Matt Cooke: The Player the System Built Vancouver drafted Matt Cooke 144th overall in 1997, a pick teams make and quietly forget. Too small to enforce, not skilled enough to ...
Derek Boogaard: Made Into a Weapon Before He Had a Choice Derek Boogaard grew up as the son of an RCMP officer in small-town Saskatchewan, moving every few years with ...
Wade Belak: The First-Round Pick Who Became an Enforcer Quebec selected Wade Belak 12th overall in the 1994 NHL Draft, a pick that signalled real expectations. Over the following fourteen ...
Most enforcers waited for trouble. Matthew Barnaby started it. Over 14 seasons, he spent 42 hours and 42 minutes in the penalty box, and teams kept trading for him anyway. ...
Jon Cooper was never supposed to be an NHL coach. He was supposed to be in a courtroom. What happened between those two rooms is one of the strangest origin ...
Mike Danton made the NHL, then tried to have someone killed. The hitman was a cop wearing a wire. But the person he wanted dead was the one man who ...
Todd Bertuzzi didn’t just end a man’s career over a legal hit, he exposed something the league didn’t want the world to see. But three years before that moment, he ...
Threatening calls came to his home. His coaches knew. Teammates noticed. Reporters asked questions. The NHL looked the other way, and five Stanley Cups made it very easy to do. ...
He dropped gloves, absorbed punishment, and did the job nobody wanted but everybody needed. Then his best friend died at 35 with a shattered mind, and Carcillo did the one ...
This isn’t really a hockey story. It’s about what happens when we tell someone to be tough for so long that they forget they’re allowed to break. Rick Rypien grew ...
