Date Posted: May 16, 2011
Print Edition: May 13, 2011
By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
At age 13, Ryan Kesler couldn’t make the cut on any team he tried out for. Rather than giving up, though, he traveled home to play for a Bantam team of his father’s. Millions of Vancouver Canuck fans are thanking their lucky stars for that, as he’s become a central figure for the final Canadian team in the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
While the 6-foot-2 centre credits his desire to play hockey to a desire to emulate his brother Todd, for a while he tried out the sport his older sister Jenny participated in as well – figure skating. “I still skated in hockey skates, though,” he said in an interview with NBC to clear up any confusion. The fact that he’s been skating since the age of four helps to explain how he’s so comfortable on both ends of the ice in the NHL. His ease on the ice has led to primary roles on both the penalty kill and power play.
It was on August 31, 1984, that Ryan Kesler was born in a south-eastern Michigan town just outside of Detroit, called Livonia. He grew up in a hockey home, and was introduced to the sport early due to the fact that his father was not only a Junior B hockey coach, but also the leader of a hockey school that Kesler attended annually for the entirety of his early playing career. His tireless work ethic paid off in June 2000. At the age of 15, he was drafted in the fifth round to the Brampton Battalion in the Ontario Hockey League. Despite this, he chose to play closer to home in the U.S. National Team Development Program, until he could finish his schooling at Winston Churchill High School. He recorded 99 points in his two seasons with the program, playing in 131 games.
His play earned him a hockey scholarship at Ohio State University, where he played for the Buckeyes, a Division-I NCAA team. He managed 11 goals and 31 points in 40 games that season. That’s all it took, as the Vancouver Canucks snatched him up in the first round of the 2003 NHL Entry Draft, 23 overall. That season he played just 28 games with the NHL team, but got his first point in his second game and his first goal by the end of his first week, which came on November 29, 2003, against the Calgary Flames. He managed just five points, and 11 with the Moose that season, but in his next season with the Moose he was a plus-22, with 30 goals and 58 points.
That performance was enough to earn him a regular position in the Vancouver line-up. He managed 76 points over his next three seasons with the Canucks, and was named an assistant captain for the start of the 08-09 season. He played so soundly defensively, while also breaking out offensively with 26 goals and 59 points, that he was nominated for the highly-coveted Selke trophy. In 09-10, he managed 75 points on the year and won the Cyclone Taylor award for team MVP. Finally, in 10-11, Kesler gave Art Ross winner Daniel Sedin a run for his money by blowing away his previous goal-scoring total with 40 on the year, and 73 points total.
His skill in the faceoff circle has also dramatically improved, making him the most consistent on the team with the loss of Manny Malhotra, and his ability to shut down top offensive players with his backcheck has made him the top story for the Canucks in the 2011 playoffs. If he doesn’t win the Selke this year it would be an absolute travesty. He is, without a doubt, the team’s most invaluable player.
Perhaps fellow teammate Jannik Hansen summed it up best when he was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying “If only we could all play like him. If we could, this would be an easy playoff.” Maybe the rest of the Canucks just need to pay a visit to his father’s hockey school.
