If you’ve seen him play even once, you know about Daniel Sprong’s shot, but what you might not know is that it was a shot so good it moved a family from Amsterdam to Montreal … and from there to the NHL
If you’ve seen him play even once, you know about Daniel Sprong’s shot, but what you might not know is that it was a shot so good it moved a family from Amsterdam to Montreal … and from there to the NHL
If you’ve seen him play even once, you know about Daniel Sprong’s shot. Robby Fabbri remembers it from when they played together at nine years old. Joe Veleno felt its bite long before he got to the NHL.
“I remember I was playing Peewee Bantam, and I was off for Christmas break,” Veleno recalls. “And my brother’s team, which Daniel was on, had their last practice, and it was just a five-on-five scrimmage. And I remember just being out there and getting a shot off the ankle, and it stung me pretty bad.”
David Perron—who played with him when he broke into the NHL with the Penguins and in a summer three-on-three league in Montreal last summer—can also attest to the brilliance of Sprong’s shot: “He can shoot from the corner, shoot from the blue line, shoot from the dots, shoot from wherever. He’s in range all the time to score. He’s got a really quick release, sneaky shot."
In fact, it was a shot so good that it moved a family from Amsterdam to Montreal when its author was just seven years old.
“Amsterdam is home,” Sprong tells The Hockey News. “It’s where I’m from, but my heart and my life is in Montreal. That’s where my best friends are, that’s where I grew up, that’s where I became a man you can say now. I’m 26, so I think I can’t say I’m a kid anymore.”
The Sprong family made the move because of what it might mean for young Daniel’s hockey career.
“It started off as a joke,” Sprong explains. “We were gonna try it for a year. We would join a hockey team and try it for a season. Fell in love with the winter, fell in love with Montreal. It’s a very European city.”
In soccer-mad Amsterdam, the opportunities for developing hockey players were limited. “We have one rink in the city that closed for two, three months in summertime, so you’d have to go skate out 45 minutes, an hour outside of the city,” Sprong says. “I just remember playing there for a bit and traveling to Finland for a couple tournaments or playing teams there with the Dutch team.”
He played soccer in the schoolyard, and he cheers for Ajax (Amsterdam’s proud representative in the Dutch Eredivisie). However, soccer never stuck: “If you ask the guys, my two-touch game ain’t European at all,” Sprong quips.
It was always going to be hockey. His father Hannie had grown up playing and became his first coach. Daniel's mother Sandra supported the mission, and his talent was so obvious, even at seven, that the family opted to make the trans-Atlantic leap.
When the Sprong family arrived in Montreal, they weren’t sure whether they’d stay more than a year, but la Métropole worked its charms.
“It’s a great city to live in,” he explains. “Hockey was going good, my parents were happy, everyone was happy living there, so I think one year after the other, we just continued staying, and next thing you know we’re still there.”
“I’m fortunate enough that my parents gave me that opportunity,” says Sprong, a simple statement, but a profound one. He made good on his parents’ investment and then some by becoming the third player ever born in the Netherlands to play in the NHL.
Today, when you watch him play, you could be forgiven for assuming Sprong was born with that shot.
He skates around the rink at a crouch, peering over his shoulder through a purple-tinted visor in search of a little pocket of space, stick always on the ice ready when the next pass comes—a hunter awaiting his next opportunity to fire a lethal blast. When the puck comes off his stick, a harmless bid from the blue line or an off-balance, flat-footed look become Grade A chances. MoneyPuck estimates his shooting talent as 25.3% better than league average, as measured in the 2022-23 season.
However, despite how it might seem, that shot wasn’t God-given. “I put in the work for it,” Sprong says. “I don’t think that just comes naturally. I put in the hours, and I put in the time.”
Honing it was a simple process: “I’d go out in the summer time to a park where there’s a net, put the board down, and put some music on and shoot away, pick different corners.”
It’s how his shot became so potent by age seven, and it’s a ritual he returns to for more than just practice. “I do that two or three times a week because I guess for me, it’s more mental clarity or just to do my thing,” Sprong explains. “Usually now I go in the summer with two, three buddies, and we just shoot, and we talk and keep my rhythm and technique going. It’s something I’ve always done.”
“This summer, it was a bit of country, a bit of house, a bit of pop,” he says of the accompanying music, which is one part of the sessions that has evolved over the years. “I’m not a big hip-hop guy, but I went to a Drake concert this summer, so I kind of got into hip-hop now slowly. When I was younger, it was more rock and roll—Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bon Jovi, U2, Van Halen, those type of bands.”
Based on the work he’d put into it, Sprong believed in his shot from his boyhood days in Amsterdam, then Montreal, but external validation didn’t come until he turned pro. “Growing up I always knew I had [a great shot], but when I turned pro, that’s really when everyone started talking about it and made it my key weapon,” he says.
However, the transition from QMJHL’s Charlottetown Islanders to the NHL wasn’t quite as smooth as Sprong might have hoped. After putting up 39 goals and 49 assists in 68 games for Charlottetown in 2014-15, Sprong made the Pittsburgh Penguins out of training camp the following season.
At an individual level and as a team, Sprong and the Penguins didn’t get off to the start to the ‘15-16 season that they’d intended. In December, head coach Mike Johnston was fired and replaced by Mike Sullivan. Not long after, Sprong was returned to the Q. The experience opened his eyes to the reality of professional hockey as an occupation.
“In juniors, you get a small glimpse of it with the travel and things like that, but I would say in Pittsburgh when I was 18 when we weren’t winning games and the coach got fired, and [Mike] Sullivan got there, I saw the business side for the first time, and then I got sent back to juniors," he recalls. "That’s when I first realized that it is a business, and you just learn from that.”
Sprong was sent back to Charlottetown after 18 games with Pittsburgh, in which he’d scored two goals with no assists. It was “a bit frustrating,” he says of the experience. “You’re 18, you’re playing in the NHL, and you gotta go play juniors, it was a bit frustrating in the beginning. And at that point, you just gotta handle it.”
“I started off hot and kinda slowed down—I wouldn’t say slowed down because I still put up the numbers, but mentally it was getting frustrating,” Sprong says of his game upon returning. He finished the season with 16 goals and 30 assists in 33 games with the Islanders.
After the QMJHL season ended, he joined the Penguins as a black ace for the postseason but sustained a shoulder injury that required surgery and kept him out until January of the following year, derailing his hopes of nabbing an NHL roster spot at training camp.
Instead, he put up another 32 goals and 27 assists in 31 games for Charlottetown after returning from injury. In the postseason, he notched another 20 points in 12 games, but the Islanders were knocked out in the third round of the QMJHL playoffs, bringing his major junior career to an end.
“If I can look back, I don’t feel like Sullivan wanted me there when I was 18, which is pretty clear because I played maybe one or two games before I got sent down, which is fine,” Sprong assesses. “I was only 18 at the time. In juniors, if you’re putting up numbers, is it the best for your development? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s really a benefit, but I understand the league needs to make money, and they need those guys to sell tickets, but I would say I didn’t really develop in certain aspects of my game going back as a 19-year-old and putting up a goal a game and two points a game. I don’t think that benefitted me much.”
“I was young, I was 18, my game I would say I wasn't full NHL yet,” he adds, before saying with a smile. “I think I still had a lot to learn, and they won back-to-back Cups, so they did something right.”
If Sprong learned the reality of the NHL as a business early, a career that has wound its way from Pittsburgh to Anaheim to Washington to Seattle and now to Detroit has reinforced that point.
He says he "wasn't happy" and "emotional" when he learned he'd been dealt from the Capitals to the Kraken, then he found he loved the fans, facilities, and team that greeted him in Seattle, only to determine he wanted a "different opportunity" in free agency last summer.
“I loved it in Washington, loved it in Seattle, loving it here, so when you find a place that you’re comfortable in and you feel like you can be yourself, it’s great,” he says of that journey. “You’re with a good group of guys, and you have fun with it. Especially when you’re winning games. That makes everything better of course.”
Sprong joined the Red Wings on a one-year, $2 million deal. When asked whether he can envision himself sticking around beyond that contract, he replies, “That’s the goal. You want to sign here long term, and hopefully I show the coaches and management that I can make this place my long term home.”
And, of course, though he’s long since learned that this line of work remains a business despite its pleasures, there have been plenty of moments of levity. Perhaps most notable among those was a goal Sprong scored against New Jersey while playing for the Capitals back in the 2020-21 season.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G02TLBvQgLg[/embed]
He took a pass from Evgeny Kuznetsov and led a two-on-one rush into the offensive zone. Sprong looked off the winger streaking with him, shot himself, and scored. In the ensuing celebration, Sprong burst into laughter. He wasn’t laughing from the thrill of scoring; he was laughing because the winger he looked off was Alex Ovechkin, the greatest goalscorer in the history of the NHL with 824 goals and counting to his name.
“I did it in morning skate, but I missed the net probably by 20 feet, and I was laughing because I thought it was funny, and he wasn’t too happy with me at morning skate,” Sprong recalls. “We had a thing where he tells me before every game ‘shoot the puck,’ and I made a joke like ‘you got mad at me this morning,' and he goes, ‘yeah shoot the puck, unless I’m open.’
"And then the game started against New Jersey and when the second started they put me with Kuzy and O. And the play happened, and I got it from the blue line, and I saw he was coming. I wanted to pass, but the second I saw the D slide over and the goalie shifted and I had the whole short side of the net, I was like ‘I’m not gonna miss this one, I’m gonna take it.’”
“It’s funny because I looked off Crosby one time, so I got a good record of looking off guys,” he adds, grinning again.
Ovechkin served as something of a mentor to Sprong during his season and a half with the Capitals, a natural connection between snipers. Sprong chose number 88 when he got to Detroit as an homage to Ovechkin’s familiar number eight.
“Just the way he shoots the puck and tries to get shots off,” Sprong says when asked what he learned from Ovechkin. “He gets targeted a lot and guys don’t want him to shoot, and he still finds a way. I think the other night he had 14 or 15 shots in Toronto. He finds that space and the way he makes himself available…Everyone knows he wants to shoot, and they’re trying to cover him, and he still finds a way.”
It’s a fitting takeaway, given the pair’s mutual affection for firing the puck and the way both have spun that skill into a livelihood. That’s not to say that Sprong’s game can be reduced merely to his shot—he’s a gifted playmaker with excellent vision for the rink, and he is a useful transition player because of his aptitude for gaining the zone with possession.
Still, as Derek Lalonde puts it, “When he’s at his best, he’s assertive with his game. He’s north, he’s shooting pucks…We want him shooting. When he’s shooting, he’s a good player.” At its pinnacle, Sprong’s game is a simple one—direct, fast, and devastating.
When asked whether he prefers playing on the left wing or the right, he says simply, “To be honest, you stand on one side on the left side, one side on the right. It doesn't really make much of a difference for me. I can play both, and I can attack both sides in the O zone.”
And that’s where the “mental clarity” of rifling puck after puck off a wooden board, picking corners and listening to music, returns.
For someone whose gifts with a stick and a puck have been obvious since age seven and whose career has brought its share of trials, one aspect of hockey has remained the same: When he's shooting the puck, Daniel Sprong is at home.
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