Longtime NHL defenseman Jay Bouwmeester was an elite presence. This 2002 story profiled Bouwmeester as an up-and-comer who eventually won the Stanley Cup.
He wasn’t an extrovert by any means, but longtime NHL defenseman Jay Bouwmeester made a major impact on the hockey world – and in this feature story from The Hockey News’ June 1, 2002, edition (Volume 55, Issue 37), staff writer Mark Brender profiled Bouwmeester as he was about to be selected third overall by the Florida Panthers.
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Bouwmeester enjoyed a solid junior hockey career with the WHL’s Medicine Hat Tigers. Though he played one year in the AHL after debuting with the Panthers in the 2003-04 campaign – necessitated by the 2004-05 NHL lockout – Bouwmeester always was himself: a low-key, smart blueliner who never showed emotion under any circumstance. For better and for worse, that’s who he was.
“I think there are times when he could say ‘Get on my back boys, let’s go for a ride,’ ” Tigers coach Bob Loucks said of Bouwmeester. “He could do it all the time, and I think he doesn’t do that enough. He doesn’t want anybody to think he’s showing them up, and he doesn’t want anybody to think he’s better than them… His biggest problem is he’s too humble.”
Bouwmeester went on to play 1,240 regular-season games as an NHLer, and he won a Stanley Cup with the St. Louis Blues in 2019 before retiring the following year. Those closest to Bouwmeester knew that underneath the calm exterior beat the heart of a fierce competitor.
“They don’t know what kind of player he is,” Bouwmeester’s father, Dan Bouwmeester, said of his son. “Deep down, boy, if I want to go to war with a hockey player, he’s going to be one of the guys I want on my side. This business about he doesn’t have the passion, he doesn’t have an edge, what a crock of s---. He’ll prove that in the NHL.”
‘MEESTER BIG
Vol. 55, No. 37, June 1, 2002
By Mark Brender
Maybe once he’s in the NHL Jay Bouwmeester will allow the folks at Sherwood to stamp his name on his sticks. So far he hasn’t let them. Nobody else on the Medicine Hat Tigers is so presumptuous as to have a personalized shaft from the factory, so why should he? Bouwmeester, a team guy through and through, doesn’t want to do anything to stand out from the boys.
It’s an honorable sentiment, except Bouwmeester hurts his own cause the moment he steps on the ice. His teammates and those who see him up close every day - to say nothing of those watching in the stands - are forever awed by the ease and grace with which he moves. In the words of Tigers coach Bob Loucks: “He skates better than most people walk.”
Lethbridge coach Bryan Maxwell, a frequent observer of Bouwmeester’s forays, agrees. “He’s a superstar, no question about it. He may be the toughest guy I’ve seen to forecheck because he skates so well he just blows everybody’s door off.”
At the same time, while acknowledging his jaw-dropping tools and all he has accomplished, there are those in the hockey world who believe Jay Bouwmeester is an 18-year-old kid with an attitude problem. As in, he needs more of one.
He is a Paul Coffey-esque glider in the body of Paul Bunyan, an intuitively gifted 6-foot-3 1/2, 206-pound defenseman who can control the tempo of a game with exceptional stamina, poise and hockey sense. That much has been evident for at least three years now, since Bouwmeester cracked Canada’s 2000 world junior team at the tender age of 16, thus becoming the youngest Canadian ever to play at the WJC.
Yet it’s what some scouts say they don’t see in his game that makes them wonder. They don’t see desperation. They don’t see anger. They can see his passion for the game - you don’t become this good a skater by not loving being on the ice - but they don’t feel it.
They don’t see evidence of his wanting to be ‘The Man.’
And so the dilemma that surrounds the odds-on favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2002 entry draft - a position Bouwmeester has held since he was, what, 12? - is this: will his quiet, shy demeanor hold him back from greatness, or, rather, does his humility present the blank tableau onto which a strong motivator and teacher can graft the next superstar defenseman?
The answer to that, Loucks says, is up to Bouwmeester.
“I think there are times when he could say ‘Get on my back boys, let’s go for a ride,’” Loucks says. “He could do it all the time and I think he doesn’t do that enough. He doesn’t want anybody to think he’s showing them up and he doesn’t want anybody to think he’s better than them… His biggest problem is he’s too humble.”
Adds one NHL scout: “You just wish he had more personality. He’ll take a punch to the head in front of the net and not respond.”
This is what happens when a teenager’s every pore has been analyzed and dissected for the better part of three years. The scouting community begins tracking its beacons early these days; when some whiz kid appears on the international stage far ahead of his time, the momentum to forecast what he will be six years down the line - and what he is supposedly missing can be unstoppable.
At the 2000 WJC, where Bouwmeester joined Wayne Gretzky, Eric Lindros and Jason Spezza as the only 16-year-olds to wear the maple leaf at the tournament, the hockey world saw his precocious talents. But we also witnessed, especially as he stood beside the gregarious Spezza during interviews, how ill at ease he was with the attention that comes with it. The difference filters down to their respective choice of agents. Spezza, last year’s second overall pick, is with Bobby Orr; Bouwmeester is with Bryon Baltimore, a low-profile lawyer and ex-World Hockey Association player from Edmonton who has no NHL clients.
Bouwmeester doesn’t try to be anything he’s not. He is honest with himself and with others and readily admits the pre-draft hype is something he would rather avoid. “It will just be sort of nice to get this all over with and move on,” he says. “I just think about the opportunity ahead. I just get excited about that.”
And the money and the lavish lifestyle that will soon come his way? They barely register.
“I’ve been bugging him about buying some fast sports car,” says Brett Scheffelmaier, Bouwmeester’s defense partner and close friend on the Tigers. “He hasn’t said much. I bug him all the time (that) in a month he’s going to be rich. Jay’s such a humble and down-to-earth guy, I don’t even know if he realizes his life is going to change.”
And where’s the harm in that? Let him mature on his own time. There was another kid who came out of the WHL 14 years ago who also preferred root canals to media interviews and Joe Sakic didn’t turn out too bad.
“Somebody is looking for negatives and I don’t see any,” Maxwell says.
“If he’s trying to please everyone else, he’s going to withdraw and go into a shell and that will hurt his development,” another scout says. “The expectations of him going to be ‘The Next One’ are out of line. I think we need to give the kid some breathing space to be what he’s going to be.”
After all, breathing space to develop is what got Bouwmeester this far. His father Dan, an ex-university player with the University of Alberta, didn’t let Jay play organized hockey until he was six. “They’ve got to know how to skate first,” he says.
And skating was one thing Bouwmeester learned early. Almost as soon as he could walk, Jay put on his sister’s four-wheel roller skates and began pushing himself around the basement of the Bouwmeesters’ Edmonton home. He quickly moved on to inline skates and was on ice skates by age two. Evidently four years without a hockey stick pays great dividends.
This season Bouwmeester was named a first-team all-star at the WJC and was named in one WHL poll as the player most respected by his peers. He probably averaged 40 minutes a game for the Tigers and on some nights hit 45. His offensive totals weren’t spectacular - 11 goals and 61 points in 61 games - but Loucks believes he will shine in the pros with players who can read the game as well as he can. His passes and breaks to open ice often went for naught because teammates couldn’t keep up with him.
Bouwmeester’s supposed inability to elevate his game at crucial times is roundly dismissed by Stan Butler, coach of Canada’s WJC entry the past two years. Butler says Bouwmeester’s performance in the 2002 semifinal battle with Sweden was a skating, puck-moving tour de force that propelled Canada into the gold medal game. As for his personality, every NHL coach would cherish the chance to groom an ego-less stud who is guaranteed to keep his mouth shut, listen and learn.
Yet the questions persist. Medicine Hat never made the playoffs in Bouwmeester’s three years there. Some tie that to his inability to step up on the ice or speak out in the dressing room. Others believe had the Tigers showed the same disciplined resolve as Bouwmeester, they wouldn’t have been the WHL’s third-most penalized team and spent far too much time shorthanded.
The critics, Dan Bouwmeester says, will live to eat their words.
“They don’t know what kind of player he is,” Dan says, his voice touched with anger.
“Deep down, boy, if I want to go to war with a hockey player, he’s going to be one of the guys I want on my side. This business about he doesn’t have the passion, he doesn’t have an edge, what a crock of s---. He’ll prove that in the NHL.”
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