THN Archive: How Cup Champion Dustin Byfuglien Became Huge

Dustin Byfuglien was a late-round NHL pick, but his size, robust physical style and ability to play forward or defense made him stand out from the pack. This story from THN's Jan. 3, 2011 edition, broke down Byfuglien's upbringing and ascent at the NHL level.

It’s been more than four years since elite defenseman Dustin Byfuglien played his final NHL game, but in this cover story from THN’s Jan. 3, 2011 edition – Vol. 64, Issue 13 – THN senior writer Ken Campbell investigated the factors that made Byfuglien such a force on the ice.

(And here’s our daily reminder – for complete access to THN’s 76-year Archive, subscribe to the magazine.)

Byfuglien was born and raised in Minnesota before he moved to the Chicago area to play under-18 AAA hockey. He then moved to the WHL for four seasons and was drafted 245th overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in 2003. He bounced between the NHL and AHL levels the next three seasons before finally sticking with the Hawks for his first full NHL season in 2007-08. Two years after that, he became the first Black American-born NHLer to win a Stanley Cup, justifying all the positive thoughts scouts had for him as an emerging talent.

“Denis Savard is a real good friend of mine, a real sharp hockey guy,” said Atlanta Thrashers GM Rick Dudley, who was Chicago’s director of player personnel in Byfuglien’s tenure there. “We had arguments about it all the time. After the first year, Denis said, ‘See Duds, he got 19 goals, he’s a forward.’ And I said, ‘Denis, what would you rather have, a 19-goal forward or a 15-goal defenseman?’ ”

Byfuglien’s size – 6-foot-5 and 260 pounds – made him a lethal force in all areas of the ice. And after the Blackhawks stunningly chose to trade him to Atlanta in June 2010, Byfuglien became a central cog in the Thrashers’ attack. He’d been used as a forward at times in Chicago, so when he arrived at his new team, it took some re-adjustment to the blueliner position.

“I was thinking, ‘Holy cow, he hasn’t been playing defense for a while,’ ” said Thrashers coach Craig Ramsay. “His timing was off on his rushes, his gap control wasn’t good, he was looking at the puck rather than the man and was caught reaching and pushing for pucks. But he got better because he has such a feel for the game. He knows where the puck is going and he has a tremendous stick. He can pick off passes, he can pokecheck people and once you get into the zone he’s such a big body that when he bumps people off the puck, they stay off the puck.”

About as big as his frame was Byfuglien’s personality, although he never showed much of it to the press over the years.

“He takes on a different persona when there are cameras or media around because I don’t think he likes it,” Thrashers captain Andrew Ladd told Campbell. “But you see him walk into the room with Kermit the Frog shoes and a Kermit the Frog lime green hat and you’re thinking, ‘Well for a guy who doesn’t like that much attention…’ ”

Byfuglien never lived by other people’s rules for what a hockey player should be. In a hint at what his future would become, he spoke to Campbell about his interests away from the rink.

“I really wasn’t (the academic) type of kid,” Byfuglien said. “I really loved the outdoors and loved my fishing and hunting. I just kind of went with the flow.”

When the Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011, Byfuglien went with them and embraced the city. But he always played a robust physical game and always had the desire to keep improving.

“To me, it almost seems like he has something to prove,” Ladd said in Campbell’s story. “People have doubted him and I think he’s really been more intense this year than I’ve seen in the past.”

Byfuglien made his teammates better, even if they encountered more danger in practice getting in front of his booming slap shot.

“I hear about it all the time,” Byfuglien said of reaction to his shot. “I just tell them to stick their mouth-guards in and it will all heal up. I’ve stood there, so I know. I’ve taken a couple and as long as your mouthguard is in, you’re all right.”

Byfuglien unexpectedly stopped playing for good in 2019, but although he amassed 869 regular-season games of NHL experience in his career, he left a legacy of positivity and success that still resonates with his fans until this day. And he made the people of Minnesota proud.

“When I left (home), I left with a purpose,” Byfuglien said. “And every time I went home, I wanted to come home with a better story.”

Volume 64, Issue 13, Jan. 3, 2011

By Ken Campbell

One thing you should know about Marshall Johnston is he’s one of those under-appreciated hockey geniuses who works largely in the shadows. He doesn’t wear the buttoned-down suits or have the fancy GM haircut, but he’s one of those through-and-through hockey guys and among the most astute talent evaluators the game has ever seen. Johnston was instrumental in building the New Jersey Devils into a Stanley Cup champion and the Ottawa Senators into an offensive juggernaut and was director of pro scouting for the Carolina Hurricanes when they won the Stanley Cup in 2006. Still is, in fact.

So it should come as no surprise that eight years ago, Johnston went looking for Braydon Coburn and saw what nobody else could in a 280-pound behemoth named Dustin Byfuglien. What might surprise you was that it was love at first – and only – sight.

Johnston was scouting for the Chicago Blackhawks and the way he tells the story, he was decamped in Portland for a weekend to watch Coburn, whose Winter Hawks were playing Friday and Sunday. With nothing better to do on Saturday, he decided to take a drive to Seattle to watch a Thunderbirds game against Prince George. That’s what hockey people do. Without trying to pay attention to anyone in particular, Johnston couldn’t keep his eyes off No. 4 for the Cougars.

“I needed a program to find out what his name was, but I didn’t need a program to see what he was doing,” Johnston recalled. “Here is this guy playing forward, playing defense, skating, shooting, handling the puck and he was such a big guy. So we get to the draft in Nashville and it’s later on in the (2003) draft and (former Blackhawks GM) Mike Smith was like, ‘Does anybody like anybody?’ And nobody said anything so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a guy I like.’ So we took him.”

And so began the odyssey of Byfuglien, the most mispronounced, misunderstood and, until this season, miscast player in the NHL in a long time. And that’s saying something, since he was pretty darn good as a left winger for the Blackhawks in last year’s Stanley Cup run. But anyone who has seen Byfuglien play this season for the Atlanta Thrashers would have to concede that the big fellow was a defenseman in forward’s clothing.

Byfuglien’s mother Cheryl traveled from the hockey-mad northern Minnesota town of Roseau to Atlanta to watch her son play during American Thanksgiving weekend and noted, “he looked like he was playing when he was in squirts.” Only a lot bigger. Byfuglien was a defenseman all his life until he came to the NHL and was turned into a forward on a Blackhawks team that was looking for size up front. And since, at a glance, Byfuglien didn’t exactly scream skill and hockey sense, then-Hawks coach Denis Savard moved him up.

“Denis Savard is a real good friend of mine, a real sharp hockey guy,” said Thrashers GM Rick Dudley, who was Chicago’s director of player personnel for much of Byfuglien’s tenure there. “We had arguments about it all the time. After the first year, Denis said, ‘See Duds, he got 19 goals, he’s a forward.’ And I said, ‘Denis, what would you rather have, a 19-goal forward or a 15-goal defenseman?’ ”

You’d rather have Byfuglien as he stands now, the leading scorer among defensemen in mid-December and a guy who was making Dudley’s prediction of 15 goals look far too conservative. With 10 goals and 29 points in 28 games, Byfuglien was on pace to score 29 times and notch 85 points this season.

That Byfuglien has moved back to the blueline and developed into a legitimate Norris Trophy candidate in the first season of his rebirth is due to a confluence of many things, but it all begins with Byfulglien’s deceptively high talent level. Dudley claims Byfuglien has a Shea Weber-type shot to go with his superior skating skills and ability to read the play. With the Thrashers, he is paired with Tobias Enstrom, a typical no-maintenance Swede who has an ego level so low he’s happy to drop back and sacrifice offense to allow Byfuglien his wild rushes up the ice and risky pinches at the blueline. And in Craig Ramsay, the Thrashers hired the perfect coach for Byfuglien’s transition. Ramsay has long served as an assistant coach specializing in working with defensemen and has a long list of players who went from borderline NHLers to millionaires under his tutelage.

“The beauty of Craig is he accepts the fact that some people aren’t perfect,” Dudley said. “As long as they’re giving the team more good than bad, he will work with the bad and make it a little better, but he’s not going to take away the good.”

For his part, when Ramsay watched Byfuglien play defense during camp, thoughts of Doug Harvey didn’t exactly go dancing through his head. But he and Dudley had made a commitment when Byfuglien was acquired from the Blackhawks over the summer to give him a legitimate shot at the position and if they approached it as an experiment or short-term attempt, it would be doomed to fail.

“I was thinking, ‘Holy cow, he hasn’t been playing defense for a while,’ ” Ramsay said. “His timing was off on his rushes, his gap control wasn’t good, he was looking at the puck rather than the man and was caught reaching and pushing for pucks. But he got better because he has such a feel for the game. He knows where the puck is going and he has a tremendous stick. He can pick off passes, he can pokecheck people and once you get into the zone he’s such a big body that when he bumps people off the puck, they stay off the puck.”

Byfuglien’s play has spoken volumes this season, even if he doesn’t. The attention of playing in Chicago and winning the Stanley Cup has certainly helped him come out of his shell, but for public consumption, Byfuglien remains a man of painfully few words.

“He takes on a different persona when there are cameras or media around because I don’t think he likes it,” said Thrashers captain Andrew Ladd. “But you see him walk into the room with Kermit the Frog shoes and a Kermit the Frog lime green hat and you’re thinking, ‘Well for a guy who doesn’t like that much attention…’ ”

Perhaps that is part of what has led people to underestimate him over the years.

Not only was Byfuglien extremely shy as a child, he was not the least bit interested in anything to do with school. Teachers would work with him 1-on-1 and more than a few suggested he had attention deficit disorder and should be on medication. Byfuglien would always show up for school and nod when the teachers spoke to him, but deep down he had no academic inclination.

That prevented him from being academically eligible to play high school hockey for the powerhouse Roseau Rams, which prompted him to embark on a journey that saw him leave his hometown at 15 and take a far more circuitous path to the NHL.

“I really wasn’t (the academic) type of kid,” Byfuglien said. “I really loved the outdoors and loved my fishing and hunting. I just kind of went with the flow.”

The Byfuglien grassroots story was well-documented during the Blackhawks’ run to the Stanley Cup final last year. It centers on Byfuglien and his mother, a woman who drove a forklift at the Polaris factory in Roseau and lived with her son in a trailer behind her parents’ house. There were stories of renting skates and financial hardship, but also of perseverance.

Almost all those tales make only a passing reference to Ricky Spencer, Byfuglien’s biological father. The story goes that Cheryl left Roseau after high school to work as a hairdresser in St. Cloud and there she met Spencer, a native of Alabama who was on a football scholarship and ran track at St. Cloud State University. Cheryl gave birth to Dustin in 1985 and went back to Roseau four years later after splitting up with Spencer. End of story.

However, Spencer insists he passed on more than just athletic genes to his son. But goodness, he did have those. Although he dropped out of St. Cloud after one year, he was the defensive freshman of the year on the football team, leading the squad in interceptions and finishing third in tackles. He ran the 100 and 200 in track and had made the baseball team, but quit before the season started. Spencer admits he “had a lot of kid in (him)” and was forced to grow up quickly after Dustin was born, but resents the fact he has been portrayed as having almost nothing to do with Dustin’s success.

“People just portrayed me as a deadbeat nobody,” Spencer said. “I don’t know how it got out there that I haven’t been a part of his life. I’ve been a part of his life since he was born. Moral support, financial support, it was all there. All you have to do is pull up his records and see that child support and everything came right out.”

Since turning pro, Byfuglien has made his off-season home in Minneapolis, where Spencer lives with his wife and Byfuglien’s three half-siblings and works as a mechanic at a Caterpillar plant. Byfuglien sees them often and Spencer said that when Byfuglien was younger, he spent a month one summer with his half-sister at Spencer’s parents’ house in Alabama. Spencer and his family were in Chicago for the Stanley Cup final and parade and made it to Roseau for Byfuglien’s day with the Cup.

Cheryl said Spencer would call every Mother’s Day to thank her and tell her what a good job he was doing with Dustin. Spencer did keep in touch and would sometimes travel to watch Byfuglien play, but most of the child-rearing responsibilities fell to Cheryl. It was against that backdrop that she made the agonizing decision to let her son go to Chicago to play midget hockey, and essentially abandon any hopes of a high school education, at the tender age of 16.

“I was just saving his life,” Cheryl said. “He was just getting to that age where boys can get into trouble and I thought, ‘No, we’ve got to do something.’ ”

Shortly after Byfuglien began playing junior in the Western League, Cheryl became romantically involved with Dale Smedsmo, who operates a sporting goods store in Roseau and is something of a Minnesota legend. A shoulder injury kept him off the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that won a silver medal, but he did go on to play four games in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs and another 110 in the World Hockey Association. As a pro, he developed into a fourth-line intimidator and when he saw teams trying to do the same with Byfuglien, he convinced the young man he could be more than that.

“I’ve got arthritis in my hands so bad now I can barely move them and I have to run them under warm water in the morning just to get them going,” said the 59-year-old Smedsmo. “My hands are shot. I probably hurt myself more than the other guy when I hit him. It’s not the way to make a living. I see some of the fights in the NHL now and I say, ‘Oh my God.’ ”

It was after a trip to watch Byfuglien play in Prince George that Smedsmo began spreading the word to his family and friends that he would have a long NHL career. What Marshall Johnston saw in his one viewing of Byfuglien, Smedsmo was also seeing.

“I thought to myself, ‘This kid is way better than I anticipated and he’s going to go a long way,” Smedsmo said. “I told all his uncles and his grandfather and the old hockey coaches here, ‘You’re going to be surprised. This kid is going to play in the NHL a lot of years.’ I could tell right away. Of course, that’s easy to say now.”

Smedsmo and Dudley were road roommates when they played together for the Cincinnati Stingers of the WHA and Smedsmo was one of the first people Dudley called after making the deal with the Blackhawks over the summer. Smedsmo told Dudley that Byfuglien preferred to play defense and Dudley assured Smedsmo that was precisely where he would be skating.

The move back to the blueline has undoubtedly brought out the best in Byfuglien. Not only is he thriving, he’s playing more than 20 minutes a game and is wearing an ‘A,’ an indication he has taken another step in his career. Unlike the situation in Chicago, Byfuglien is having responsibility and pressure heaped on him and he has responded brilliantly. He is the kind of player who wants to have the puck at crucial times and craves the opportunity to be a difference-maker. When Byfuglien played forward, he looked dominant at times, but would also go stretches where he wouldn’t have much of an impact at all. The consistency of effort and results is much more evident with him playing his natural position.

“To me, it almost seems like he has something to prove,” said Ladd, one of four Thrashers who played for the Blackhawks last season. “People have doubted him and I think he’s really been more intense this year than I’ve seen in the past.”

Opening up so much of the ice for Byfuglien has allowed him to fully exploit his underutilized talents. Instead of passing to Patrick Kane or Jonathan Toews or dumping the puck into the zone, Byfuglien is getting more chances to carry the puck up ice. The instincts he developed playing forward have allowed him to jump into the rush and his shot from the blueline, Ladd opines, is as hard and heavy as any in the league. His shot was measured at 98 miles per hour at the American League All-Star Game a few years back and there’s a good chance he’ll get an opportunity to have it clocked again at this year’s NHL event. Dudley said he once saw Byfuglien score top corner from center ice in junior hockey and it’s nothing for him to fire it over a goalie’s glove from the blueline. Of course, that also means it is sometimes up around the ears of his forwards, something that has drawn the ire of center Bryan Little in particular on several occasions.

“Sometimes he scares the hell out of guys,” Ladd said.

“I hear about it all the time,” Byfuglien said. “I just tell them to stick their mouth-guards in and it will all heal up. I’ve stood there, so I know. I’ve taken a couple and as long as your mouthguard is in, you’re all right.”

It’s always something with this guy when it comes to being around the net. TSN recently did a funny bit with Vancouver Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo where they dressed him up to look scholarly and had him recite poetry. Among them was this beauty about Byfuglien:

Human eclipse, rhinoceros hips,
Who will laugh last when I slash your calf?
Bring me peace, make it cease,
Get your big ass out of my crease.

When the Canucks travel to Atlanta to face the Thrashers March 25 in their only meeting this season, there’s a good chance Luongo won’t have a big No. 33 obstructing his view.

“I don’t think I’ll be standing in any crease anytime soon,” Byfuglien said, “except my own.”

And on that front, Byfuglien remains a work in progress, but the work is leading to progress. It’s interesting to watch a player that large be able to get back into defensive position so quickly and while he certainly isn’t a bonecrusher, particularly for a guy of his size, he willingly plays the body in the defensive zone. Ramsay continues to display confidence in Byfuglien and is learning more and more about his skill set with every passing game. With Byfuglien logging so much ice time, he and Enstrom are often out in crucial situations against the opponent’s top line and in the Southeast, that means a steady diet of Washington’s Alex Ovechkin, Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom; Tampa’s Steven Stamkos and Martin St-Louis; and Carolina’s Eric Staal.

“I don’t agree with that sometimes,” Byfuglien said of the matchups, “but I’ve got a job to do and I try to do my best.”

If Byfuglien keeps doing his job, it wouldn’t be a stretch at all to see him on Team USA’s blueline in the 2014 Olympics if the NHL allows its players to participate.

Byfuglien will not yet be 29 then, an age where most defensemen just begin entering their primes. And in the short term, why not talk him up for the Norris? Former Blackhawks teammate Duncan Keith, Capital Mike Green and the Kings’ Drew Doughty – the three finalists from last season – might not even make the top three in voting this season and the race for top defenseman honors is more wide open this season than it has been in years.

To win the Norris would be an enormous validation for Byfuglien, the kid who couldn’t stay home to play hockey because he couldn’t handle school. Last summer during the parade in Roseau, Byfuglien’s eyes welled up as he addressed a crowd of 2,000 at the Roseau Memorial Arena, where Byfuglien would have played if he had been able to suit up for the Rams. It was Stanley’s first visit to Roseau, despite the fact native son Neal Broten won the Cup with the New Jersey Devils in 1995.

“When I left, I left with a purpose,” Byfuglien said. “And every time I went home, I wanted to come home with a better story.”

When it comes to native son Dustin Byfuglien, the stories for the good people of Roseau, Minnesota just keep getting better and better.

The Hockey News Archive is a vault of 2,640 issues and more than 156,000 articles exclusively for subscribers, chronicling the complete history of The Hockey News from 1947 until today. Visit the archives at THN.com/archive and subscribe today at subscribe.thehockeynews.com