THN Archive: How Much Did It Cost for Patrick Kane to Make the NHL?

Longtime Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane joined the Detroit Red Wings Tuesday, but this 2008 story from THN's exclusive Archive profiled the costs of raising an elite young player into a bona fide NHL superstar.

Longtime NHL star winger Patrick Kane made headlines Tuesday when he reportedly signed a one-year contract with the Detroit Red Wings. But in this cover story from THN’s exclusive Archive, we profiled Kane’s rise through the amateur ranks to become one of the greatest players of his era.

(And don’t forget, to access THN’s complete 76-year archive, subscribe to our magazine.)

In this particular piece, from THN’s Sept. 2, 2008 edition – Vol. 62 Issue 2 – senior writer Ken Campbell wrote about Kane’s upbringing in Western New York and his evolution from an amateur phenom to a budding NHL superstar. Kane’s father, Patrick Kane Sr., provided a detailed look into the expensive cost of raising an elite young player and how the family managed Kane’s ascent into hockey’s top league. 

At one point of Campbell’s article, the Kane family estimated they’d spent approximately $144,000 on Patrick Jr.’s hockey career, and then there was the immense commitment Patrick Jr. made to play as often as possible.

“(One) year, he played more than 300 games and scored more than 1,000 goals,” Patrick Sr. told Campbell. “Patrick (Jr.) could tell you that out of 365 days a year, he would be on the ice about 350 days.”

Campbell’s story on Kane also touched on the options Kane Jr. considered before settling on a position in the USA Hockey National Team Development Program, followed by one year playing for the OHL’s London Knights.

“I remember after the nationals with (Michigan-based) Honeybaked (AAA), Ohio State offered me a scholarship and I thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” Patrick Jr. said. “I was saying, ‘Should we commit now? Should we commit now?’ And everyone else is saying, ‘Settle down and see what else comes along.’ The way my career has gone, it seems we made every right decision and I have my parents to thank for that.”

Kane’s decision to sign with the Red Wings Tuesday doesn’t come as a surprise to those who’ve closely followed his career. As a 14-year-old in 2003, Kane moved to Detroit to play midget hockey, and his parents made the lengthy drive from Buffalo to Michigan for just about every game he played.

“He absolutely needed us there,” Kane’s mother, Donna, said. “We would go to a tournament and after the tournament we would be driving away and he’s looking through the back window waving to us as he took the exit for Detroit and we took the exit home to Buffalo.”

Kane's likely assured himself of a place in the Hall of Fame thanks to his many years of dominance with the Chicago Blackhawks, but now that he’s a Red Wing for at least this season, he should expect his parents to be fixtures at his games in Detroit. That’s the way it always has been and the way it likely will remain.

“I was just talking to my dad the other day and I said, ‘How long do you plan on following me around?’” Kane Jr. told Campbell. “And he said, ‘Your whole career.’ And that’s fine with me. If he wants to be there then I’m all for it and I love to have him there by my side.”

By Ken Campbell

Sept. 2, 2008

By 1994-95, Sylvain Turgeon had become a bit player on a bumbling expansion team that was spectacular in its ineptitude. On the surface, Turgeon's hockey card from that season is, well, pretty much as forgettable as his tenure with the Ottawa Senators.

Card No. 288 from the Pinnacle set from that year would just be another 10-cent piece of cardboard among thousands made in an era when hockey cards were viewed more as an investment than a hobby.

That is, if not for what is in the top right-hand corner of the card. The picture for the card was taken at the old Buffalo Auditorium and in the front row seats is a man with a rather garish-looking pullover. On his lap is a young boy with a crew cut wearing a Pat LaFontaine sweater. That boy is Patrick Kane.

Patrick Kane’s status as NHL rookie of the year hasn’t made the card worth much more these days, although there have been reports that some people have paid as much as $20 for it, which proves there really is one born every minute. But it’s interesting that, 13 years before he made his debut in the NHL, Kane already had an unofficial rookie card.

It wasn’t long before Kane went from rail seats on his dad’s lap at the Aud to taking a starring role on the ice himself. The next season, Kane began his hockey career with the Cazenovia Chiefs houseleague team. He began the season as a third-liner and worked his way up to the top line by the end of that year.

Since then, it has been a dizzying array of all-star teams, tournaments, world travel and sacrifice for Kane and his family, all of which came to its fruition when Kane was selected first overall in the 2007 NHL entry draft. The first thing Kane did after the Chicago Blackhawks called his name was to embrace his father and say, “Dad, we did it.”

Kane often uses the word “we” when he talks about his hockey career. So does his father, Patrick Sr., a 48-year-old guy who looks a little like Tony Soprano except thinner and shorter. Also part of the “we” is his mother Donna, a woman of 46 whom a limo driver in Vancouver once mistook for young Patrick’s wife (“I would be the mother,” Donna told the sheepish driver).

If it seems Kane’s hockey career belongs to all three of them, that’s because in many ways it does. Like a growing number of parents, the Kanes were with their son every step of the way and made enormous family and financial sacrifices. The Kanes conservatively estimate they’ve spent almost $144,000 on their son’s hockey career. And that doesn’t take into account the fact Patrick Sr. sold his Jeep dealership two years ago in order to focus on supporting his son’s hockey career.

“When you break the numbers down,” Patrick Sr. said, “your stomach is rolling over. And these numbers are probably conservative.”

That’s exactly what THN asked the Kanes to do. The purpose of doing that was to put an approximate number on how much it costs to produce one NHL player from the time he begins playing hockey to the time he signs his first professional contract.

Every player’s route to the NHL is different and some cost more than others. But it’s fair to say that stories such as those of John Madden, Glen Metropolit and Anthony Stewart – inner-city kids who rose to the NHL from meager beginnings – are in the minority. Many NHL careers are now forged by well-off suburban kids whose parents have the means to provide them with everything from expensive equipment and ice time to 1-on-1 coaching and travel.

In fact, when Kane was 14, he had outgrown the Buffalo minor hockey system and went to Detroit to play for the famed Honeybaked organization that also included a young Peter Mueller. Former NHLer Pat Verbeek was the team’s assistant coach and Kane boarded with the Verbeek family free of charge. But Kane’s parents drove to every game and tournament and spent $20,000 to send their son to a private school in Detroit.

At the time, Patrick Sr. was selling Jeeps when oil wasn’t $125 a barrel and people were still buying big vehicles. Business was very good and, as the boss, he was able to set his own hours and leave for days at a time.

“Those were the heydays,” Patrick Sr. said. “The business was very, very good to us. We’ve given up a lot, but we were fortunate to be able to do that.”

After selling the business, Patrick Sr. took six months off and now works for his cousin at a Ford dealership, but is an employee and no longer has an ownership stake. Add his lost income to the expenses and it’s easy to see how the family’s investment could easily climb over $200,000.

Ask almost any parent with a child playing elite competitive hockey about the costs of playing these days and their stories will boggle the mind. The Greater Toronto Hockey League, the world’s largest youth hockey organization, spends about $3 million a year on ice time alone. That has prompted the league to charge a $5 admission for each person over 16 attending the game, including the players. That means if Little Johnny’s parents go to watch his peewee game, they’re paying $10 just to get into the game on top of all the registration, equipment and travel costs.

“The reality of the situation is that you need to be very well off just to have a AAA (minor hockey) player,” said Jim Parcels, a longtime hockey figure in Ontario who did a sobering study on a player’s chances of making the NHL. “I would say it costs between $7,000 and $10,000 a year and probably $12,000 to $15,000 if you’re talking about a goalie. Not only that, you have to have a flexible work schedule.”

It’s quite obvious all the time and money invested by the Kanes paid off. Their son, after all, hit the jackpot. He signed a three-year entry level deal with the Hawks that paid him $1.9 million last season and could pay him up to $3.75 million in each of the next two seasons.

With their son making money like that, their investment is beginning to look like chump change.

But the sobering reality is that for every Patrick Kane, there are hundreds of players who are out of the game by their teens or, even worse, put all of their efforts into pursuing the dream and never make it. Of all the kids Kane played with in minor hockey, Mueller is the only other one who has made it to the NHL.

In 2002, Parcels, formerly a trainer with the OHL’s Peterborough Petes and a marketing director for the Guelph Storm, updated a study he had originally done in 1995. In it, he sampled all minor hockey players in Ontario born in 1975. About 30,000 went on to play some level of minor hockey between the years of 1988 and 1991. It was one of the largest groups of minor hockey players the province of Ontario has ever seen.

Of that group, only 48 players were drafted, just 32 saw action in the NHL and only 15 of them had an NHL career that lasted more than one season.

So let’s put this into perspective for a moment. If you took only the players in Ontario as a sample and disregarded the rest of the world, the chances of a player playing more than one season in the NHL based on Parcel’s study would be one out of 2,000.

Now let’s assume for a moment the average family has to spend $100,000 over the course of an elite player’s minor hockey career, keeping in mind the pool of players would shrink and the player’s chances would increase as players drop out with every passing year. If the parents of that player were to take the $100,000 and spend it all on lottery tickets in a 6/49 draw, they would be able to purchase 50,000 tickets. With 13,896,816 possible combinations, that would give them about a one-in-300 chance of winning the lottery.

But Parcels, who also worked for the Ontario Minor Hockey Association, acknowledges that it’s almost impossible to get the message through to parents and children who believe they will be the ones to realize the dream.

“The problem with parents is you can keep telling them and telling them and you can give them all kinds of seminars, but a lot of them don’t get it until they live through it,” Parcels said. “I have people coming to me all the time and saying, ‘Oh, that’s how it works,’ and I say, ‘I told you that six years ago.’ And by that time it’s often too late. At the end of the day, a lot of these guys don’t know anything else but a hockey rink because that’s all they’ve ever lived.”

The other side of that reality is that somebody has to make it and the cost of taking the risk in hockey is high. But it’s hardly the only athletic or academic pursuit that takes a financial toll. Consider the following:

• If the Kanes were to take the money they spent on hockey and instead directed their son to the University of Virginia Medical School, they’d have spent infinitely more. Four years for an out-of-state student at that school would cost about $221,000 and that’s without even paying for undergraduate studies. Just the tuition for one year at Harvard’s medical school is $49,000. The Association of American Medical Colleges found the average debt load for the graduating class of 2007 was $140,000 and that 76 percent of all graduates leave medical school at least $100,000 in debt.

• The cost for a 15-year-old tennis player to attend the world-renowned Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., is almost $60,000 a year. The cost would be about the same for any of the IMG academies for baseball, basketball, golf and swimming run out of the same facility.

• If a promising dancer wanted to attend the National Ballet School in Toronto from Grades 6 through 12 and didn’t live in the area, the final bill would come out to almost $162,500.

Patrick Sr. and Donna Kane jumped into minor hockey with both feet shortly after their son started playing. The first year, he played house league hockey. Then in 1996-97, he played for one house league team and a traveling team in Buffalo and, that summer, Patrick Sr. had his son in nine hockey camps.

“We really kicked it up for summer hockey schools,” Patrick Sr. said. “There were 10 weeks in the summer and I put him in nine camps. I couldn’t find another camp in our area or he would have been in for all 10.”

Two years later, Kane was playing in three different age groups in the same organization. Because he was born on Nov. 19, 1988, and is considered “a late birthday,” he was able to play with players born both in 1988 and 1989 and was good enough to play up with players born in 1987. He also played in three summer leagues, meaning he was on the ice all 12 months of the year.

“That year, he played more than 300 games and scored more than 1,000 goals,” Patrick Sr. said. “Patrick could tell you that out of 365 days a year, he would be on the ice about 350 days.”

It was right around then that Patrick Sr. and Donna realized hockey was more than a pastime for their son and that perhaps he could be good enough to land a college scholarship. For his dad, who never went to college, that was the dream. It helped that they were largely insulated from the scrutiny he might have faced if he were Canadian. Patrick would come to Ontario for tournaments and was often the MVP, but he’d always be able to quietly go back to Buffalo afterward.

“I remember after the nationals with Honeybaked, Ohio State offered me a scholarship and I thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” Patrick Jr. said. “I was saying, ‘Should we commit now? Should we commit now?’ And everyone else is saying, ‘Settle down and see what else comes along.’ The way my career has gone, it seems we made every right decision and I have my parents to thank for that.”

In fact, Kane flew so much under the radar that it wasn’t until his draft year that people began really noticing him. Despite all his efforts, he was the last player added to the under-17 team for the U.S. national team development program in Ann Arbor, Mich. In fact, the season had already started and the team had been picked when USA Hockey called.

Kane had already been cut from the under-17 squad, but had been chosen for a ‘B’ team that played a tournament in Germany. Kane did very well and continued to tell his parents that USA Hockey would call him.

“We pick him up on a Sunday night at about 10:30 and he says, ‘They’re gonna call,’” Patrick Sr. said. “I said to Donna, ‘The kid’s in denial. They’re not gonna call.’”

Well, they did call and Kane ended up leading the team in scoring both seasons before joining the London Knights in the OHL. There were rumors Kane was paid under the table by the well-heeled Knights, but his parents maintain all their son received was the same $50 each player gets and a little extra for gas money to drive himself and some teammates to practice. There were unsubstantiated reports Kane was paid $100,000 to play for the Knights.

“Is that the number you heard?” Patrick Sr. said, “because we heard it was even higher. Not true.”

The Knights paid most of his expenses, but the biggest one was the $5,000 Patrick Sr. spent on a Jeep Grand Cherokee for his son. The younger Kane promptly totaled the vehicle on the way to practice during a heavy rainstorm two weeks into the season, but insurance covered the cost of replacing it.

Much of the Kanes’ expense when it comes to their son’s hockey career comes from the money they both spent attending all his games and tournaments. Patrick Sr. rarely missed one and if there was a weekend tournament in Toronto and Donna had a Saturday commitment for one of her three daughters, she would often join them Saturday night. The family always stayed in hotels where there were pools so the girls could swim while young Patrick played hockey. Weekends in Toronto – and there were many of them – would cost upwards of $500 each.

And the travel for the Kanes continued long after he stopped playing minor hockey. His parents beat a path between Buffalo and Detroit when he played midget for Honeybaked and attended all his tournaments. They did the same every weekend for the two years he was in Ann Arbor and traveled to almost all 68 home and away games when he played for the Knights, even though they’d only be able to talk to him for 10 minutes after road games. Even this year in Chicago, they attended 35 of the Hawks’ 41 home games.

When Kane was on a summer team that had a tournament in Edmonton, Donna flew there with her three daughters and a niece. Once for a tournament in Colorado, Donna accompanied her son.

Perhaps they didn’t always have to be there and their son would have found his way on his own. But try telling that to a mother who watched her son leave home at 14 and spent the first months miserable with homesickness.

“He absolutely needed us there,” Donna said. “We would go to a tournament and after the tournament we would be driving away and he’s looking through the back window waving to us as he took the exit for Detroit and we took the exit home to Buffalo.”

Patrick Sr. is still there almost every game. He goes to practices and is at every game-day skate. He still challenges his son to be better than any other player on the ice. He stays for the other team’s skate and gives his son a scouting report on the goalies’ tendencies.

“Even in Chicago if he’s in a slump he’ll say, ‘Mom and Dad, are you coming, are you coming?’” Patrick Sr. said. “And then we’ll get a call a couple of hours later. ‘Are you close, are you here yet?’ We’ll show up and he’ll get a goal and two assists.”

Patrick Jr., meanwhile, said, at least for public consumption, that he probably doesn’t need his parents around that much, but is comforted by their presence and that it was essential for him to see them in the stands earlier in his career.

“I was just talking to my dad the other day and I said, ‘How long do you plan on following me around?’” Kane said. “And he said, ‘Your whole career.’ And that’s fine with me. If he wants to be there then I’m all for it and I love to have him there by my side.”

In the end, Kane made the NHL largely because he’s enormously talented and he willed his way as a small man (5-foot-9, 163 pounds) in a large man’s game. But he does recognize he had opportunities open to him that the families of many athletes could not afford.

“How can I not feel lucky?” Kane said. “I mean, I’m 19 years old playing in the NHL, playing for an Original Six franchise, leading scorer on the team, rookie of the year. How could I not be lucky? I’m very lucky, very fortunate for what has happened to me throughout my life and my career.

“And it starts with your parents. If I had the same talent and two different parents, I’m not sure I would be in the same situation.” 

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