Flames winger Connor Zary proved himself a solid NHL player this past season. And in this magazine excerpt from THN's 2024 Rookie issue, writer Jared Clinton profiled Zary as he set out to become a long-term piece in Calgary.
Depending on the company you keep, the saying, “Saskatchewan is difficult to spell but easy to draw” is either considered a fun-loving slogan or a wry jab about provincial plainness.
Among locals, it has doubtless served as both. And while city-slicking outsiders have made a habit of distilling the sparsely populated territory down to one defined by six months of flat farmland and six months of frigid and unforgiving cold, many who call the province home learn to love it, coming to embrace the charm and, yes, climate to make figurative and literal hay. Connor Zary is among them.
There is a tell, however, that Zary has perhaps had a difficult time explaining all there is to love about his home to those who haven’t experienced life on the prairies. It comes in the way the Calgary Flames rookie prefaces and then professes his love of playing on an outdoor rink.
“I know it might sound crazy that you could love winter…,” Zary starts, before explaining that while he didn’t exactly spend his youth wishing away the summer months, his favorite time of year was when the double-digit temperatures dipped then disappeared, with falling snow and windchill warnings arriving in their place by October. So deep-seated is Zary’s zeal for twirling around the outdoor ice that the 22-year-old somehow found himself green with envy all the while three months into living his big-league dreams.
“My buddy was sending me pictures and texts because they were going to the outdoor rink the other day,” Zary said. “Obviously, it’s a little different that we’re older now, but it kind of made me feel jealous. I’m here playing in the NHL, and I was pretty jealous of my buddies who were just at the outdoor rink in Saskatoon.”
Despite it seeming an obvious rite of passage for many Canadian kids, it bears repeating just how much Zary cherished his time at community-center rinks, on ponds or any slapdash surface he could carve up.
Whether it was at the park located a slapshot from his family home or on the backyard sheet that Zary begged his parents to build, hardly a day went by when he wasn’t braving the elements to sharpen his skills or test a cheeky new deke. Before games. After games. It didn’t matter. And it’s all that time spent, as much as anything, that helped Zary develop the offensive tools – poise with the puck, playmaking vision and a shot with power and precision – that caught scouts’ eyes early.
In time, his offensive abilities were what drew the attention of the Flames’ brain trust, particularly after Zary turned heads with a top-five scoring season with the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers. His 86-point performance in 57 games in his third year on the circuit was the precursor to Calgary making him a first-round selection (24th overall) in 2020, and Zary has followed a steady upward trajectory in the time since.
The pandemic-related delay to the start of the 2020-21 WHL season allowed him to see nine games of AHL action, where he notched three goals and seven points, and that cup-of-coffee stint with the Flames’ farm club set the table for Zary to dive head-first into the pro game the following season.
Long is the list of players, though, whose major-junior success didn’t instantly translate to effectiveness in the AHL overnight. It can be a difficult adjustment, and there were some teachable moments during Zary’s time in the AHL.
Don Nachbaur, whose coaching career spanned 20 WHL campaigns and a fistful of professional gigs prior to his landing as an assistant coach with the Flames’ AHL club in 2021, said one of the first things Zary had to learn was the speed of the game.
“What really jumped out at me, a lot of young guys come into the pro game and they get a little intimidated and forget what their skill set is,” Nachbaur said. “(Zary) grabbed pucks in the AHL and, for me, probably hung on to them too long. We wanted him to move it a little quicker, so that was a process. But as far as compete, going to the right areas to make plays, going to the right areas to score, he had a good upbringing.”
And, in point of fact, upbringing happens to be precisely the word. Because while the finer details and his offensive skill set have been carefully crafted, the determination that’s a hallmark of Zary’s game – or the “little junkyard dog” mentality, as Nachbaur called it – was instilled while growing up.
“That’s just something my dad beat down into my brain, that if you get to the front of the net, you’re going to get rewarded eventually,” Zary said. “It’s easy to get away from that, especially when you get to junior or you become older or a higher-end player because you can play on the outside. That’s something that (Nachbaur) reminded me of, that you get inside those dots, you get inside the house, inside the crease, and that’s where the puck is eventually going to come to score a goal.”
This is an excerpt from Jared Clinton's article in THN's 2024 Rookie issue, in which the Flames winger Connor Zary's road to the NHL, love for the game and experience in Calgary were analyzed as he put up solid numbers in limited appearances for the Flames in 2023-24. Here's THN's Adam Proteau with more on Connor Zary:
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