Derek Ryan is one of the best stories in the Stanley Cup Final
Looking back at one of the better stories and remembering an AHL conversation from nearly a decade ago.
I rarely find much of value from large media scrums.
It’s a necessary evil of the job, but is it really a human-to-human interaction when one person is staring back at a crowd of at least 25 people, many holding up phones or cameras and shouting questions over each other?
This was the view of what Connor McDavid’s scrum looked like on Friday.
Good luck trying to battle through that and find anything of substance.
When large scrums develop, one of my go-to moves is to walk to the opposite side of the room. Go against the flow of traffic, find the human stories on the opposite side. Do you want to be a person or a human monopod?
And on the opposite side of the room from McDavid’s scrum I caught up with Derek Ryan.
Ryan is one of my favorite NHL stories, he was a late bloomer out the WHL and went the Canadian U-Sports route. After playing at the University of Alberta, he spent four years in Europe before coming back to North America with the Carolina Hurricanes organization.
Since cracking the NHL as a 29-year-old, Ryan has crafted an NHL career with 570 games played across nine season for Carolina, Calgary, and now Edmonton.
In Ryan’s first year with Carolina, during the 2015-16 season, I was doing some freelance work for a now defunct site called Hockey’s Future. I believe I was making about $25 per story, and writing prospect features on players in the AHL.
So I wrote about Ryan, and while the editor at HF at the time told me he wasn’t a prospect, I pushed back and asked them to at least let me write this human story.
To their credit, they published it. It’s since been scraped from the internet with Hockey’s Future shuttering, but I was able to find copy of the story in my sent emails from 2015.
Derek Ryan and his wife, Bonnie, have a map hanging on the wall in their living room back in Spokane, Washington.
Places the couple have lived and visited are on the map, including Austria – where their son Zane was born – and Orebro, Sweden – where Ryan won the Swedish Hockey League’s MVP award last season.
“It’s kind of neat, I’ve gotten to travel the world and play the game I love,” Ryan said. “My son was born in Austria, he’ll always have that. Not many people my age have been able to travel the world like that. We’ve been to Rome, Paris -- places like that we’ve already crossed off the list because of hockey before I turned 30-years-old.”
Now, Ryan is trying to add Raleigh, North Carolina to that map as he’s working his way toward an NHL future with the Carolina Hurricanes.
The 28-year-old, who will turn 29 on Dec. 29, isn’t the most traditional prospect in the Hurricanes organization.
I PDFed the whole piece here if you want to read some of my raw, unedited writing from that time. Please be kind if you do.
So at media day I asked Ryan if he remember that conversation, if he remembered talking to a random reporter in Cedar Park, Texas nearly a decade ago.
Surprisingly, he did. He also mentioned that it wasn’t common for non-Carolina media to talk to him at the time.
I also asked about that map. Does it still exist?
“We don’t live in that house anymore, it’s still in that other house,” Ryan said. “But it still lives in our head.”
Ryan has gotten used to people asking and writing about his story, it’s one of the common things with professional athletes. When you move from one team to another, your story gets re-told or re-introduced to a new audience. Even this piece, it’s simply another historical re-telling of a story you may already know.
And Ryan is OK with that. He’s told his story hundreds, if not thousands, of times. To media members like myself and to other players. He’s never been the one to bring it up himself, but anyone who digs up his Elite Prospects page will look at it and think, “I’ve gotta know more about this.”
“People like to talk about it, and honestly, it’s fun, because I do think it’s an inspirational story,” Ryan said. “I think it’s a great story for kids, great for people to say not to give up on their dreams. All those cliche things. But I think most important it’s a story of just working hard and not worrying about what’s too far ahead of you. You worry about one of two or three steps that are right in front of you, you handle that you move on.”
“It’s not like I was sitting in Charlotte and stewing and fuming because I wasn’t in the NHL or the same thing could be said about when I was in Austria or Sweden,” Ryan added. “It’s all about not getting too worked up in where I wasn’t and being more focused on getting worked up in what I could do where I was.”
And today Ryan is playing for the Edmonton Oilers, prepping for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final.
At 37, he’s closer to the end than the beginning of his hockey playing journey, but he’s also in the rare position where he’s been able to enjoy his story as a family.
One of the things I find fascinating, particularly after I had kids of my own, is how professional athlete’s kids view what mom or dad does for a living. Percentage wise, very few pro athletes still have that title into their 30s, and unless a kid was born really early in mom or dad’s career, they’re never old enough to really understand what’s happening.
For the Ryan family, 10-year-old Zane and 7-year-old August have been able to comprehend Derek’s journey. This Stanley Cup Final goes late into June, maybe it’s fitting that Game 4 is played on Saturday of Father’s Day weekend.
“That part has been amazing, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” Ryan said. “They are old enough to really experience this and enjoy and remember this. They’ve really latched onto this playoff run, they’re all in. They’re hanging on the every game, over the moon with every win and even more distraught with every loss, so it’s been really fun. The fact they can appreciate it now and look back in 10, 15 years and cherish it without have to be told about it, that’s my favorite part of this journey.”
This is the most Sean Shapiro story. And it's why you're such a good hockey writer. Keep em coming.