The Seattle Kraken announced seven new hirings Wednesday, most prominently adding longtime NHL forward Gary Roberts as their sports science and performance consultant.
"Roberts will work to provide the Kraken training center and team infrastructure with the proper equipment and systems in place to enable Kraken players to perform at their highest potential," the club said in a statement.
Roberts, 56, became a personal trainer after retiring from the NHL in 2009. His success in the field led him to create the Gary Roberts High Performance Centre in Toronto, where he currently works with several NHL players including Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos.
The hiring marks Roberts' second post-playing role with an NHL club; he served as the Dallas Stars' player development consultant in 2010-11.
Roberts and Kraken general manager Ron Francis were teammates during their playing careers with both the Carolina Hurricanes (1998-2000) and the Toronto Maple Leafs (2003-04).
Roberts amassed 438 goals and 910 points over 1,224 career contests and captured the Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames in 1989.
Edmonton Oilers head coach Dave Tippett believes his club will get an improved version of Jesse Puljujarvi when the Swedish-born Finnish forward rejoins the club next season.
"You watch him play now and he's a different player," Tippett said, according to NHL.com's Ryan Frankson. "He's a dominant player in the Finnish league right now.
"His English is good and he's anxious to come over and prove he can be a good player in the best league in the world ... I think we'll get a much better player coming in here this time."
Puljujarvi tallied 24 goals and 53 points over 56 games for Karpat of the Finnish Elite League in 2019-20 to rank fourth in league scoring.
The Oilers signed the 6-foot-4 winger to a two-year, $2.35-million deal earlier this month. He's been loaned to Karpat for the beginning of the 2020-21 campaign but will return to North America once the NHL season starts.
Puljujarvi has struggled to carve out a permanent role at the NHL level since being selected fourth overall by Edmonton at the 2016 draft. He recorded 17 goals and 37 points over 139 contests with the Oilers before choosing to return to Finland prior to last season after the team failed to meet his trade request.
“Ilya decided to step off a little bit from an already agreed number to help the team fit under the cap,” Dan Milstein told Sportsnet's Luke Fox on Tuesday night. “For Ilya, it was less about the money, but more about the role in the organization. He wishes to win the Stanley Cup. It's been a lifelong dream.”
The Maple Leafs and Mikheyev initially agreed to a cap hit exceeding the $1.645 million that accompanied the two-year contract the two sides announced Tuesday, according to Milstein.
However, the club then called the agent back - while he was on the phone with Mikheyev outlining the original deal - and asked if he'd be willing to take a slight decrease in pay to accommodate Toronto's cap situation.
The 26-year-old forward signed his new pact fewer than 24 hours before he was scheduled to have a salary arbitration hearing. He reportedly filed for a one-year contract at $2.7 million, while the team offered two years at $1 million.
Mikheyev became a fan favorite in his rookie campaign while posting eight goals and 15 assists over 39 games in 2019-20. He returned for the playoffs in August after his regular season came to an early end when his wrist was cut by a skate in December.
The Russian winger spent four years with the KHL's Avangard Omsk - his hometown squad - and signed a one-year, $925,000 deal with the Maple Leafs in May 2019.
Toronto's projected cap hit for 2020-21 is now $81,675,200, according to CapFriendly. The cap ceiling will be $81.5 million next season. Defenseman Travis Dermott is the lone remaining restricted free agent on the club's NHL roster.
Willie O'Ree's surname, the four letters that changed hockey for the better when they appeared on an NHL lineup card in 1958, derives from that of the American military officer who enslaved his great-great-grandfather. The officer was Peter Horry, pronounced unlike what you'd expect. He fought the British in the Revolutionary War, and in recognition of his service, he was given a Black man to own. The man was Paris O'Ree, as the name was later stylized, whose courage unlocked a future for his descendants.
Willie O'Ree isn't sure how Paris secured his freedom, but archival records he's read relate the enormity of what the man accomplished. Along with some family and at tremendous risk, Paris is believed to have escaped South Carolina, where Horry lived, late in the 18th century, becoming a farmer and father upon settling north of the border. He came to own a couple hundred acres in New Brunswick, Willie's future home province. Paris' son had a son who had a son who had a son, the trailblazing winger who's proud to share his ancestor's spirit.
A name is weighted with history, and Paris O'Ree rewrote his family's. Anti-racism protests gripped his great-great-grandson's sport this year, as they have North American society at large. Where Paris sought liberty, NHL players want their game to be inclusive and welcoming, full stop. They want to eliminate any remnant of the barriers and the hate that Willie O'Ree - the first Black man to play in the NHL - conquered when he debuted with the Boston Bruins.
Paris and his family "set goals for themselves, I guess the way I did," O'Ree said in a phone interview this week. "They wanted to make a better life for themselves. (Despite) the hardships and things they had to go through, they just made things happen."
Mike Stobe / NHL / Getty Images
Together with author Michael McKinley, O'Ree has written a new memoir, "Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL's First Black Player." The book, released in hardcover Tuesday, recounts his ascent to hockey history: how he twice dressed for the Bruins in 1957-58, tallied 14 points in 43 games for Boston in 1960-61 - no small feat in the Original Six era when NHL roster spots were in short supply - and skated in a further 785 games in the minor-pro Western Hockey League, from which he retired in 1974 as a top-20 career scorer. As it happens, 1974 was the year the Washington Capitals drafted and signed Mike Marson, the first Black player to follow O'Ree to the NHL.
O'Ree turned 85 last week, and his presence in the game remains cherished. He was elected as a builder to the Hall of Fame in 2018, and became that same year the namesake of the NHL's Willie O'Ree Community Hero Award, presented annually to a person who harnesses hockey to positively impact his or her part of the world. O'Ree lives near San Diego, his longtime WHL home, but he's a product of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was there as a child that he listened by radio to Hockey Night in Canada. He idolized Maurice Richard, and Foster Hewitt's nasal, rousing commentary provided the soundtrack to his Saturday nights.
Without a TV at home, O'Ree never watched Richard play. Only later did he think about the upside of this constraint: how seeing no Black men on the ice might have snuffed his childhood ambition, and how instead he was empowered to visualize a sport and league in which he belonged.
O'Ree (right) skates for the Bruins in 1961. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
O'Ree's first hockey mentor was his oldest brother, Richard (nicknamed "Coot"), a regional light-heavyweight boxing champion 17 years his senior whose tutelage helped fine-tune O'Ree's best skills: the blazing speed, the stickhandling honed on choppy pond ice, the will to absorb hard hits and respond in kind. Booted off his high school team for hurting the coach's son with a clean open-ice check, O'Ree charted his own course through Fredericton's youth ranks to Quebec's top junior league. There, his coach - the former NHL star Phil Watson - endorsed O'Ree's towering potential, telling him he had the talent to become hockey's Jackie Robinson.
Emulating Robinson's breakthrough on the diamond required O'Ree to keep a troublesome secret: He was blind in one eye, the consequence of a deflected slapshot that had smashed his right retina in junior.
O'Ree told a single confidant, his older sister Betty, about the injury. To everyone else, he looked like the same fleet left-winger with scoring touch, and the Bruins, whose vetting process didn't include a sight exam, soon promoted him to the NHL. Squeezed out of the 132-player league after 1961, O'Ree went on to excel for 13 seasons in the WHL, where the Los Angeles Blades cleared a positional glut by shifting him to the right wing. The switch enabled his good eye to process more of the ice, powering him to five 30-goal seasons.
"It was a big move for me," O'Ree said.
Mark Blinch / NHL / Getty Images
The 13th and youngest child of one of two Black families in Fredericton, O'Ree writes in his memoir that he was never bullied for the color of his skin growing up. In adulthood, racism tailed him across the continent. O'Ree rode a segregated bus to attend a pro baseball training camp - he was a good middle infielder, too - in Georgia in 1956. Junior hockey fans in Chicoutimi, Quebec, chanted racial obscenities at him. Minor-league fans in Virginia hurled a black cat over the glass during one of his shifts. During an NHL road game in 1961, O'Ree writes, Chicago forward Eric Nesterenko called him the N-word, shattered his front teeth with a butt-end to the mouth, and repeated the slur. (Nesterenko has said he doesn't remember the oft-told incident.)
In 1965, O'Ree and a Blades teammate drove through the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the aftermath of the area's six-day uprising against racial discrimination. He recalls breathing in the air and surveying burned-out buildings, processing the fury and sorrow that compelled Watts' Black residents to take to the streets.
Rage and the desire for justice - for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black victims of U.S. police violence - moved millions of Americans to protest this spring and summer. In the absence of justice, O'Ree writes in his reflection on Watts, anger is an understandable response.
"People of color have always been targeted, way back since slavery," O'Ree said. "I'm all for protesting in a nonviolent way, and the marching to let people know that people's lives matter. They really do. I'm just hoping, and I keep my fingers crossed, that things are going to get better."
Dave Sandford / NHL / Getty Images
In hockey, Black players who followed O'Ree to the peak of the profession have taken it upon themselves to lobby for change. At the start of the NHL's bubbled postseason, Minnesota Wild defenseman Matt Dumba spoke at center ice on behalf of the nascent Hockey Diversity Alliance, exhorting his sport to take seriously the need to combat racism. The players who kneeled before a Vegas Golden Knights-Dallas Stars game - Ryan Reaves, Robin Lehner, Tyler Seguin, and Jason Dickinson - were among the hundreds who forced the playoffs to pause later in August, hockey's contribution to the athlete sit-out protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
In effect, players such as Hockey Diversity Alliance co-founders Evander Kane and Akim Aliu now front the cause O'Ree has championed for decades. After his minor-league career ended, O'Ree recalls in his book, he took jobs spanning a wide gamut. He worked construction, drove a Pepsi truck, sold Pontiacs, and even supervised security at San Diego Chargers NFL home games. In 1996, not long after O'Ree turned 60, NHL executive Bryant McBride recruited him to the league's diversity outreach program; in the days before search engines were prevalent, McBride went so far as to ask acquaintances at the FBI to track down his phone number.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, O'Ree's ambassadorship kept him on the road 10 days a month, running hockey clinics and recounting his journey to youth of color from coast to coast. He said the fire to work - to make the game more accessible to kids who lack the means or opportunity to play - still burns within him. He hopes he'll soon get to travel for the first time since March and that he'll be able to stick with it for a couple more years.
In the meantime, hockey's best and most promising Black players continue to log major milestones. Blake Bolden, the first Black player in the National Women's Hockey League, joined the LA Kings last winter as an AHL scout. The Kings just drafted Quinton Byfield second overall, making him the highest-selected Black prospect in NHL history. The cast of standout players, present and past, with whom O'Ree keeps in touch - P.K. Subban, Wayne Simmonds, Anson Carter - includes Jarome Iginla, the newly elected Hall of Famer who wrote the foreword to "Willie."
O'Ree and Blake Bolden, the National Women's Hockey League's first Black player. Juan Ocampo / NHL / Getty Images
In his book, O'Ree makes clear that other Black men could have ascended to the NHL before him. He counts six predecessors or contemporaries who, in his view, were worthy of the honor: Herb and Ossie Carnegie, Manny McIntyre, Art Dorrington, John Utendale, and Stan Maxwell. If O'Ree's story is a testament to his own self-belief and persistence - "I stayed true to my goals (through) the things that I had to overcome," he said - it's also intertwined with a larger legacy.
O'Ree hopes his readers come to understand the magnitude of the challenges he endured, starting with the eye injury and recurrent bigotry. In Iginla's foreword, the legendary Calgary Flames captain contemplates the maltreatment O'Ree would have faced in the NHL: Every opposing agitator and prejudiced fan had a ready-made target to try to rile, knowing O'Ree, bearing a pioneer's burden, was out there alone.
All O'Ree did, Iginla marvels, was smile and proceed to prove he belonged. His example has uplifted generations.
"(Black players aren't in the NHL) because of their color. They're there because they have the skills and the ability to play in the National Hockey League," O'Ree said. "They've proven that. It's just a nice feeling to know that I was the person who made it possible for them to be there."
Todd Bertuzzi apologized for the way he acted with the media for a portion of his career on Tuesday's edition of Sportsnet 650's "Starting Lineup."
"I was too hard, I told you guys, 'Sorry if I was a douche, man,'" Bertuzzi said. "It's true, I wasn't very co-operative at times because I wasn't ready for that stuff. I didn't want to speak every day. I was paid to go play hockey and entertain fans not to have stuff written in the paper. I could care less what was written in the paper, the stories that you guys needed. I just wanted to go play hockey and entertain fans, that's all I wanted to do."
The 45-year-old was known as a bruising power forward throughout his career. In an infamous 2004 incident while with the Vancouver Canucks, Bertuzzi sucker-punched Colorado Avalanche forward Steve Moore and fractured multiple vertebrae in his neck, ending his NHL career.
The event resulted in criminal charges against Bertuzzi and a civil lawsuit, which brought an intense media spotlight on him for several months.
"Getting older and understanding that a lot more comes with it, I'm sure things would have been less abrasive after 2004, but at the same time what's done is done and we all learn," Bertuzzi said. "If people want to hate me or have an opinion on me because of that then that's OK I'm fine with that.
"Vancouver, you know what, looking at it now, they were great, they really were. I was just at that point annoyed with having to answer the same set of questions, I was not prepared for what I needed to do."
The two sides were set to have an arbitration hearing on Wednesday. Mikheyev filed for a one-year contract with a value of $2.7 million and the team filed for two years at an average annual value of $1 million, according to Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman.
Mikheyev appeared in 39 regular-season games during his rookie campaign, registering eight goals and 15 assists. He was cut by a skate on his wrist in December but was able to return for the playoffs.
Prior to joining the Maple Leafs, Mikheyev spent four seasons in the KHL, in which he racked up 62 goals and 60 assists in 224 games.
