For A Decade, Ryan Kesler And Canucks Were An Excellent Match

For 10 years, the Vancouver Canucks and star forward Ryan Kesler had an excellent working relationship. It didn't work out well in the end, as Kesler eventually was traded to the Anaheim Ducks in 2014. But in this cover story from THN's Feb. 14, 2011 edition (Vol. 64, Issue 17), senior writer Ken Campbell wrote a deep-dive feature on Kesler's hockey ride toward becoming an icon for the Canucks:

QUIET RIOT RK17

By Ken Campbell

The trade demand, if you could call it that, was short and to the point and came from a pay phone in a suburban Detroit rink. “Come and get me,” the player said. “I’m not playing for this asshole.”

Ryan Kesler was a petulant, obstinate teenager back then. So the fact he developed into a petulant, obstinate adult came as no real surprise to Mike Kesler, who is Ryan’s father and was the asshole in question. Mike played at Colorado College and has coached youth hockey in the hotbed of Detroit for more than 30 years, but he had always steered clear of coaching the youngest of his three children. 

That all changed in Ryan’s first year of bantam hockey, when Ryan had been cut by six minor bantam AAA teams in Detroit and was faced with going down a level or playing high school hockey or even quitting the game altogether. But the Detroit Little Caesars major bantam team was in disarray and needed a coach. 

The organization approached Mike Kesler to take the job, which gave Ryan a place to play a year ahead of his age group. The team was a rag-tag bunch of castoffs that was supposed to be terrible, with its cornerstone player an underage kid who had just been cut by every team in the city.

“I told Ryan, ‘You’ve got two choices,’” Mike Kesler said. “‘You can quit hockey and all you’ve done is proved all these people right. Or you can turn around and stick it in their faces and know you’re better than this and prove them all wrong. But you have to make that decision and whatever decision you make, I will support you 100 percent.’”

But there were ground rules. Mike made it clear he would hold his son to a higher standard than other players when it came to effort. And there would be no mocking him or making faces during practice. So, what happened? In the team’s first practice, Mike was drawing up a drill and when he turned around, Ryan was making faces at him. 

“I basically said to him, ‘Kesler, get your ass off the ice. You’re done with my practice,’” Mike said. “And somehow he found 20 cents at the rink and called his mom to come and pick him up.”

Mike and his wife, Linda, had learned to live with their son’s emotional outbursts and on-ice indiscretions right through to the best league in the world, even though it made them cringe or yell at the television at times. Linda refers to Ryan as, “our little surprise.” He was intense from the beginning and being nine years younger than his brother and seven years younger than his sister, he was allowed to win at everything from mini-sticks to backyard hockey.

“We kind of created a monster,” Linda said.

More than a decade later in his sixth full season in the NHL, Kesler has become a monster all right. His Vancouver Canucks are looking every bit the Stanley Cup contender THN predicted they would be and Kesler is putting together a season for the ages. 

The defensive awareness and tireless work ethic that have made him a Selke Trophy finalist the past two seasons has not let up one iota, but Kesler has displayed an offensive prowess few thought he possessed. 

He is one of those rare players who is a staple of every aspect of his team’s game plan – from providing equal amounts of offense and defense to playing on the power play and the penalty kill. And coincidentally, he is displaying a level-headedness and maturity even fewer thought he possessed.

At 26, he’s also become something of a teen idol/sex symbol in Canucks-crazed British Columbia. A buffed-up photograph of Keslerin his gitch to publicize his clothing line has been all the rage in Vancouver; more on that later.

As wonderfully talented as the Sedin twins are, as dominant as Roberto Luongo can be in goal, Kesler is in many ways the engine that drives the Canucks. The only problem is the engine often overheated and blew a gasket. 

Teammates nervously fidgeted and looked away when Kesler smashed his stick at the bench, unsure of whether he was angry with them, himself or the officials. Veterans rolled their eyes when Kesler set his mouth moving before engaging the brain off the ice. His mood swings and broodiness after losses irked some people.

When Luongo relinquished the captaincy of the Canucks after last season, reigning MVP Henrik Sedin was the obvious choice to replace him. He’s low maintenance, unflappable and uniquely equipped to deal with the white-hot spotlight in the hockey fishbowl that is Vancouver. Even though Kesler supplies so much energy and emotion and has outstanding leadership qualities in his own right, the organization felt he was simply too volatile and unpredictable to carry the weight of the captaincy.

During Kesler’s exit interviews last year, both coach Alain Vigneault and GM Mike Gillis made it clear to him that he wasn’t doing anybody any favors by allowing his emotions get the better of him and there was a much better way to channel his energies rather than wasting them on self-recrimination and yapping at opponents and referees.

“I just thought it would make me a better player and a better person if I stopped chirping and really just stayed positive and didn’t let things affect me as much,” Kesler said. “And it has really helped me on and off the ice. I’m a more positive person now. It was a matter of me maturing a little bit and kind of respecting the game a little more.”

Kesler seemed, in fact, to relish making himself the center of attention for the wrong reasons. Whether it was discussing David Backes’ wife on the ice or telling the world he hated Canadians during the Olympics last year, controversy never seemed far away. 

Two years ago, when the Sedins were entering a crucial stage of negotiations for new deals with Vancouver, Kesler publicly said the Canuck players, including himself, should be prepared to accept lower than market value to keep the team together, a remark that drew recriminations from team-mates and the NHL Players’ Association alike.

On the ice, Kesler has always seemed to have a bull’s-eye on his back. Jesse Boulerice earned what was at the time a tie for the longest suspension in league history when he was banned for 25 games for viciously crosschecking Kesler in a game in the 2007-08 season. Later that year, Chris Pronger received the longest suspension of his career, eight games, for stomping on Kesler’s leg.

During the peak of his career, Hall of Famer Stan Mikita underwent an even more dramatic metamorphosis, going from leading the league in penalty minutes to a two-time Lady Byng winner, in large part because of the observations of a small family member. Mikita likes to tell how his young daughter confronted him one day after coming home from a road trip.

“She said to me, ‘I watched you last night and you were really good,’” Mikita once told THN. “Then she asked me, ‘When the man with the stripes on his sweater blew the whistle, why did Uncle Bobby and Uncle Kenny (Mikita’s linemates, Bobby Hull and Kenny Wharram) go one way and you went the other way and sat down all by yourself? Were you being a bad boy?’”

Kesler is in no danger of winning a Lady Byng Trophy anytime soon, but his first Selke is simply a matter of time. And you could certainly envision him winning a Conn Smythe if the Canucks can fulfill their Stanley Cup destiny, can’t you? But there is no doubt his change of outlook has a lot to do with little Makayla Kesler, a precocious two-and-a-half-year-old who knows when her father is on TV and monitors his behavior on the ice.

“It really hit me this year in the pre-season,” Kesler said. “I got into a fight against Corey Perry in an away game and when I came home, my daughter was all upset with me and said, ‘No fighting.’ She hates fights. That was really when it hit me that, ‘Wow, she gets it. She knows what’s going on out on the ice,’ and now I have the mindset with everything I do, ‘What would your kid think of you if they saw you doing this?’”

Presumably, his kids would be pretty impressed with the transformation. Kesler admits the whole positive attitude thing was beginning to sound like a bunch of psychobabble when the Canucks came out of the gate 0-2-1 and Kesler was looking for his first goal. 

But he refused to give in to his old ways and scored late in Game 5 and hasn’t stopped scoring since. Another big part of the reason for that is Kesler is now playing a much more effective power game and instead of using his lethal wrist shot to score from the hash marks, more goals are coming from the greasy areas.

Playing wing beside Mats Sundin two years ago began to bring out a creativity and vision for the game in Kesler that has surprised many hockey observers and only been accentuated since he moved to center in 2009-10. This year, he’s playing primarily with Mason R aymond and Jeff Tambellini on what might be the fastest line in the NHL. Kesler himself thought he could be a decent playmaker who was capable of scoring maybe 25 goals a season, but certainly not 25 by just over the halfway point.

And he probably never envisioned that he would become Vancouver’s version of David Beckham either. After his impressive performance in the Olympics, he was chosen as the cover boy for NHL 2K11. But the poster boy quickly became a pin-up boy when a beefcake shot of Kesler appeared in the Vancouver Sun in November. Kesler has his own clothing line with a small company called Firstar Sports in Vancouver and part of the promotion included a photo of him modeling his RK-17 absorbent underwear.

Firstar president John Catliff, a former Canadian Olympian in men’s soccer, said the picture has been downloaded from the company’s website more than 2,000 times and he suspects most of them have come from women. Kesler was named one of Vancouver’s “hot bodies for 2010” and was also on a list of the most beautiful people in B.C. 

The underwear is apparently flying off the shelves and many of the buyers are women. While many are no doubt purchasing them for men, some women are shelling out $24.99 for the picture on the front, while others are wearing the underwear themselves. 

“Apparently they like to lounge around in them,” Kesler said. “They’re actually really comfortable boxers. They have some kind of material in them and I don’t know the word to describe them, but it feels really good on the skin, let’s just say that.”

The term to describe the material in the underwear is actually J-Skin, which is a jadestone-infused polyester microfiber that has a cooling effect. When they did the photo shoot, Kesler was reticent until he was told the photo would only be used if it were really, really necessary. 

Yeah, that’s the ticket. We’ll only use it if we have to. “He has a certain sort of seriousness and Beckham-like good looks that make him appealing,” Catliff said. “He has chick appeal, for lack of a better expression. We have a large gay and lesbian community in Vancouver and that picture has appeared in some of those magazines as well. I don’t think Ryan knows about that.”

The Canucks certainly don’t and hockey players being hockey players, the ribbing will likely be even more intense than when the photo appeared in the newspaper. All the notoriety makes Kesler a little anxious, but it certainly beats the kind he was getting until this season. “That picture has gotten me a lot of recognition and it’s helping the clothing sales, so it’s all good,” Kesler said. “Some day I can show my kids and say, ‘See, your dad wasn’t too bad looking back in the day.’ They’ll probably laugh at me.”

As the progeny of a guy who was once kicked out of practice for making faces at his coach, the Kesler kids would simply be following a time-honored tradition.