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By Ken Campbell.
It took some time and a great deal of courage for SPENCER KNIGHT to seek help as issues stemming from obsessive-compulsive disorder increasingly debilitated him from even functioning, let alone playing in the NHL. He now knows that while problems ‘don’t really go away,’ that that’s just life. And he’s OK with that. And he feels he’s better equipped to deal with all that’s still to come – good and bad
Every Monday night through the spring and summer, Spencer Knight would leave his parents’ home in the sleepy beach town of Darien, Conn., and jump on the I-90 East for the 173.2-mile drive to Boston. The three-hour trip would take him past Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, then through Springfield and Worcester before he’d arrive at Gasson Hall on the campus of Boston College, where he’d join 20 other students for a weekly lecture in a course called Business Planning for New Ventures. That allowed him to graduate on time with BC’s Class of 2023, with a Bachelor of Arts in corporate systems tucked under his arm.
“It was really cool,” Knight said. “I wasn’t sitting under a rock the whole time. I forced myself to not hide. I wanted to make progress.”
New ventures. As Knight embarks on his (sort of) third full season in the NHL as the No. 2 man on the Florida Panthers’ goaltending depth chart, he’s on something of a new venture himself. It all started innocently enough during his freshman year at Boston College. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he began repeatedly washing his hands. He’d go to a campus party and make 20 visits to the bathroom to run his hands under the water. He would leave the house and drive back several times to ensure he locked the door. But it never seemed to bother him or get in the way of his life. Even though he was obsessive about washing his hands and avoiding germs, he made it through the hell that was the COVID-19 pandemic without incident. He even felt the compulsion to shower before the gold-medal game at the 2021 World Junior Championship, and then he went out and pitched a 34-save shutout to lead Team USA to glory. But over time, it developed into a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder so debilitating that it prompted him to enter the NHL/NHL Players’ Association player assistance program.
We know what you’re thinking, and so does Knight. The league and union come out with a joint announcement of a player entering the program, and the first thing you think is it’s because of either drugs or alcohol. We should really stop doing that. Knight left the NHL for one reason only: his OCD was wearing him down to the point where he could no longer function, either as a human being or an NHL goaltender.
Despite entering the night of Dec. 6, 2022, with a 3-0-3 record in his six previous games and playing some of his best hockey as an NHLer, Knight knew something was off. The Panthers were in Winnipeg to take on the Jets. He didn’t feel well, and he gave up three goals on 15 shots before being pulled in the second period. By the time he got off the charter that night, he had the chills and was running a fever. It turned out to be nothing more than a garden-variety flu, but it sent Knight’s mind racing. He spent much of the next two months unable to sleep because he was so worried about catching a disease.
By February, he could no longer endure it and removed himself from the team. Alcohol and drugs had nothing to do with it, but in the absence of facts, many observers drew lines from A to B.
“People are pretty quick to make assumptions,” Knight said. “I’ve read comments online with people saying they saw me doing cocaine. I’ve even had people come up to me and tell me they heard I was addicted to painkillers. I don’t know where that came from, because that was never a part of it.”
We should be celebrating the fact Knight summoned the courage to seek help. In April 2021, Jonathan Drouin, then of the Montreal Canadiens, temporarily left the team to deal with debilitating insomnia stemming from years of anxiety. Both the NHL and the sport itself have made enormous strides in the area of mental health, to be sure, but it’s still difficult for some people to get their heads around something as complex – and as foreign – as OCD or anxiety.
It’s hard to conceal when a player has a substance-use disorder. But mental-health issues are more nuanced, and this is still hockey, after all. But Panthers GM Bill Zito and the entire organization acted with understanding and compassion, with Knight’s well-being the primary focus for all involved.
“He’s a great person,” Zito said. “A great human being. He needed some help, and we got it for him.”
“YOU WIN THAT GAME, AND THE THING GOES AWAY, AND YOU REALIZE THAT ANOTHER PROBLEM POPS UP. THAT’S JUST LIFE, RIGHT?– Spencer Knight-
Knight spent much of his time away from the game talking with others who live with OCD about their experiences and working 1-on-1 with an expert in the field. When you go through a journey the way Knight has, one thing you learn about dealing with mental-health issues is that it’s paramount to continuously manage the disorder. In much the same way a meal you ate last week won’t keep you full this week, it’s not as though you can get a little therapy and declare yourself cured. It’s constant work.
But Knight now has the tools to better deal with things. Though he’s not even certain himself how things will turn out, that’s OK.
“What I’ve come to realize is that regardless of what happens, problems don’t really go away,” Knight said. “They just evolve. Before, I would always think that if I could just win this game or get to this point or have this thing go away, my life would be good. But you win that game, and the thing goes away, and you realize that another problem pops up. That’s just life, right?”
But what do you do when you know something is wrong, but you’re still functioning at a level that puts you in the top one percent in the entire world at what you do? Even when Knight couldn’t sleep or when he felt terrible beyond belief, his worries would melt away when he stepped on the ice. He surprised even himself with how well he could play in the crease after a night of tossing and turning.
When you’re winning hockey games and excelling in the NHL, and when you’ve signed a contract extension that will pay you $4.5 million each of the next three years, it’s difficult to realize that you have to change things. But after the illness in December, Knight’s OCD manifested in ways that affected different areas of his life. And that showed in his play. After that Winnipeg game, Knight won only once in five starts and posted a save percentage of just .853 in those games. Before shutting things down for good, he also stopped 12 of 14 shots in a relief appearance against Nashville on Feb. 18.
By the time Knight left the team, the Panthers were fighting for their playoff lives in a race where they ultimately earned the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference, then went on a run to the Stanley Cup final. Knight joked to people he’d talk to that the Panthers were on such a tear.
“Because they got rid of a lot of the dead weight.” But the reality was he needed to take care of himself. And if that meant he was missing one of the most stirring and inspirational runs to the Cup final in years, that was just how it was going to have to be. It pained him not to play. It pains every hockey player not to play the sport they love. “One of the feelings you get when something like this happens is that you just let everyone down,” Knight said. “I never wanted to feel like a burden.”
But the rewards of taking the time off were boundless. And it’s important to remember that this is a young man who came to this realization less than two months before his 22nd birthday. Some people suffer in silence with these things for years.
“I now know how quickly things can change, for both the better and the worse,” Knight said. “But I’m not fighting it anymore. It’s cool. The best thing about this is that now, I have a good system and approach that will let me live life at a highly, highly functional level. I don’t know what this season is going to bring. You can look at the past few months of my life as adversity, but when I look into the future, this is something that I think will benefit me tremendously as a player and a person.”
And when Knight peers into that future, he sees the Panthers signed veteran journeyman Anthony Stolarz to a one-way contract worth $1.1 million as an insurance policy. Sergei Bobrovsky, who experienced an enormous renaissance in the playoffs and was an essential part of the Panthers getting to the final, is the undisputed No. 1 in town. He has three years left on a deal that counts $10 million against the cap each year. Knight’s three-year extension, which he signed Sept. 27, 2022, kicks in this season, so he will have plenty of time to find his game.
“I THINK I’M BETTER EQUIPPED TO HANDLE THE ADVERSE EVENTS AND KIND OF EMBRACE THE GRIND AND THE ‘SUCK.’ MY MENTALITY NOW IS, ‘BRING IT ON’– Spencer Knight-
That might take a while, and it might not. Not even Knight himself can predict what is going to happen. But regardless of how it unfolds, he feels much better prepared to deal with it because of what he has learned in the past few months.
“I think I’m better equipped to handle the adverse events and kind of embrace the grind and the ‘suck,’ ” he said. “My mentality now is, ‘Bring it on.’ ”
The talent has always been there with Knight. In his sophomore year at Boston College, which would be his final NCAA campaign, Knight earned goalie- and player-of-the-year honors in Hockey East and was a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award as the best player in all of U.S. college hockey. Former Eagles coach Jerry York – who has won more games than any other coach in NCAA hockey history and is a Hockey Hall of Famer as a builder – once compared Knight to Ken Dryden, against whom York played when he was in college.
In 2021, Knight was the No. 6 prospect overall and the top-rated goalie in THN’s Future Watch edition. And he’s just 22, which is downright embryonic when it comes to goaltenders. Most don’t find their stride until they’re at least 25, and many have to play a couple hundred games in the minors before becoming NHL-ready. Knight already has 57 NHL games (and 49 starts) under his belt, and you’d have to think if he can enter the crease unencumbered by the thoughts that have kept him up at night, it will bring out the best in him as a player.
And that is indeed the plan for both Knight and the Panthers. Knight would not be surprised if it takes him a little while to find his game this season.
“Maybe I don’t feel great off the start,” he said. “But maybe I do. Maybe I come in and feel great right from the start. Who knows?”
Despite not being at the rink, Knight never missed an off-ice workout while he was out of the lineup. And it’s not as though he’s the first player to be shut down in February. Oftentimes, players who get physical injuries miss that much time – or even more.
Knight doesn’t see this as being any different. Injuries have to be managed, and so do things like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Knight is confident that, armed with perspective and the tools to deal with his condition, there is no reason he can’t be the goalie the Panthers envisioned when they drafted him 13th overall in 2019.
“I can still be the player I want to be, and I still believe I can be one of the best goalies in this league,” Knight said. “Maybe it’s this year. Maybe it’s next year. Maybe it’s in three years or four years or five years. I don’t know. I know what I’m capable of accomplishing. It was there before, and it has been there the whole time.”