranked 2019 draft prospect.

He credits much of his maturity and preparation to his "great support system," featuring his family and coaches.

His father Jim Hughes, mother Ellen Weinberg-Hughes and uncle Marty Hughes all played Division I hockey. His older brother Quinn was drafted seventh overall by the Canucks last summer and plays at Michigan, while his younger brother Luke is 15 years old and considered an up-and-coming talent.

"We've all kind of been through the ringer already," Hughes said last Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia. "I'm thankful to have them around me."

Wroblewski said the scouting presence this season for the Hughes-led U-18 team has been "overwhelming," but in a good sense.

"It's been nonstop, it's been relentless," Wroblewski said. "The scouting community - reporters doing articles or scouting prospects, [people] that do this for a living, and of course the NHL scouts - is all trying to decipher where do these guys fall in the pick of the litter. And I'll tell you, right behind Jack on this team, there's a slew of other players that are going to be right there with him in the National Hockey League."

For Hughes, the eyes on him are at an all-time high with the draft a little less than five months away.

Is he keen to the amplified attention?

"No, I've been dealing with that since I was 14, 15 years old," Hughes said. "A scout is pretty much another person in the building. All I have to do is play my game and have fun."

Like Wroblewski said, Hughes is manicured.

He gives you guys the clichés at times, but there's a little bit of twist to his cliché answers. There's insight there, it's not like he's just throwing out these random phrases. He's got practice at it, but he's not just going through the motions when he talks to the media, which gives me a lot of hope that he could be at that ultimate ambassador to the game. Not just a guy that goes through and plays excellent hockey and is a focal point, but somebody who is also attractive to the media.  At the same time, when the cameras are away and he's not on the spotlight, he's a kid. He's a high school kid who is goofy and funny in the back of the bus - he's got personality, he's got swagger, he has a lot of the intangibles.

There wasn't just one play or game that convinced Wroblewski.

"I don't think moments capture excellence," he said, "particularly with a kid that's going to go No. 1 overall in the draft."

The World Under-17 Hockey Challenge in November 2017 was when Wroblewski really saw it. The U.S. had taken home gold by beating Canada, 6-4, in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.

Hughes led the field with 15 points (five goals, 10 assists) in six games.

"He just completely dominated the event - and then as the octane and the temperature rose in the tournament, he continued to surpass expectations and continued to dominate and find another level," Wroblewski said. "In a hostile environment - he was a kid who grew up a bit in Toronto wearing the American sweater, and all of a sudden he's thrust into this environment; it was such a pro-Canadian environment, and he allows himself to block out all the X-factors and just concentrate on dominating the game at hand. 

"That to me was kind of the time where I was like, 'This kid is No. 1.' I always had that throughout the fall, but from there on, it was like, 'This is the kid that's going No. 1 next year.'"

Hughes strives to be the entire package.

That doesn't mean he's there yet. However, the multifaceted, no-holes-in-your-game mindset is what pushes him.

"As a hockey player, everything you do you want to improve," Hughes said. "You see the best players in the world working on their game, year in and year out. For me, I focus on everything, but some of the things I focus on the most are my faceoffs and my shot. Those are two things that need to be really good to be a good player."

What about his strengths?

I play a new brand of hockey - speed and skill, the way the game is now. I'm kind of an open book. There are a lot of great players out there and something that they all have in common is that they're Swiss Army knives. They can do everything really well. I feel like my game is what my game is, but I'm working on other parts of my game and trying to become the best at everything that I do. I'm going to show up to the rink to compete and have fun.

In 28 games this season as the captain of the U.S. national U-18 team, Hughes has 56 points on 13 goals and 43 assists. In 60 combined games last season between the U-17 and U-18 teams, Hughes had 116 points on 40 goals and 76 assists.

"He's a workhorse on and off the ice," Wroblewski said. "He'll do whatever it takes. When he finds a deficiency in his game, or if there's something not at - if you want to scale things out of five - if there's something that's not at a five, he'll start working right away at getting to that number. 

"Last year, it was his shot. He did not have a very good shot. It was still good, but it wasn't elite. He went at it hard this summer, his one-timer, his release, everything else has improved so much in that regard. And that's something that I think he'll continue to do."

The Twitter hashtag has grown in popularity for any struggling team near the NHL basement and in the ballpark of the 2019 draft's first overall slot. #LoseForHughes.

Hughes isn't oblivious to the slogan in which many Flyers fans have adopted.

"The first time I heard it was actually my OHL draft year (2016-17)," he said with a laugh. "It's not new to me, but every time I see it, it's pretty funny and I get a little chuckle out of it."

How hard the Flyers charge after the All-Star break will determine their chances for Hughes, while the NHL draft lottery results will have the final say.

Whichever team does land Hughes, its fans will be on board with his message.

"I'd tell them I hope to give them a lot of good years," Hughes said. "That's what every player wants - they want to go to a city that's hungry to win and a city that's a lot of fun. That's really what I'd be excited about - have fun with the city and playing hockey for the community and the city, for however long I'm there."

[whirlpool-blogs]

Jack Hughes set to ‘revolutionize’ hockey but will be grateful for any NHL team

April 8, 2019

Plymouth Twp. — There was a time early this season when Jack Hughes was as interested in the NHL Draft lottery as hockey fans.

And for good reason. Hughes, the 17-year-old star forward of the U.S. National Team Development Program, based in Plymouth, is projected to be the No. 1 player picked in the draft.

Hughes got caught up in it, too, checking the odds over which team held the best chance of landing the No. 1 pick.

“Once it came to October and November I just kind of stopped looking at it and realized I have no say whatsoever,” Hughes told The Detroit News, shortly after another powerful performance for the USA team last month. “I have no choice where I go, so there’s nothing I can do. All I can do is control my play.

“I don’t get to choose where I go.”

Maybe Hughes hasn’t thought about it much lately, but the teams at the bottom of the NHL standings certainly have. The team that wins the draft lottery on Tuesday (8 p.m., NBCSN) will be very happy.

Ottawa has the best chance to win the No. 1 pick at 18.5 percent, but the Senators traded their selection to Colorado last year. No. 2 on the odds list is Los Angeles (13.5 percent) followed by New Jersey (11.5 percent), Detroit (9.5 percent) and Buffalo (8.5 percent).

Many scouts (there were about 30 at nearly every USNTDP game this season) and draft analysts believe Hughes is a generational talent who is capable of transforming an organization in a short period of time with his speed and skill.

“Hughes remains the best player available this year,” said Craig Button, TSN director of scouting wrote in his late-season report, “combining elite offensive skill and imagination with his will to compete every time he comes over the boards.”

Hughes broke the all-time scoring record for the USNTDP this season, passing Clayton Keller (Arizona Coyotes), with 202 points (63 goals, 139 assists) in 101 games over two seasons.

On a USA team that could find a half-dozen or more of its players drafted in the first round this year, Hughes’ talent stands alone.

Still, there was a bit of a slow start this season for Hughes, as the attention, speculation and notoriety gradually built.

“When we went overseas (Czech Republic tournament in November), that was a turning point for him,” USA coach John Wroblewski said. “Just to get away from everything and concentrate on hockey for a week and be able to go about his business.

“We went over there, there were four games, and he put up 16 points (won the tournament's Most Valuable Player honors) with no media, and he was just able to go and play hockey.”

Playing and practicing daily at USNTDP against some of the best competition in his age group has been a tremendous benefit, Hughes said.

“It’s awesome, you’re playing with the best kids in your age group, the best 20 kids in your age group in the USA,” Hughes said. “Our practices are just as hard as the games. We practice, we compete every day.

“It’s been an awesome two years here. You go through the same things, create a bond, friendships that will last a lifetime.”

The only hesitancy some hockey personnel have regarding Hughes is his smallish frame. Listed at 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds, Hughes will no doubt fill out more and become that much more of a threat on the ice.

And even if he doesn’t get that much bigger, the way the NHL is trending, with speed and skill more important than physical size, Hughes could be entering the league at just the right time.

“If there’s ever been an era to come into if you’re good enough and you’re going to make it, this is it,” Wroblewski said. “Here’s the other thing with Jack — he’s an athlete. He’s not even close to hitting his max as an athlete. He’s going to put on 20 or more pounds between now and when he peaks (physically).

“And with that skating ability? He’s going just revolutionize the sport.”

Many hockey people have compared Hughes’ game to Patrick Kane’s (Chicago Blackhawks), another prolific, smaller player out of the USA program.

Kane has gone on to win Stanley Cups and Olympic medals, and has helped transform the Blackhawks organization despite not being 6-foot tall.

But Wroblewski sees a bit of a difference between Kane and Hughes on the ice.

“Kane, as I watch him play, he’s an expert at slowing the game down, where Jack speeds the game up and try to catch me,” Wroblewski said. “Kaner slows it down and everybody starts to watch him and he carves you up.

“Jack is going to go at you and he’s going to out-skate you and he’s going to go at someone else and take him on. He has the same vision; they are both very acute with their vision. But they’re different how they attack.”

Hughes has taken parts of Kane’s game into his own.

“I love to watch him play,” Hughes said. “I don’t think I’m exactly like him, but there are similarities there. He’s played 12 years in the league already. He kind of slows the game down. My game is a little more like (Mathew) Barzal’s, up the ice and dart through. I enjoy watching (Connor) McDavid, guys like that.”

As with any young player, Hughes feels there’s work to do on his game, along with physically getting stronger.

“I have to work on my whole game, I have to round out my game to 200 feet,” Hughes said about developing his two-way game. “That’s a big thing with me.”

Hughes knows who has the best odds of winning the lottery, and casually knows the rosters. If Hughes has a preference where he’d like to go, he isn’t saying.

“There’s obviously some teams you’d love to go to, but it’s the National Hockey League — anywhere you go it’s going to be an unbelievable spot,” Hughes said. “You have to be grateful to go there.”

[whirlpool-blogs]

BORN IN THE U.S.-EH: From the outdoor skating rinks to the beloved Maple Leafs, Toronto makes lasting impact on projected 2019 first overall NHL pick Jack Hughes

Nov 27, 2018

PLYMOUTH, Mich. — It was like watching a magician pull a quarter from behind someone’s ear. After the fact, you could piece together what had happened but in the moment everyone was fooled, most notably the three dizzied Dubuque defenders.

The ever-evolving magic show of 17-year-old Jack Hughes, the consensus No. 1 pick in the 2019 NHL draft in Vancouver this June, was in fine form on a recent Sunday afternoon inside the USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Mich., on the outskirts of Detroit.

Hughes’ USA Hockey National Team Development Program under-18 squad was leading comfortably early into the third period of a United States Hockey League contest against the Fighting Saints — a team comprised of mostly 19- and 20-year-olds — when the top prospect pulled this particular rabbit from his hat. The play began when Hughes intercepted a haphazard clearing attempt. He then went to work, first cutting ever-so slightly to his left to find a seam — or, rather, create a seam — between a pair of helpless Dubuque players at their own blue line. Hughes coolly gained the zone and outsmarted one more opposing player before sliding a precise pass to teammate Cole Caufield, who easily cashed in, at which point the team’s play-by-play man proclaimed, “he made that look almost too easy.”

The announcer was referencing the goal-scorer but he could also have been talking about Hughes, the team captain and best player on the ice this day by a country mile.

When you're playing with him, you've got to expect the unexpected. Teammate Cole Caufield

“He created a 2-on-1 out of a 3-on-2 for them,” said Caufield, himself a projected first-rounder in what is an American-heavy 2019 draft class. “When you’re playing with him, you’ve got to expect the unexpected and you have to trust him. You kind of know he’s going to make the right play.”

Hughes’ U-18 coach at the USNTDP, John Wroblewski, recalled similar wizardry from his star centre earlier this season against Dartmouth College. That day the magic started with an opposing defender having a “clear-cut, 99% chance” at exiting the zone with the puck, before Hughes stripped him of the puck, found Caufield, and Darmouth yanked its net off the moorings to prevent a goal. “You watch it on tape and you’re just, ‘oh my god.’ That is, I think, his defining quality: When he’s on … when he’s buzzing, you’d better have eyes in the back of your head because he is going to hunt you right down and that puck is going the other way as soon as he gets on top of you.”

It’s all to say, the #LoseForHughes social media hashtag has wide circulation for a reason: Jack Hughes could be worth tanking for. As a frame of reference, consider that in early March he broke the NTDP’s season scoring record for a player in his under-17 season (87 points in 46 games), averaging 1.92 points through 51 games and surpassing point-per-game marks of Auston Matthews (1.13) and Patrick Kane (1.11), the last two Americans selected first overall in the same age category. As a 16-year-old, facing teams made up mostly of 18- to 20-year-olds, Hughes registered 116 points in 60 games, which is one point shy of the program record set by Maple Leafs superstar Matthews who was a year older than Hughes at the time.

While he might not be mentioned in the same breath as generational talents such as Connor McDavid or Matthews — only time will complete that story — Hughes is viewed as a genuine No. 1 pick, the type of franchise-player-in-the-making an NHL team builds around. Though he’s a centre, the 5-foot-10, 168-pound Hughes has regularly been compared to similar-in-stature Blackhawks superstar winger Kane (his childhood idol), with emphasis on his grade-A skating ability, high-end hockey IQ, puck skills and that previously mentioned knack for creating offence out of thin air.

Yes, it’s early days. There’s a pile of hockey to be played between now and June, including the world junior championship beginning Boxing Day, where draft positioning can shift greatly based on performance. (The hype train will surely roar off its tracks in Vancouver and Victoria, where Hughes and his older brother, Quinn, a Michigan Wolverines defenceman and NTDP graduate selected seventh overall by the Vancouver Canucks last summer, are expected to don stars and stripes jerseys together.) Still, at this moment there is little to debate about whose name will be called first by a smiling NHL general manager eight months from now. As one Eastern Conference scout told The Toronto Sun: “If you look at first overall picks as a whole, he certainly fits that criteria. He’s certainly a dynamic talent. There’s a good group that could push him, but it’s Jack’s to lose right now.”

Hughes wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Any time you dream of something like that, you’re not dreaming to be the second or third pick overall,” said Hughes, who is chased only by Finnish forward Kaapo Kakko in the race for first overall. “You always want to be No. 1, the best. It’s really important to me.”

TORONTO, THE GOOD

There was little Jack Hughes, four years old, skating on a frozen baseball field in plain view from the classroom window in Mississauga. Inside the classroom, staring out at Jack and his dad Jim, was older brother Quinn, who might as well have been in jail.

The Hughes family home rang.

“Can you please not go out there? It’s really distracting. All he wants to do is watch you guys,” their mother, Ellen, recalls a school official pleading with her.

The Hughes family has always had an almost religious devotion to the frozen game, forever seeking out competition of the highest order. And the GTA – most notably the city-run outdoor rinks – holds a special place in their hearts. After all, it’s where the three Hughes boys — Quinn, now 19, Jack, now 17, and Luke, now 15 — grew their unbridled passion for the sport.

But when Jim took a job as an assistant with the American Hockey League’s Marlies and moved the family to Canada’s most populated city, this family that loved hockey gained a new level of access to the sport. When they weren’t playing for the city’s top youth hockey teams including the Mississauga Rebels and Toronto Marlboros, the boys spent every minute of their free time either on the outdoor rink at Wedgewood Park in Etobicoke, or touring around to watch Leafs, Marlies or Ontario Hockey League games. They were living and breathing hockey 24/7, in a hockey mad metropolis that encouraged that sort of behaviour.

“When we first moved to Canada, the first thing that was apparent to us was that hockey was in the culture, the society,” Jim Hughes said. “Everywhere you looked, kids were wearing jerseys to school. Just from a cultural standpoint … it’s on the radio, it’s on TV, it’s multiple games, it’s everywhere you look, hockey. It was just a fantastic place for the kids to grow up and and really grow their passion.”

It only intensified when Jim became head of player development with the Maple Leafs (after spending 11 years with the organization, he now works for renowned player agent Pat Brisson at CAA).

Jim recalled sneaking young Jack up to the ACC press box for a Leafs game shortly after being hired during the John Ferguson Jr. era. Healthy scratch Carlo Colaiacovo was sitting next to him, and broadcaster Dick Irvin was sitting next to Jack.

“I said to Jack, don’t move. Here’s your popcorn,” Jim said with a chuckle.

With tickets being sparse, expensive and usually both — even for Leafs staffers — Ellen would often drop her boys and some of their friends off at the gates, sending them on their way with standing-room ducats.

“It was sick,” Jack, a self-proclaimed die-hard Leafs fan, said of his time spent watching games from up near the rafters inside the ACC, noting he and his young friends would politely decline offers of beer from the boozehounds who dominate those quarters. “The atmosphere was unbelievable. If you go to any sporting event you’ll know that the die-hards are in the second section, standing-room only. It was pretty rowdy up there.”

Jack has met Penguins superstar Sidney Crosby – one of his childhood idols – on a few occasions, and this past summer skated alongside NHLers such as Jason Spezza, Taylor Hall and John Tavares.

For Jim there is no doubt that Toronto is where his boys fell in love with the sport.

HOCKEYTOWN, USA

If Toronto provided the memories, Michigan provided the springboard.

While Jack continues to hone his craft with the NTDP, older brother Quinn, a Canucks defence prospect, is starring with the Michigan Wolverines down the road in Ann Arbor, and 15-year-old Luke plays minor midget with the Detroit Little Caesars.

Luke, the youngest Hughes brother, appears positioned to follow in his brothers’ footsteps and join the top American junior-aged development program next season. If he were to find his way into the first round of the 2022 NHL draft, they would become the first three American brothers drafted in the first round.

Alex Turcotte, a fellow projected first-rounder and NTDP teammate, rooms with Jack and his parents in Plymouth, while San Jose Sharks first-round pick and Ottawa Senators property Josh Norris lives with Quinn in Ann Arbor. It’s a family affair at the rinks in Detroit, Plymouth and Ann Arbor, with the players often dropping in to watch their siblings’ games with mom and dad.

“It was kind of logical,” Jim said of the move across the border.

“It’s just another great hockey hub,” Ellen added, “It’s been a really great transition.”

‘HE’S A KILLER’

If there’s one thing instantly noticeable when watching Jack Hughes in a game – aside from his almost comically effortless skating stride – it’s his sense of urgency. He wants to be on the ice, he wants the puck, he wants to make a play, he wants to score and he wants it all five minutes ago.

It was no different this day at USA Hockey Arena. The puck was dropped to signal the start of the Sunday afternoon game against the visiting Fighting Saints and the first shift had passed, then the second and the third. Hughes, straddling one leg over the boards at his bench, clearly anxious as he awaited his first assignment. When he finally got the tap on the shoulder from coach Wroblewski, Hughes was not initially feeling it. A giveaway while attempting to carry the puck from behind his own net preceded a fruitless power play quarterbacked by the double-shifted Hughes, who, upon arrival back at the bench, kicked his skate against the boards – an early, if not rare sign of frustration by the player wearing No. 6.

“You might be able to shut him down for a period, but when he plays that way and sticks to it and just says, ‘I’m not going to get denied,’ there’s not a league that can stop him,” Wroblewski said.

“The game is more fun when you have the puck on your stick. I love to get on the ice, I’ll tell you that. It excites me. I just love to be out there competing and making plays out there. That’s kind of what puts a smile on my face,” said Hughes.

Scott Monaghan, the NTDP’s senior director of operations who has been with the program since its formation more than 20 years ago, can only recall being similarly impressed by two other players at first sight: Forward Phil Kessel (fifth overall, Boston, 2006) and defenceman Seth Jones (fourth overall, Nashville, 2013).

“He’s a killer. He wants to be in the game. He wants to score. He wants to win more than anything,” said Monaghan, who served as general manager for Team USA at the under-18 world championship in Russia last winter, where Hughes was named tournament MVP. “You watch him, he just flows. He glides and he can shift gears to faster and then you put the stick skills and the vision together with that.

“There he is, he’s back on the ice and you’re just following him for the whole shift until he goes back on the bench,” Monaghan added. “Even if he disappears somewhere for a minute, he pops right back up and he’s got the puck again. The puck gravitates to him. And he knows how to play in the big trees.”

Coach Wroblewski was equally blown away he first saw Hughes on the ice two years ago.

“It was tremendous to watch him with a group of kids that were two years older than him, how he could still just dominate the surface,” Wroblewski said. “He was still very small and slight back then. But he had this ability to navigate through traffic. How he could kind of freeze the opposition even though it’s guys that are two years older than him and much more mature in regards to their defensive habits. He could still freeze them up and open up his teammates.”

It all has scouts high on Hughes, the Florida-born, Toronto-raised, Michigan-based NHL superstar-in-waiting ahead of what appears to be a particularly strong draft class for American and Western Hockey League players. There were dozens of talent evaluators on hand for the recent Sunday game in Plymouth, including Detroit Red Wings general manager Ken Holland, whose team could be in the thick of the draft lottery proceedings by season’s end.

He's got great ability with the puck, just to kind of create offence from so many different ways; using his skill, using his speed, using his sense. Eastern Conference scout

“He’s got great ability with the puck, just to kind of create offence from so many different ways; using his skill, using his speed, using his sense,” said the Eastern Conference scout, noting Hughes tends to try to do a bit too much by himself at times, but that shouldn’t be viewed with concern for possible suitors.

NO PRESSURE

How has Hughes handled the pressure that comes with being the expected No. 1 overall pick?

By all accounts, with ease.

Hughes has managed to maintain an excellent pace thus far. He enters the month of December leading his team in points (nine goals and 43 points through 22 games played for an average of 1.95 PPG), while also thriving against college opponents, including a three-point game against the Michigan Wolverines which saw him face off against brother Quinn for the first time. Hughes recently led all players at the Five Nations tournament in the Czech Republic with six goals and 16 points in four games as the U.S. 2001-birth year group moved its undefeated streak on international ice to 18 games dating back to October 2017.

If he is feeling any heat, the forward isn’t letting on.

“There’s a lot of scouts and a lot of eyes on us every day, every game we have … and I think he has the most pressure on him obviously,” his teammate Caufield said. “He doesn’t let that affect him at all. He’s not too worried about anything like that right now. He just goes day by day and it’s really cool to see him not get too anxious about anything and just take every day as one at a time and go from there.”

Hughes said it has never been in his nature to be easily distracted by any outside forces — something he says he learned at an early age while starring in minor hockey in the “crazy hockey market” of Toronto. He also leans on his dad’s advice to “just keep your feet on the ground” and stay in the moment, and has benefited from seeing first-hand all that was involved when his brother went through the draft process last year.

Hockey is...so important in my life. Jack Hughes

“Of course it’s a big year. It’s kind of just one step closer to the ultimate dream, to play in the NHL,” Hughes said. “But for me, I’m kind of just taking it day by day and trying to enjoy it and trying to get better here at the NTDP. Honestly, I don’t really feel any pressure. I feel like I just want to do great and I know I’ll do great, so I just continue to come here and have fun.”

As to which teams might be in the hunt for Hughes, it’s safe to say it won’t be his beloved Maple Leafs, an organization that’s currently trending upwards. At the end of the day, Hughes will be content with an opportunity to take the next big step toward his dream.

“I know there’s a lot out there other than just hockey. Hockey is just a small thing in a big world,” he said. “But it’s so important in my life. I spend so much time thinking about it. I have such a love for it. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

BEST TEAM EVER?

PLYMOUTH, Mich. — While Jack Hughes will command the bulk of the attention in the months leading up to the 2019 NHL draft in June, his teammates won’t be overlooked.

To hear the NTDP’s senior director of operations describe it, this year’s under-18 team could be the program’s strongest ever, joining the conversation alongside the 1984 birth-year group that included Ryan Kesler, Patrick Eaves and Jimmy Howard, the 1987-birth year team that featured Phil Kessel and Jack Johnson, and the 1997 birth-year squad that included Auston Matthews and Jeremy Bracco.

“But I think we’ll know more after next year in terms of where they fit in the overall pantheon,” said Scott Monaghan, who has been with the U.S. program since its formation more than 20 years ago.

Being surrounded by so much high-end talent should only benefit Hughes, who is projected to go first overall.

“He is obviously a very special player, but we see a lot of special things from various individuals on this team,” under-18 head coach John Wroblewski said. “Jack is right there at the top, but these other guys aren’t far behind him. They’re neck and neck as far as I’m concerned.”

Added fellow projected first-round pick, defenceman Alex Vlasic: “Having a ton of focus on (Hughes), obviously, it will bring focus to the team in general, so we’re obviously thankful for that. It’s just a great experience to be playing with such a great player.”

Last year, six players with ties to the NTDP were selected in the first round.

SENSORY FRIENDLY HOCKEY

No pre-game warmup music, no video replay, no PA announcer. To say the atmosphere inside USA Hockey Arena during a recent Sunday matinee was subdued would be putting it mildly.

But that was the whole idea, as USA Hockey hosted its first Sensory Friendly Day in partnership with the Autism Alliance of Michigan late last month.

When the under-18 American squad lined up for the singing of the Star Spangled Banner, there was no music pumped in – just a lone young singer without a microphone. So the players started singing, or doing their best variation of that.

“I hear them (singing) on the bus all the time. They’d better stick to hockey,” said coach John Wroblewski with a laugh.

The arena lighting away from the ice surface was dimmed, two suites at centre ice were designated quiet rooms for children who might need them, and ear plugs and gluten-free options were available at the concession stands.

It was all geared towards making the game as comfortable as possible for children with special needs.

The Hughes family thrives on competition, so it should come as no surprise that an annual Peel Region school board cross-country race ranks among the most memorable events for the family during their time in the GTA.

“It’s something away from the hockey rink,” Jim Hughes said of the meet he and his wife would always make sure their hockey standout sons, Quinn, Jack and Luke, signed up for. “You go in the woods and you run in the mud, in the rain, and you come out of the woods and somebody’s (No. 1), somebody’s two, somebody’s three …

“It was a different challenge away from hockey rinks and it was just almost refreshing,” he added, noting the boys’ athleticism and fierce competitive nature would usually lead them to a podium finish.

QUICK HITS WITH JACK HUGHES

Favourite NHLer: Patrick Kane

Best Hughes: Quinny Favourite band/musician: “I’m a country guy, so Luke Bryan.”

Favourite food: Steak and rice

Favourite style of goal: Breakaway

Favourite NHL team: Maple Leafs

Most memorable hockey moment: Winning the under-17 world hockey challenge with Team USA

Favourite teammate: “Too many. All of them.”

Favourite non-hockey hobby: Golf

Not good at: Golf

Favourite place visited: “Bahamas. Family trip five or six years ago.”

Non-hockey talent: Wakesurfing

Night owl or early riser: “I can do both. I don’t need any sleep to function.”

[whirlpool-blogs]

Building a prodigy: How Jack Hughes’ blend of skill and personality morphed him into a top NHL prospect

Published: Jun. 21, 2019

Jack Hughes was pissed.

Standing in the driveway of his billet family house in Plymouth, Mich. — finally free to do so in the early spring after the cold, oppressing winter broke — Hughes grabbed a basketball, his eyes red with revenge.

Moments earlier, United States National Team Development Program teammate Alex Turcotte dunked directly over Hughes. Poster-worthy jams came frequently on the intentionally lowered nets, and Hughes wasn’t going let Turcotte have the last word.

The 5-10, 171-pound hockey player took the ball, drove to the net, catapulted toward the rim and unleashed hell.

“He got so mad,” NTDP defenseman Marshall Warren said. "Just went the other way and dunked on everyone.”

That outburst came during innocent pickup hoops played among some of Hughes’ best friends. Those circumstances never stopped him from being the first rip off his shirt, playing until sweat streamed from every pore on his body.

The desire to never be outdone stems from Hughes’ attitude on the hockey rink, where during his teenage years, his drive and skill transformed him into a top NHL prospect, which could culminate with his likely No. 1 overall selection by the Devils at the 2019 NHL Draft on Friday in Vancouver.

Even while scouts and coaches sung his praises as he tore through every level of youth hockey, Hughes developed his own distinct personality off the ice. His drive bled out in some aspects of life, but Hughes found ways to turn off his engine away from game that defined him.

"You get him into those athletic situations and he’s the ultimate competitor, but he’s able to flip the switch off, which I think bodes very well for him long term,” NTDP head coach John Wroblewski said. "Not just as a hockey player, but as a functioning adult and a product of a good family."

A JERSEY DOWN TO HIS KNEES

When Wroblewski accepted the heading coaching position at the NTDP in 2016, he inherited a group of 17-year-olds born in 1999 as the first group auditioning for his U18 team. Running spring practices in Plymouth, he was still getting acclimated with the names, faces and skills of his new roster.

Before a practice, Jeremiah Crowe, then the program’s director of player personnel, approached the coach and told Wroblewski another player would be skating with the team. He was the younger brother of Quinn Hughes, one of his 17-year-old defensemen. His name was Jack.

Wroblewski took the ice, and as the team trickled out, he saw a small, skinny 15-year-old kid emerge from the tunnel, with skaters two years his elder towering over him. Hughes’ assigned jersey hung down to his knees.

Yet the scrawny center skated with power rivaling any 17-year-old on the ice, and that group of teenagers was the best the United States had to offer. Wroblewski couldn’t keep his eyes off the kid that was supposed to be 24 months away being there.

"He had this magnetic ability, the puck just kept finding him and finding him,” Wroblewski recalled. "And when it did, the opposition couldn’t shut him down. They would give him too much time and space because he had this kind of forcefield that great players have.”

But the newest members of the U18 team picked up on this. Eventually, they stopped respecting the underage boy skating circles around them. They collapsed on Hughes, attempting to take away the freedom that came so easily.

That didn’t make a difference.

“If somebody rushed at him, he’d slide it right through their legs and go around them,” Wroblewski said. "It was amazing how he could manipulate players two years older than him and fit right in and be one of the best offensive players on the ice for two straight days.”

To Wroblewski and those seeing Hughes up close for the first time, it came as a mild shock, even with some of the murmurs that accompanied his arrival. They’d only heard secondhand what the crafty forward was doing from the day he put on skates.

Some of Hughes’ eventual NTDP teammates skated with him for the first time years earlier. In 2011, Hughes and a gaggle of 10-year-olds suited up for the Brick Invitational Hockey Tournament in Edmonton, blissfully unaware of the future that awaited some them with the NTDP.

Even then, among players barely old enough to access their skills and talents on the ice, Hughes shined among his peers.

RAISED TO SUCCEED

The Hughes clan has already been dubbed the next great American hockey family.

Quinn Hughes, the oldest of three brothers, was the seventh overall pick in the 2018 NHL Draft, and he’ll be a mainstay on the Vancouver Canucks’ blue line for years to come.

After Jack inevitably goes at or near the top of the draft on Friday, the youngest of the three siblings, Luke Hughes, will follow in their footsteps. The defenseman will likely hear his name called in the 2021 NHL Draft.

Genetically, the trio was bred to be hockey players. The brothers’ father, Jim Hughes, played college hockey at Providence. That never blossomed into a long pro playing career, but he carved out his path coaching in the NHL and AHL before becoming the Toronto Maple Leafs’ director of player development.

Their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, was the one that taught the brothers most of their hockey chops. A former player on the U.S. Women’s National Team and a member of the University of New Hampshire athletic hall of fame, she introduced the three to skating. Then she showed them how to excel at the sport that came so naturally.

"She was our coach,” Jack Hughes said. "Our dad, when we were young, was coaching pro, on the road a lot, so it’s not like when you have a game, you get a fly by. Our mom, she knew the game too, so you’d hear it from her.”

But aside from Jack Hughes’ prodigious skill on the ice, the two parents molded the forward to be the person capable of handling the attention off of it.

"How does a kid who’s that good and has been tabbed the No. 1 pick, remain humble and hungry, and just overall a good person?” Wroblewski said. "You can’t look any farther than the parents.”

The NTDP cycles in class after class of America’s top hockey talent, plucked from every corner of the U.S., with the sole goal of developing the country’s next superstars.

Hughes fits that mold in every sense of the word, from his competitiveness and desire to never be second best. Yet away from the ice, Hughes’ life isn’t dominated by the game.

He has a shoe collection. He plays video games and poker. He golfs. He hangs out with friends. He does what, by most standards, many normal American teenagers do when they can escape the daily grind of school and sports.

His teammates don’t see him as an untouchable prodigy. Hughes never looked down on them from a pedestal as praise and hype followed him at every turn and continuously gained steam as he aged.

"He’s kind of a goofy kid. Loves hanging out with his buddies. Just making jokes,” teammate Trevor Zegras said. “To me, he’s always just been Jack.”

THE PATH TO NO. 1

David Gregory tried to avoid the hype. He heard the name more than enough, but like any prospect, he wanted to see for himself before drawing his own conclusions.

A North American scout for NHL Central Scouting, tasked with watching and evaluating hundreds of skaters every year across the U.S. and Canada, Gregory walked into Plymouth’s rink and saw Hughes at a camp, trying out for the development program.

Gregory saw Hughes again in his first U18 game, where the center received an early promotion as a 16-year-old. Gregory didn’t need that second viewing to know Hughes would live up to his billing.

“He’s already at full speed and he figures out how to find this other gear,” Gregory said. "If a hole opens up or there’s an opportunity to get to a different spot to make a play, he just finds more speed. It’s pretty amazing to watch.”

From the moment the whispers started years ago about Hughes potentially being the No. 1 overall pick, all the way through the palpable hype during his 2018-19 season, his teammates and coaches never saw a shift in the forward’s demeanor.

Traveling back from a European tournament on a Monday, the U18 team had a quick turnaround for a USHL road game in Omaha on Friday. Hughes roared from the get-go, skating with the ferocity of someone playing in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

“He’s flying around the ice, and the other team’s trying to kill him. Literally,” Wroblewski said. "Three guys are trying to go after him and he’s still doing his thing and dishing pucks."

That consistent drive helped Hughes shatter the all-time scoring record at the NTDP, previously set at 189 points by current Arizona Coyotes forward Clayton Keller. Hughes’ 228 career points also dwarfed the production of current NHL stars Phil Kessel, Patrick Kane and Auston Matthews.

As Hughes racked up record after record, he was still routinely the first on the ice for practices. If the goalies needed a shooter for drills beforehand, he was the first to volunteer.

"That’s also a part of a why he’s so good. He hates losing. He wants to be a difference maker all the time, which I think is why he’s going to be a special player,” goalie Spencer Knight said. “That’s something people might not see about him. Besides all the skill and the glamour, he’s a really good guy, and he’s always working hard.”

[whirlpool-blogs]

NHL notebook: USA Hockey's Jack Hughes expected No. 1 pick in NHL draft

Published: Dec 5, 2018

PLYMOUTH, Mich. — Jack Hughes draws a crowd.

Detroit general manager Ken Holland and former Red Wing star Steve Yzerman chatted during the first intermission of one of Hughes' recent games. Scouts from the NHL were scattered throughout USA Hockey Arena that night, taking notes for teams paying them to evaluate the world's best hockey players.

Hughes, a 17-year-old center, will likely be the top pick in the NHL draft in June.

USA Hockey has developed the nation's top players for more than two-plus decades and four of them have been selected No. 1 overall — including Auston Matthews and Patrick Kane — from its National Team Development Program. Hughes is expected to be next.

"He's as good as I've seen come through here in terms of talent, work ethic and being the complete package on and off the ice," said senior director of operations Scott Monaghan, who has been with the program since its inception in 1996. "He's more like Patrick because of his skating and shiftiness than Auston, who was really big and strong.

"We have 30 to 40 scouts at most of our home games and as many as 60 because Jack is on a team with as many as six, seven or eight first-round picks."

Hughes chose to surround himself with the best American hockey players his age as an amateur instead of getting paid as the No. 1 pick in the Ontario Hockey League. He also could have graduated high school a year early to play with his brother, Quinn, a freshman at Michigan and a defenseman drafted No. 7 overall last summer by the Vancouver Canucks.

"I feel like it's the best place to be for a 16-year, 17-year-old," Hughes told The Associated Press. "No one trains as hard as us. We skate every day. We lift three days a week. We play a great schedule. I think it's the best place to be to groom yourself to be an NHL player someday."

Hughes was born in Orlando, Florida, where his father, Jim, was assistant coach for the Solar Bears in the International Hockey League. He wasn't there long. Jim Hughes moved his family a few months later to Boston because he got a job as an assistant with the Bruins. Two years later, the former Providence defenseman went to New Hampshire — where he, his wife and three boys vacation each summer — to be an assistant and later head coach with the Manchester Monarchs in the American Hockey League.

Jim Hughes' next job appears to have been pivotal in the development of his sons' hockey careers because it landed him in Toronto as an assistant with the AHL's Marlies. He later became director of player development for the Maple Leafs.

"I always played him a year up and that's not easy to do in the hockey mecca of the world," Jim Hughes said. "Even when he was 5, you could see he had a special skill set. As he got older, coaches were yelling at their players to hit him and teams were trying to attack him. And quite frankly, he was still dominant."

While Jim Hughes was often busy with his job when the boys were growing up, Ellen Hughes taught her sons how to skate. She drew on her experience from playing for the U.S. women's national hockey team and at New Hampshire, where she was also on the soccer team.

"When Jack would go outside to play, older boys would always pick him even though he was at least two years younger than the rest of them and he always wanted the puck," Ellen Hughes recalled. "We never had to push him. It was always organic and Toronto was just the best place for him to prepare him for what he's doing now."

Jack Hughes starts his day at 6:15 a.m. with two eggs on a bagel with cream cheese and salami along with some fresh fruit, orange juice and a vitamin. He has to arrive at school shortly after 7 a.m. and if he's tardy or misses a class, USA Hockey has a staff member who knows it and there are consequences.

"There's no sleeping in," Jack Hughes said. "They'll sit you for a period if you're late or skip a class, or if you're late for the bus."

Hughes, who plans to graduate this month, takes four classes before heading to USA Hockey Arena in suburban Detroit to drill on a shooting pad, lift weights and go through an intense, two-hour practice before going to study table. His favorite meal is his father's grilled steak. Shortly after dinner, his parents don't have a hard time getting him to go sleep.

"If you don't go to bed early, this place will eat you alive," Jim Hughes said.

The 5-foot-10, 168-pound Hughes feasts on the competition wherever he goes, playing U.S.-based colleges against players much older and bigger than him, as well as in the United States Hockey League and international competition.

With 16 points in just four games, he was tournament MVP at the under-18 Five Nations tournament in the Czech Republic last month. He had 116 points in 60 games last year and he is averaging about two points a game this season, putting him on pace to set the NTDP career record for points. Hughes skates effortlessly in any direction and has soft hands, allowing him to dangle to puck to set up a shot for a teammate or himself.

"Jack Hughes is the leading candidate to be the No. 1 pick at this point and scouts are out evaluating him as often as possible," Holland said. "He's an incredibly talented player, who is destined to have a fabulous NHL career."

[whirlpool-blogs]

USA Hockey's Jack Hughes viewed as future NHL superstar

Published: Oct 2, 2018

It’s not hard spotting Jack Hughes on the ice for USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program.

Just watch the puck. Chances are pretty good 17-year-old Hughes is there, too.

Mesmerizing, quick, nimble and creative are just some of the words that aptly describe Hughes. Scoring machine, workout freak and almost certain top pick in the 2019 National Hockey League Entry Draft are other spot-on characterizations.

“The draft is 10 months away,” said Hughes, a 5-10, 168-pound forward, who opened the 2018-19 season along with his NTDP U-18 teammates with road games Sept. 29-30 in Cranberry, Pa. “All those websites can come out or people can come out with the rankings, but really, none of it really matters until the teams' rankings come out at the draft.

“I’m not too worried about it, I’m just worried about my game and focusing on that. I’m not the only guy on the team with high expectations. I could go pretty high. We got a really good team with a lot of really good players. There’s a lot of good stuff looming with our team.”

Hughes already is displaying traits both on and off the ice that give a strong indication that he’ll be ready whenever he gets the NHL call.

“I haven’t been around anything like this,” NTDP U-18 head coach John Wroblewski said. “Where there’s been pressure for almost a year and a half for him to be the No. 1 overall pick in the upcoming (NHL) draft, I’ve never seen anything like it.

“I know the kid hasn’t changed much. He’s still the player and the young man who comes to work. He’s got teenaged tendencies, but he’s also a very impressive young man. If you tell him something, his uptake is so quick and he’ll put it to work. And it’s the same kid that always comes to the NTDP every day.”

And who knows, if the Detroit Red Wings miss the playoffs (as is widely expected), the younger brother of University of Michigan defenseman Quinn Hughes (this summer’s No. 7 pick by Vancouver) could wind up as Detroit’s next cornerstone teenage player — just like then-18-year-old Steve Yzerman was in 1983.

“It’d be cool, of course. Detroit’s a great place to play,” said Hughes, who attends classes at Plymouth-Canton Educational Park. “But it’s the NHL. All 31 teams are unbelievable and, if you got the chance to play for any team, it would be just so special.“

Work comes first

Hughes isn’t getting too far ahead of himself. He knows he has a lot of work to do for the NTDP, including international medals to go after next April in Sweden, when the IIHF U-18 Men’s World Championship takes place. USA Hockey Arena fans will get their first chance to watch him play at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13, against the University of Minnesota.

“It’s a big year, of course. It’s fun,” said Hughes, whose parents are Ellen and Jim Hughes of Plymouth. “First of all, it’s our last time playing together with our team. None of us will play together again after this year, so it will be really fun. We’ll make the most of it, for sure.

“With the NHL draft, most of the (U-18) guys are draft-eligible, so it’s a really important year and we’re all really excited about it.”

Hughes isn’t the only budding NHL prospect with the team. He and 17 other NTDP players took part in the recent All-American Prospects Game in St. Paul, Minn. — six of whom are projected top 20 picks in the 2019 NHL draft.

The other top NTDP players include center Alex Turcotte, left wing Cole Caufield (54 goals in 2017-18), defenseman Cam York, left wing Matt Boldy, center Trevor Zegras and defenseman Alex Vlasic.

“Cole’s a special talent, of course,” Hughes said. “Not many guys can come to the program and be able to score goals as well as he can. He’s obviously an unbelievable player and an unbelievable scorer. He’s such a good kid off the ice, too.

“Not only do we click on the ice, but off the ice we’re really good friends, too. I think that helps, for sure.”

Puck finds him

Wroblewski raved about Hughes’ uncanny ability to find open ice and either go top shelf or thread perfect feeds to linemates such as Caufield.

But the coach sees all the intangibles that add up to a future NHL superstar.

“(College and pro scouts) see the guy that flies around the ice. But in games, sometimes the puck is attached to him,” Wroblewski said. “I don’t think that they see how hard he works in a game. The reason the game sometimes looks easy for this guy is he works so hard in practice. He’s got such an unbelievable VO2 (oxygen rate during exercise) and ability to create at the end of shifts, because of what he does in practices.”

Yeah, skating fast is one thing. Of course, Hughes is like any hockey player in that he loves to score goals.

Last year, playing for both the NTDP U-17 and U-18 teams, he tallied 40 goals and a program-record 76 assists in 60 games.

“I’d definitely say scoring a goal,” Hughes said, when asked about which part of the game he gets the most buzz out of excelling at. “If you don’t say scoring a goal, I think you might have a problem, because that’s the name of the game. Score goals.

“Anytime you get to score a goal, it’s definitely something you don’t forget about. You get really excited for it, just like it’s your first goal.”

Just relentless

Yet he is the guy who doesn’t stop in practice drills.

“He loves the drills that involve up and down the sheet that exhaust you to the point of being keeled over,” Wroblewski said. “But he’s always going to jump in line for the next rep. Some guys, not necessarily on this team, who are lesser players, might try to find the line where they can rest in — or go to a line that has a few more guys in it.

“He’ll go right back up in our hardest drills if that line is vacant. He’s a relentless worker.”

The coach was asked whether or not Hughes could be a Wayne Gretzky-like player in the NHL and he smiled. He quickly pointed out how much the league has changed since The Great One hung up his skates in 1999.

“It’s just such a different era,” Wroblewski said. “What I’ll say is, I’ll compare (Hughes) to Gretzky in that he’s got that class. You read the stories about Wayne, how he used to take on all the media requests and handle them with dignity and be able to still perform at a high level ... carry himself as a gentleman and ambassador of the game. I see Jack as the type of kid who can carry on that type of legacy. Respect, charismatic and still humble.

“It’s a different superstar compared to what it was back then. Gretzky was playing a different game than everybody else that was out there. There’s a lot of players who play like Jack. There’s not a lot of players who play exactly like Jack — it’s speed, skill. There’s a lot of people out there that have it, (but) it’s his determination and desire to be the best that separates him from a lot of other guys.”

Family plan

Another plus for Hughes was growing up in a hockey hothouse. It didn’t matter whether they were in Florida, Boston, New Hampshire or Toronto.

“It was unreal,” Hughes said. “With three of us in the house, it was crazy and hectic for my mom, of course. We’d always have friends at the house, (playing) mini sticks, watching hockey, going to the outdoor rink.

“It was always hockey, hockey, hockey for us. It was a really good childhood growing up. The house was really competitive whatever it was, whether it was ping pong or whatever.”

Wroblewski also credited the Hughes family for instilling the winning traits that all three of their sons (next up is 15-year-old bantam phenom Luke) possess in droves. Luke Hughes played last season with the Little Caesars Bantam Major AAA team.

Yet in the case of Quinn and Jack Hughes, they have had to step up to expectations seemingly every step along the way from childhood. They’ve aced every test coming their way. By the time 2019-20 rolls around, both could be playing in the NHL.

“They’re different kids,” Wroblewski said. “I’m sure that (family) support system helps, but they’re very unique. There’s sometimes where you’ll see them in an interview and they appear similar, but they’ve got some dimensions that are different.

“It has a lot to do with how they play on the ice. Jack, his motor is relentless. And Quinn is much more deliberate and he’s able to kind of make people, he baits people in. Where Jack is always going, he’s at high speed a lot during a game.

“It’s a different position (each plays). They just have a different mentality, a different mindset. It shows in their personalities, too. Jack goes and that’s him. Quinn is a lot more calculated and deliberate. They’re both unbelievable kids, teammates and competitors.”

This season, in what might be his final season in Ann Arbor, the older Hughes will try to pick up where he left off last year with the Wolverines.

Stiffer challenge

As far as Jack Hughes is concerned, however, Wroblewski expects opponents in college, international and United States Hockey League play to ratchet it up and really see what the uber-talented prospect is made of.

“It was one thing when he wasn’t under the radar, because of how good he was,” Wroblewski said. “But it wasn’t his draft year. He wasn’t constantly being keyed on. Moving from U-17s to U-18s, there was some differentiation there. But this season, it’s going to be every night, he’s going to have that bull's-eye on his back.

“This is gearing him up for what he wants, to play in the NHL as the No. 1 pick and go on to a lengthy career as a franchise-type player. This is all a learning experience for him.”

It undoubtedly will be a blast, too.

“Just fun, everything’s going on,” Hughes said with a small smile. “It’s what you dream of — having a good game, where everything is just easy and so fluid. You’re kind of just in a zone and locked in on everything else going on around you. You’re kind of in your own bubble.”

From all accounts, the Jack Hughes bubble isn’t about to burst for a long time to come.

[whirlpool-blogs]

NHL Draft 2019: What Jack Hughes said to Devils during scouting combine interview

Updated: May. 31, 2019

The Devils planned to conduct more than 60 interviews with prospects for the 2019 NHL Draft at this week’s NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo.

It’s safe to say their interview with Jack Hughes ranked among the most important of the bunch. […]

Following their session with Hughes, the Devils released video of his answers to three questions posed during the meeting.

Here’s a glimpse at the questions and what Hughes said.

Question from Dr. Aimee Kimball (Devils director, player and team development): “Define success for me.”

Hughes: "In life, it’s making a purpose and achieving that, right? Dedicating your life to something, dedicating time to something, ending up achieving it and maybe doing better than that. Me personally, that would be a Stanley Cup. That’s something I’ve dreamed of my whole life. I think that’s why every hockey player at this level plays.

Question from GM Ray Shero: What do you know about yourself or about your game that you might not have known if you just stopped playing at the U18s and didn’t go to the World Championships?

Hughes: “Easy thing to do for me was to go back home, golf every day, hang out with my buddies until we leave for the combine. That was the easy thing to do. I just broke (Alex) Ovechkin’s (U18) record. I had 20 points in seven games. I felt I had more left in the tank, and I did the hard thing, which was go to men’s worlds, play a third-line center role. And I feel like I did that all for the experience to play against men and be around men.”

Question from assistant GM Tom Fitzgerald: “Do you have any fear at all of next season, coming into the best league in the world?”

Hughes: “No. I don’t think there’s any fear in me. For me it’s something I dreamed of my whole life. For me, I read and react. I think when I have time and space, I’m a threat to score or a threat to make a really nice play. It’s exciting. I think it would be unbelievable to play in the NHL as an 18-year-old.”

[whirlpool-blogs]

Why Jack Hughes could be the best USNTDP product ever

NHL scouts can't stop thinking about consensus No. 1 pick Jack Hughes. And after a lifetime spent dominating every level of hockey he's played, Jack Hughes is ready to start thinking about the NHL.

NHL scouts lining the rail in back of the seats at USA Hockey Arena is pro forma. Every organization has a staffer based in the Detroit area. It’s a hub, offering easy access to NHL, AHL, NCAA and CHL games on any given night. The calendar is crowded with chances to check out talent waxing or waning, but the stop everyone makes is the home of the USA Hockey National Team Development Program, the NTDP for short. 

Outside international tournaments, the NTDP’s under-18 squad faces a schedule of exhibitions against teams from the USHL and NCAA. These matchups see the U18s, the draft-eligible kids, either punching up a weight class against a lot of 19- and 20-year-olds in the USHL, or punching way, way up against collegians who might be four or five years older. On this December Saturday night, they’re facing the Waterloo Black Hawks, traditionally one of the stronger USHL franchises, and one that features a couple of decent, older European prospects — a Russian forward, Vladislav Firstov, who might squeeze into the first round, and a goaltender, Jared Moe, who was drafted in the sixth a couple of years ago by the Winnipeg Jets. The Black Hawks know they have a chance to get seen by scouts when they come to Plymouth but they also know they’re bit players here. The scouts are here to see the U18s, knowing that six or seven or even more will play in the NHL. And, of course, they’re here to watch — and even marvel at — Jack Hughes, an impossibly boyish looking 17-year-old around whom an NHL franchise will be built starting, oh, seconds after the Draft Lottery.

Ask Hughes to write his own thumbnail scouting profile and he comes back with this: “I’m a fun player to watch. I’m exciting. I’m high skilled. The big thing is I just want to win. Lots of guys have skills. My internal motor, my internal drive is what separates me. I like to think I’m a complete player.”

He also clearly has a gift for understatement.

Right from the opening faceoff, it’s plain that Hughes is in one category of prospects and everyone else on the ice is in another — it doesn’t take a professional eye to pick it out. It’s like watching a video with nine skaters running at normal speed and another, the one wearing No. 6 and the captain’s ‘C’, at 1.25 or 1.50. He’s in constant motion and it seems with every turn, sharp or wide, he somehow accelerates. He cites his “motor” or “drive” but the pros inevitably talk about his “steering” and “handling.” 

“Hughes’s speed blows you away but it’s his edges that are really incredible — as good as anybody at any level,” says one scout, who is seeing the U18s for the eighth time this season and Hughes for what he estimates to be the 30th time over the past 15 months.

“Whatever Jack can do standing still he can do full speed.”

It’s not just the speed that makes him so dangerous. No, it’s the fact that he doesn’t leave his vision or any of his audacious puck skills in his wake. On a shift four minutes in, Hughes comes down the right side of the ice against a Waterloo defenceman giving a big cushion with his stick extended, a situation that looks like a simple one-on-one lock-up. Out of this seemingly harmless setup, with no wind-up and not even a glance, Hughes wires a shot that Hawks goalie Jared Moe only hears carom off the crossbar behind him as it barely stays out of the net. In the same situation later in the period, Hughes sends a cross-ice pass through traffic that only he and his winger, Cole Caulfield, anticipate. “Whatever Jack can do standing still he can do full speed,” says Caulfield, himself a projected first-rounder. “He just forces you to keep up and be aware.”

Up on the rail, the scouts shake their heads. Detroit general manager Ken Holland talks animatedly with his staff. Hughes wouldn’t fix everything that ails Holland’s Red Wings but his arrival would be the catalyst for a turnaround. Says one scout with another team almost certain to be in the lottery based on early season form: “You can’t help but project him into your lineup. He’s the one player [in this class] who changes everything with your franchise for five or 10 years. You’re banking information for everyone on the ice but you’re also only human. At some point you’re thinking, ‘What could he do for us?’”

TURN THE CORNER

Pro scouts rave about Hughes's "handling" and one predicts he's the only player in his class who "changes everything with your franchise for five or 10 years."

It’s not simply that 2001 was a very good year for the USA Hockey program, but rather that it still is today. 

Around Plymouth, teams are referred to by birth years; thus the current U18s are the 2001s. And no one associated with the program nor anyone who tracks it professionally can call it “a very good year” and leave it at that. “It’s their best group ever,” says one veteran NHL scout. “They really haven’t had anything else like this, and they’ve had a lot of other teams that won the under-18s [world championships].” In fact, the U.S. has won the tournament 10 times, as much as the rest of the hockey world combined.

The talk about this team isn’t hype. A fair measure of the 2001s’ quality was their performance in the USHL last season. The program’s under-17 teams play a full schedule there and, understandably, usually struggle to keep up. With three future first-round NHL draft picks and a bunch of seconds and thirds, the 1998s won only six out of 34 games. The previous group, the ’97s, was considered a powerhouse and featured eight eventual first-rounders, including Auston Matthews, Brady Tkachuk and Charlie McAvoy; they managed to win 11 of 34.

“Certain players have that knack of delivering in crucial moments, a look in their eye that says, ‘I got this one’ when it’s all on the line. Jack has it.”

Last winter, the 2001s went 19-15 against the USHL and only had their captain, Hughes, for nine of those games. They won the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge and went undefeated in their age group in international play. Hughes was unavailable to the 2001s because he’d been called up to the under-18 team. “It was just a gold mine for me getting called up,” he says. 

Eventually, four other 2001s were called up to the under-18 team in Russia last year — again, unprecedented stuff. The U.S. team went to the final but fell a couple of goals short; led by Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Finland edged the Americans 3–2. Officials passed over Kotkaniemi, who’s impressing with the Canadiens this season, and his Finnish teammates for MVP honours; instead they gave the award to Hughes, who led the tournament in scoring.

Hughes and the rest of the 2001s have been just as impressive this season. In their first big test, the Five Nations Tournament, they outscored opponents 24–7 in four games. Hughes showed the way with six goals and 10 assists. He didn’t simply rack up points in blowouts, either. Against the Czechs, the U.S. led 2–1 with less than 10 minutes to go in what hardly looked like a sure thing. At that point, Hughes took over, scoring two goals, his second and third of the game, half a minute apart. He wound up adding two assists to the hat trick, all at even strength, in a 5–2 victory.

For Dan Hinote, who joined the NTDP this season as a full-time associate coach after stints as an assistant coach and scout with the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Five Nations was his first chance to see Hughes skating against players in his birth year — to that point, Hinote had only seen him against USHL and NCAA teams. Hinote says that Hughes’s performance against the Czechs evoked the Hockey Hall of Famers the coach played with on Colorado’s Stanley Cup winners in, yes, the year of the phenom’s birth. “Certain players have that knack of delivering in crucial moments, a look in their eye that says, ‘I got this one’ when it’s all on the line,” Hinote says. “I saw it with Chris Drury. I saw it with Sakic and Forsberg. Lots of guys who score 90, 100 points don’t have it. Jack does.”

The Five Nations cemented Hughes’s place atop NHL Central Scouting Service’s mid-term ranking, which will be released in mid-January. In fact, look for NTDP players to crowd the top 20 North American skaters; six others will likely be joining their captain. And along with that, the NTDP’s Spencer Knight is a lock to be the top-ranked North American goaltender. Consider: In the CSS’s pre-season players-to-watch list, eight of the U.S. 2001s were ranked as probable first-rounders compared to 11 across the entire CHL.

“Will he be the best ever to come out of the USNTDP?”

Still, the team’s excellence and depth is bound to be lost in the buzz around Hughes this spring. He is as certain to be the first overall pick as Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid were. The only debate is one that will take years to play out: Will he be the best ever to come out of the NTDP? 

On that score, his play at the under-20s in Victoria and Vancouver will be measured against the past performances turned in by Patrick Kane, Jack Eichel and Auston Matthews in their respective draft years. For what it’s worth, all were late birthdays and thus did not go directly into the draft from the NTDP — Kane through the London Knights, Eichel through Boston University and Matthews through the Swiss pro league. And none of them came away from the under-20s with a gold.

NO. 1 FROM DAY ONE

Hughes has played beyond his years from almost the first moment he stepped on the ice. “He was just so fluid and so impactful," says Jim, "always playing up a year."

Jack Hughes’s birth certificate lists his D.O.B. as May 14, 2001, and was issued in Orange County, Florida. He’s not really a Florida kid per se; that’s just where his father happened to be working in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Twelve days after the birth of his second son, Jim Hughes coached the Orlando Solar Bears to a series-clinching win over the Chicago Wolves in what turned out to be the last International Hockey League game ever played. (Most of the IHL teams, though not Orlando, merged with the AHL.) So, in one sense, Jack Hughes was born into hockey, not just the game but also the business of the game. All that was missing was a puck and an entry-level contract in the incubator.

Ellen Weinberg-Hughes knows the game as well as her husband. Jim played collegiate hockey at Providence and she played at the University of New Hampshire — she had gone to UNH on a soccer scholarship, walked on with the hockey team in the winter and wound up as team captain in her senior year. Jim had a brief pro career but Ellen, born in St. Louis and raised in Dallas, made it even farther in the game, playing for the U.S. national team in the early ’90s. Ellen held out hope the IOC would approve women’s hockey in time for the Olympics in Lillehammer in 1994 and still hoped to make the team that would play in Nagano but a blown-out knee effectively ended her competitive career — if you don’t count skating with her sons.

“He was able to dominate as an under-ager in one of top minor-hockey markets in the world. You could suspect he’d have somewhat of a bright future.”

Jim’s coaching career took him to an assistant’s job with the Boston Bruins and then a job behind the bench with Los Angeles’s AHL affiliate in Manchester, N.H. “Manchester’s where I started skating, age three or four on outdoor rinks, and fell in love with the game,” Jack says. Those sessions included his brother, Quinn, who’s two years older, their father, when he was free from work, and their mother, when she was untethered from youngest son Luke, who came along two seasons, uh, years after Jack. 

The Hughes boys’ hockey life went from saturation to full immersion when Jim took a job as an assistant with the Marlies, Toronto’s AHL affiliate, in 2006. The family settled in the Lorne Park neighbourhood in Mississauga and immediately thereafter Ellen embarked on a schedule of getting her sons to the arenas — she took in as many games as possible but, like a true hockey-industry professional, she takes pride in the fact that she never actually bothered watching a practice. Otherwise, though, her dedication knew no limits. “Inevitably the three boys had three different tournaments in three different arenas,” Ellen says. “We had a great support network of families of the boys’ teammates who helped us out. Sometimes one of the boys would sleep over at a teammate’s home for the whole weekend.”

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SONS

Jim passed his love of the game on to his boys (from left to right) Jack, Luke and Quinn, who was a first-round pick of the Canucks in 2017.

When the boys weren’t with their teams, they’d be in the street playing ball hockey; or skating at Wedgewood Park on an outdoor tennis court that was flooded, weather permitting; or at Marlies or Leafs games when Jim could score tickets; or, when all else failed and schoolwork was taken care of, watching NHL games at home. “Ellen is a master planner,” Jim says. “When I was coaching and when I moved to the Leafs’ player development job [two seasons later], I had to rove around and somehow she got the boys where they had to go. And she’d get on the ice with them.”

Maybe someday Wedgewood Park will be memorialized in Jack’s name or the Hughes family’s or even Ellen’s for valour in hockey parenting, but the boys referred to it as ODR, the outdoor rink. Though Jack will celebrate his 18th birthday sometime around the NHL Combine, a few stories about the Hugheses have already entered the media lore — among them Quinn getting distracted in class, staring out a window and spying Jack skating on a frozen baseball diamond outside Christ the King grade school. “We had different lunches, so Jack would be out there and I’d want to be out there with him,” Quinn says.

A skilled if smallish defenceman, Quinn was an elite talent — he would go on to star at the NTDP and wind up as a first-round pick, seventh overall, of the Vancouver Canucks in 2017 — and Luke likewise starred on the blue line for his teams, but Jim Hughes understood that his middle son was a player apart. “You could see it in Jack at a younger age,” Jim says. “He was just so fluid and so impactful, always playing up a year. He was able to dominate as an under-ager in one of top minor-hockey markets in the world. You could suspect that he’d have somewhat of a bright future.”

It seems that Jack’s tendency to understate is a learned trait.

Jack’s talent wasn’t lost on his older brother, either. Quinn describes Jack as his “best friend” and even his “biggest influence.” While that might make him sound like Jack’s biggest fan, Quinn also evinces protectiveness. “When Jack was [playing up] in bantam and I was with the Marlboros minor-midget team, we called up Jack for a game, so he was on the ice with guys two years older than him,” Quinn says. “He was so much smaller, so I worried about him. He ended up scoring a goal and two assists that game. He figured it out.”

“He was the best player on the ice with the best players in the country who were two years older than him.”

Jack Hughes had skills like no other kid born in 2001. He also had an entrée into professional hockey unlike anyone short of the little brother of an NHL star. For a stretch the Hughes family billeted a teenaged William Nylander. Jack’s coach with the Marlboros 2000s was Dan Brown, father of Leafs winger Connor Brown, who’d play on an outdoor sheet with the Hughes boys when he was trying to win a place in the Leafs’ lineup. “I don’t know if being around William or Connor or others made [the league] seem accessible,” Jack says. “Every 12-year-old kid thinks he’s going to play in NHL. I don’t think you’re playing hockey [at that age] and not saying you’ll play in the NHL, whether you’re close to NHL players or not. But I was really lucky to meet players like that and to learn from them.”

The brothers saw all levels of the game from the inside — occasionally Jim Hughes would take one of them on a working road trip to major-junior or NCAA games. Every summer he’d take one of them to Lake Placid for the USA Hockey under-20 development camp. He says his sons came away with an education that went beyond the game. “The boys would be around Brian Burke or Dave Nonis or John Ferguson and they learned how to speak to adults,” he says. “They learned how to listen and be respectful, which really comes across when they’re at combines or in professional settings.”

And that comfort level outside his peer group comes across in his sessions with the media. Neither notepad nor microphone rattle him. As precocious as any of his skills on the ice is his nonchalance in the spotlight. “I’ve talked to reporters a fair bit for a while now,” Jack says. “I knew that this was going to be a part of it and that there’s going to be a lot more [in the pros]. I’ve seen it before and I’m ready for it.”

KANE TO MATTHEWS TO HUGHES

Given Patrick Kane and Auston Matthews emerged from the same program, it's saying something that Hughes is seen as potentially the best USNTDP product ever.

After Quinn Hughes’s minor-midget season wrapped in the spring of 2015, he had a choice of casting his lot with the Ontario Hockey League or trying out for a spot with the NTDP’s under-17 team. The Sarnia Sting selected him in the third round but by then he was set on the USA Hockey program. Jim brought Jack down to visit Quinn in Plymouth that fall and it proved to be a revelation — for Jack in the end but first for those in the offices of USA Hockey.

It started with a buzz around the arena. “It was one of my first days in the program,” says John Wroblewski, the coach of the NTDP’s 2001 team. “Someone in the office told me Quinn’s brother was going to skate with team. I knew nothing about Jack. I went down to the rink and that day he was the best player on the ice with the best players in the country who were two years older than him. Jack was tiny, so small, so weak. At the same time, they couldn’t knock him off the puck. He found ways to get separation. He could draw defenders in and then distribute the puck. He was a really special player.”

Jack came away impressed with the program on and off the ice. “I skated twice with Quinn and the practices were unbelievable, so uptempo, all-skill workouts, all about getting better. I liked the life away from the arena, too. I went back to the house where Quinn was billeting with Brady Tkachuk. I saw that this was a place where you’d make lifelong friends, just a really positive place. I could tell I’d be comfortable here.”

BIG BLOCK MOTOR

One of the only criticisms of Hughes's game a scout is willing to voice is that he tries to do too much when his team isn't clicking.

At that point, though, Jack Hughes was two years away from the NTDP’s under-17 program. Bantam-aged, he was playing for the Marlboros’ minor-midget team and another option was hanging out there for the 2016–17 season: exceptional-player status. If you’re looking for comparables to Hughes, John Tavares and Connor McDavid are a good place to start. Both are players who blossomed with early entry to the junior ranks; kids who at 15 could lap 18- and 19-year-olds. Others had gained early entry — Aaron Ekblad (a hit) and Sean Day (a miss) — but they were granted exceptional-player status in large part because they were physically mature, almost too big and strong to play in their own age group. 

From Jack’s vantage point and from his family’s, a second season of minor-midget seemed like it would be a waste — playing with 2001 birthdays when he’d played all along with 2000s, when he had impressed with Quinn’s elite group of ’99s in Plymouth. “So we applied [for exceptional-player status] — I’ll openly admit that,” Jim Hughes says. “We went through process. Jack did all the paperwork. Jack did the interviews. I remember we were planning on taking a visit to Guelph on the Friday — the Storm owned the first pick in the draft — and then late Thursday I got a call to tell us that the league was denying Jack exceptional status. I don’t know why. Never got an explanation.”

“I saw that this was a place where you’d make lifelong friends, just a really positive place. I could tell I’d be comfortable here.”

Pat Brisson, the CAA agent whose client list is topped by Sidney Crosby, had first met the Hughes family when his son’s Los Angeles atom team played against Jack’s Mississauga Rebels at the Brick Invitational tournament in Calgary — Brisson’s wife, Kim Hughes (no relation), made sure their son tracked down Jack for the post-game sweater exchange. When the OHL decided to deny Jack’s exceptional-status application, Brisson told the family not to worry. “What’s the rush, really?” he says today. “I told them that Sidney didn’t get exceptional status and it didn’t hurt him. It’s a long game. It’s not how fast it comes together. It’s how well it comes together.”

Today, Jim sees the league’s decision as a blessing. “The next year, his second in minor midget, Jack had 165 points and it really did so much for his game,” Jim says. “Developmentally, sometimes it’s good to slow the process. That season allowed him to take ownership of his situation and he hasn’t looked back since.”

SMALL BUT MIGHTY

Playing up his whole life, Hughes — still just over five-foot-ten and 165 pounds — was always the smallest guy on the ice, and opponents still couldn't knock him off the puck.

Jack made the decision to commit to the NTDP days before the 2017 OHL draft — “I knew this would be best for my game and I’d be happiest here,” he says — and the whole family moved with him from Mississauga to Michigan. The Hughes are under the same roof… well, sometimes. They’re schedules still keep them on the run. Quinn’s in his sophomore year at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor. Ellen has to drive Luke to commitments with his minor-midget team in the Little Caesars program in downtown Detroit, a good half-hour commute. Jim left the Leafs organization and signed on as a player-development consultant with CAA and that puts him on the road a fair bit. And then there’s the phenom.

Jack Hughes will tell you that his game has grown leaps and bounds in his 16 months or so in Plymouth and that he thrives with the workload. It’s hard to imagine a more demanding schedule and it’s one that every teenager at the NTDP follows. Jack is out the door at 6:15 a.m. and off to Plymouth-Canton Educational Park, a high-school with 6,000 students, among them all the players on USA Hockey’s under-18 and under-17 teams. 

By the early afternoon, with classes done, he and the team are on the ice at USA Hockey Arena — after the first 60 minutes of practice, the team walks through a tunnel to a second pad, thus not having to wait for the Zamboni to flood the rink. Practice runs a full two hours and it’s high-tempo. John Wroblewski says he hasn’t run a five-on-five drill all week, going four-on-four or three-on-three and often breaking into two groups playing cross-ice at either end, the better to keep everyone engaged, the better to develop players’ skills with the puck on their sticks.

Players lift three times or four times a week under the direction of the program’s strength coach. They check in with the academic advisor on staff. They attend team or individual sessions and maybe drop in on the coaches — a couple of days before the game against Waterloo, Hughes dropped in to watch video with Wroblewski and Hinote. “That’s not out of the ordinary at all,” Wroblewski says. “Jack soaks up coaching. Every player who thinks there isn’t room for improvement is going to flatline. Look at Auston Matthews — he scored all those goals last year and then spent a summer working on making his shot better. What we talked to Jack about was getting lost on the ice — we showed him video of teams sending two or three guys after him, trying to take him off his game or take him out. We’re working on him getting lost in fray, being the 10th guy away from the puck, taking inventory on the ice, and not being the focal point of attention with the puck on his stick. We broke down video of Kane, Marner, Gaudreau and Barzal to show him how they’ll get lost on the ice and let the puck go through someone else. He’s a real student of the game. He watches video here and I know that when he gets home, he’s breaking it down even more.”

By the time he makes his way back to the Hughes home in Canton, Jack has been on the run for a full 12 hours. He eats a dinner per the schedule from a nutritionist. After dinner he does his homework and if the stars line up, has an hour at liberty. He’s in bed at 9:30. Though living at home, he follows the schedule laid out by the NTDP staff for all players. There is a curfew but it would seem a miracle if anyone could stay up late enough to break it.

Hughes says he thought about trying to qualify for the NCAA this season, cramming two years of academics into one. Others have made the jump directly from the under-17s to the collegiate ranks, most notably Noah Hanifin of the Calgary Flames and Zach Werenski of the Columbus Blue Jackets. If he had gone that way, Jack might have had an opportunity to play with Quinn at Michigan, but how he could squeeze more into his overflowing days is hard to imagine. With the U17s playing a full USHL schedule, the team had to abide by league travel rules so as not to gain any advantage — as a result, at the end of a week of exertions, the teenagers often had to board buses for, say, a 17-hour overnight ride to Omaha or a marathon trek for weekend games in Iowa.

A HOCKEY FAMILY

When Jim's work with the Leafs had him on the road, Ellen hustled all three boys to practices, games and tournaments solo.

It might seem to be trial by ordeal, but Jim Hughes calls the NTDP “one of the best development programs in any sport.” Worth considering: As noted earlier, the CHL Prospects Game this season will bring together for a couple of days, barring injury, 11 projected first-rounders; every day after school Jack Hughes gets to practice against seven other teenagers whose names will be called on Friday night at the draft. “Jack raises people’s games every time on the ice but we have a bunch of drivers on this team, so every practice is like a game day,” Hinote says.

Going to an NCAA school might not have raised the bar at all — Jack and his 17-year-old teammates beat Quinn’s Michigan team 6–3 in an exhibition game in October and the 2001s’ record against Division I schools stood at 5–3 through to Jack heading off to the under-20 team’s camp. Talk to NHL scouts familiar with the program over the years and they’ll tell you that USA Hockey’s philosophy has evolved to the benefit of Hughes and the other elite teenagers. “In its first years, [the NTDP] was pointed to getting results at the end of the season, the world under-18s, and down the line, at the world juniors,” an NHL scouting director says. “It was a team-oriented, results-oriented program. Now, really since the program moved to Plymouth [in 2015], it’s become about building better players and skills development. The foundation was always there — the ratio of practices to games. But now it’s about skills and not all about the short-term returns.”

Perhaps, but for Jack Hughes over the holidays and into the new year, it will be about a handful of games, the World Junior Championship. “I’ve dreamed of playing in this tournament with my brother my whole life,” Jack says. “Odds are, I’m probably not going to get a chance to play with Quinn in the NHL. That the tournament is in Canada is just that much better. We went [to WJC games] when they were in Toronto. We even went to Montreal.”

“I’ve taught the boys to stay in the present. Try to be better every day and understand that nothing big has happened yet.”

For lottery-bound NHL teams, the world juniors will be a telling indicator of Hughes’s readiness to make an unprecedented jump directly from the NTDP to the NHL. He’s not as physically prepossessing as those he’s compared to, the first-overall picks who played in the under-20s in their draft-eligible seasons before moving on to the NHL at 18. Central Scouting lists Hughes at five-foot-10.25 and 168 pounds, and he might be even slighter. By his account and that of everyone in his camp, his physical development has tracked just like Quinn’s. “He’s a young 17 [physically] like Quinn was. But in the year and half since Quinn graduated [from the NTDP], he’s filled out a lot, so you can assume Jack will too,” Wroblewski says.

Perhaps, but in the meantime Jack avoids any bold declarations about his belief that he can play in the NHL next October, but neither has he made a commitment to an NCAA school, unlike his NTDP teammates. “It’s your dream to get to the NHL from the time you’re in minor hockey but really only in the last year did the idea of playing in the NHL someday come clear to me,” he says. Still, he exudes quiet confidence about playing in the league as soon as possible and Brisson says simply that the chances for Jack making that jump “are out there.” In his hybrid role of father and industry pro, Jim Hughes is noncommittal about a timeline for his middle son, and Jack clearly has taken his advice to heart. “I’ve taught the boys to stay in the present and don’t get too far ahead of themselves,” Jim says. “Try to be better every day and understand that nothing big has happened yet.”

FROM THE BIG HOUSE TO THE BIG TIME

The Hughes boys pose with Ellen at the 2014 NHL Winter Classic; Jack hits the ice during the Leafs Family Skate.

The 2001s carry a 2-0 lead late in the second period of this exhibition against Waterloo, their 24th game of the season. By the final whistle, they’ll owe a debt to their goaltenders — splitting duties at the midway point, Cameron Rowe and Spencer Knight will stop 35 of 36 shots. Hughes has done something that catches your eye every shift but scouts are of the opinion that, at this point in the season, the team is a little fatigued, still paying a price for the travel to the Five Nations and four games in five days a couple of weeks back. Says one scout: “When the team struggles you can see Jack tries to do too much. It’s not a bad thing. It’s something he’ll figure out.” 

Through 30 minutes, the Black Hawks are becoming less discreet with their attempts to jab and provoke Hughes but he mostly brushes it off and doesn’t get drawn into a retaliatory penalty. He does draw a couple of Waterloo minors, though, which is per usual. Says Hinote: “With his speed and edges, I don’t see how he doesn’t draw three power plays a game in the Show, as strict as they are with their rules.”

Faster than everyone else to begin with, Hughes incredibly finds another, higher gear when, on a U18 power play, a turnover at the blue line sends a Black Hawk penalty killer off on what should have been a 120-foot breakaway — on his way to break up the play at about the 90-foot mark, Jack blows right past his two teammates who were back on the point. He also processes the game faster — an errant pass in his skates is kicked up to his stick without breaking stride and the puck is wired to a teammate, all in a blink. As his former Marlboros coach Dan Brown notes: “The way he can use all his skills and his vision at top speed, it’s like the clock is ticking slower for him than everyone else.”

At even strength in the last minute of the second period, Hughes tracks down a loose puck behind the Waterloo net and Black Hawks defenceman Hank Sorensen gives chase, in vain of course. Hughes looks like he’s going to pick up the puck and circle behind the net but instead he picks up Cole Caulfield in his rearview mirror. At full speed he takes a sharp turn and then throws a backhand, behind-the-back pass that hits Caulfield in stride pouring down the left side of the ice and into the space vacated by Waterloo’s over-committed defenceman. Caulfield throws the puck over to their linemate Michael Gildon who has a wide-open net. It will go down as a secondary assist for Hughes, his second of the game and 48th point of the season, but it’s as impressive as anything all night and there was plenty to impress. Three-zip for the U.S. under-18s. Waterloo will get a power play goal in the third but really don’t threaten to make it any tenser than that.

“With his speed and edges, I don’t see how he doesn’t draw three power plays a game in the Show.”

The NHL scouts pack up at the game’s end. Really, their priority at USA Hockey Arena this winter will be making the book on the seven other projected first-rounders. Cole Caulfield is under five-foot-seven but, with 21 goals in 25 games this season, he’s doing a very passable impression of Alex DeBrincat. Is Caulfield a lottery pick or did he win a lottery by getting a chance to play with Jack Hughes, or both? Scouts will deal with pressing questions about those other prospects while trying to some extent to avoid being distracted by the phenom in their midst. 

The underlying ironies: As the NHL pulls ever more clearly into view for a 17-year-old who’s dreamed of making the Show, he becomes the dream for half the league.