published on June 25, 2024 in corga

The incredible stories of Blackhawks star Patrick Kanes days as Americas most dominant youth h

Patrick Kane was crying. Again.

The 14-year-old who looked like a 10-year-old was at his locker stall at Compuware Sports Arena in Plymouth, Mich., trying — and failing — to hold back the tears as the tyrannical coach of his Detroit HoneyBaked U-16 team, Donnie Harkins, absolutely tore into him for what he deemed a poor effort in the first period. There were OHL and USHL scouts in the stands that day, along with staff from the United States National Team Development Program, a coveted destination for the best American youth-hockey players. And Kane wasn’t playing to his potential, with a pair of botched breakaways among his transgressions.

Finally, Harkins grabbed Kane’s stick and tried to break it. He failed. He tried again. Failed again. Eventually, he just started slamming the stick again and again and again. Kane was in tears. Of course, so were his teammates, who were howling with laughter until Harkins finally got the damn stick to break.

“He thought it would be an easy break, but since Kaner’s stick was so short, it was hard to break,” teammate Nate Hennig said, still laughing some 18 years later.

“Donnie’s crazy,” teammate Vinnie Bradley said. “He’d literally take a 14-year-old’s stick and try to break it. I won’t repeat the language he was using, but there was a lot of profanity in that locker room. Kaner was the best player on our team, and if he was having a horrible game, it would have an impact on our team. So Donnie would sometimes pick on Kaner.”

Harkins stormed out of the room and Kane sat there and stewed. Stewed on the embarrassment of being singled out in front of his teammates, the anger he felt toward Harkins at the moment, the frustration with his own performance.

Then he went out and did something about it.

“Kaner came out in the second and third period and ended up with three or four goals and another three or four assists, and we came back and won the game,” Bradley said. “I just remember Kaner was so fucking pissed at Donnie. Every time he scored, he’d turn and just stare at him. That was Kaner. He could do that.”

Kane is already hailed by many as the greatest U.S.-born hockey player of all time, and as he approaches his 1,000th NHL game, he seems destined to finish his career as the consensus pick in that category. At 32 years old, he’s having one of the best seasons of his career, serving as a de facto captain and willing a team of kids into playoff contention.

But Kane was once a kid, himself — an extremely gifted, extremely small kid, one who was constantly underestimated, but who consistently dominated. From a coddled childhood to an eye-opening move to Michigan, this is how a tiny little kid from Buffalo became the best youth-hockey player in the world, and the No. 1 pick in the 2007 NHL draft, as told by those who played, worked and lived alongside him.

The boy in black

Remember back in Little League baseball, when there’d be that one 12-year-old pitcher who was already shaving and could throw a real curveball and his fastball must have topped out around 140 mph? Remember that feeling of stepping into the batter’s box against him, your heels backed up against the white line, praying he didn’t hit you or make you look foolish? That’s what it was like going up against an 11- or 12-year-old Patrick Kane in pee wee hockey in Western New York.
Only he was the tiniest guy on the ice.

Mark Zengerle, currently playing in Germany: It was almost like a Wayne Gretzky thing, where he knew what he was going to do three steps ahead. He always made guys look silly.

Jack Combs, currently playing in Romania: What was he like? He was tiny. He was always the best player, though. Always the smallest player and always the leading scorer at every tournament.

Kevin Montgomery, Buffalo Saints and USNTDP teammate: What his dad did for him in squirts and pee wee was, he would play for three different teams. He would have three jerseys in his bag and play three games. The kid was hockey 24/7.

Patrick Kane: When you’re a kid and you start doing things that you’re good at, maybe you tend to fall in love with them a little more. If there were 365 days in the year, I was probably on the ice for 350 of them, multiple times a day. That was my childhood, and that was what I loved to do. My dad never forced it upon me or anything. I played other sports, too. I loved playing basketball, that was really something I loved to do. But nothing really compared to playing hockey.

Zengerle: Yeah, Pat was on like three different teams at a time. Whatever opportunity he had to get on the ice, he was on that team. I’m an ’89 (birth year), but he was a late ’88, so he was allowed to go down and play with the ’89 team for state and that sort of thing, so we played against him a lot that way. He was only a month or so older than some of us, so he’d come down to the worst team and end up making them the best team. Our team, the Rochester Americans, was pretty good. Those teams he’d join were the basement teams. We’d beat them 7-0, then he’d join the team and it was a 6-5 game and you didn’t know who was going to win.

Montgomery: Playing against him in pee wee, it was almost unfair. He was so good, you’d have to have a player on the team shadow him. If you didn’t have somebody on him at all times, he’d kill you. I played for the Rochester Americans and he played for the West Seneca Wings, then the Regals. We had a really good team, so we usually beat them. But if we won 4-3, he had the three goals.

Kane didn’t start skating until he was 6, and he didn’t start playing until he was 7. But he took to it quickly and became an early star on the Western New York scene. By about 10 or 11, the best players started revealing themselves. The top kids in the Buffalo and southern Ontario area joined Darryl Belfry’s “Playmakers” group over the summer. In the winter, they found their way to the Buffalo Saints, which allowed them to play tournaments and a non-league schedule, so they didn’t end up spending most of their games beating up on overmatched league opponents who were often the 11-year-old equivalent of beer-leaguers.

Danny Baco, Buffalo Saints teammate: It’s no different than the Junior Sabres or the Chicago Mission these days, where they just do tournaments all over. Respectfully, we were playing at a higher level than those league teams, so it was better for us to be playing tournaments all over the place. We had a lot of Division I players and draft picks from those teams.

Part of the reason the Saints were formed was that Buffalo was hosting the national championship that season, so building a super team was a priority. Despite winning several tournaments in Western New York and the Toronto area, the Saints came up short at nationals, losing in the quarterfinals to the New Jersey Devils, featuring Kevin Shattenkirk.

Brian Keane, Buffalo Saints teammate and current skills coach for Kane: It was unfortunate because we all had it in the back of our minds that we were going to be in that national championship. It was disappointing. But Kaner did so many amazing things in those games. Just like he does today.

Zengerle: In his case, it was very obvious how good he was. We’d be at youth tournaments where all the teams from the area are there, and this is like, 10, 11, 12 years old, and we’d all be watching him in warmups and poking at each other like, “Oh my God, did you see what he just did?” Just young kids trying not to get caught by our coach respecting him too much. At that age, he was doing stuff that none of us had really seen before. It’s the same stuff he does now — spin-o-ramas, putting it under the bar. We were like, whoa. He had way more of an idea how to work in space and how to find space and what to do in that space, while most of us would just be skating to the net. He was a lot of steps ahead of most, or all, the players. His hands and his ability were just amazing, just like they are now.

Montgomery: His agility and his skating was like nothing I’d ever seen before. But it was always, “He’s too small, kids are going to catch up to him. He’s too small, he’s not going to make it. He’s too small, he’s too small.” And then every year, he’s the leading scorer. We’re like, “When is it going to be the year that it’s going to catch up to him?”

Zengerle: When we were in pee wee or squirts, all the parents in the stands were like, “Yeah, but wait till checking starts. He’s not going to be very good.” Then checking came and he was even better. Then it was “Wait till high school. Wait till college. Wait till junior. Wait till the next step.” Then the next step would come and he was always by far the best.

Keane: The way the game was played at that point, where it was much more physical at the NHL and junior levels, it was a lot about size and strength and hooking and grabbing and contact. I definitely remember there were times people would say things like that. He just overcame it. If anything, it drove him even more. For any small player, not just him, it was, “OK, can you do it at the next level and continue to dominate?” And he dominated at every level. It hasn’t caught up to him yet.

Nate Hennig, Detroit HoneyBaked U-16 teammate: Was he the second coming of Christ way back when? I don’t know. There was his size, and then everyone said his shot was too soft, which kind of goes hand in hand. If you’re not a big, strong player, you’re not going to have a big, strong shot. Yet again another instance where he proved everyone wrong. You don’t have to have the hardest shot if you always put it in the right spot.

Keane: You see a lot of the same things he was doing back then in his game now. The way he approached the game because he maybe was smaller and didn’t have the physical tools that maybe other guys had at that point, he had to find other ways to dominate. And he did. Had a little more maturity than the other guys back then. He had a pretty good narrow focus on how he wanted to play the game and improve. We admired that, as well.

Even back then, Kane had a little “Showtime” in him, a flair for the dramatic. The kid even had a gimmick.

Baco: He was just kind of like this mysterious kid who played a ton of hockey, scored a ton of goals and had everything blacked out — his stick was painted black, he had black Tuuks (blade holders) on his skates, even the (lime green) Graf logo on his skates was painted black. His gloves had no logo and his helmet was buffed out with no logo. He was a unique kid to play against. Just this legend in the Buffalo area. His father (Pat Sr.) wore all-white skates back when he played high school hockey in Buffalo. All white was big in the ’70s, but all black was Kane’s thing. It added to the mystery of Pat at that age, being this wunderkind playing on 100 different teams. That was just his look. It looked great.

Zengerle: My first time playing up with the ’88s, my first time seeing him, I was intrigued. He had that style that nobody else had, with the black skates, black gloves, black stick. He already stood out before he even skated, and everybody was talking him up. So you’re like, all right, how good is this guy really going to be? Then early in the game, he had the puck and was skating down the left side, just pacing himself. And then he just put on the jets, blew past our guy, fired a real quick shot right off the bar and in. We were like, “Oh.”

Combs: He dominated, but in a different sense, because he wasn’t overpowering physically. He was so cerebral that you literally couldn’t make a mistake and you had to play the body against him. You had to play perfect hockey to contain him, and at that age, no one plays perfect hockey. He was a stud. He’s so shifty, it’s crazy.

Baco: Even as a young kid, he’d use senior wood sticks. The benefit for him was the length of the blade. Senior sticks had a longer blade, which is fairly similar to what he has now. The length of the blade allowed him more opportunity to handle the puck. His backhand back then was always so good, as it obviously still is. It was just interesting that the smallest kid on the team was using a stick that was sized for an adult man.

Zengerle: There was never any time to waste. Even if he got three goals, he wanted four. Meanwhile, the other guys are excited for a few shots on net. He was the idol for guys that were his own age.

Baco: I ended up linemates with him. This is 11 or 12, so this story is kind of ridiculous. He made some crazy pass and set me up to score a goal. So we’re back on the bench, and this was right around the time that “The Sixth Sense” came out and the line everybody was always quoting was “I see dead people.” I very, very clearly remember Pat leaning in and saying to me, “Danny, I see through people.”

Even when Kane wasn’t at the rink, he was sort of at the rink. His basement was decked out as a little hockey rink, complete with two nets and boards and a concrete floor painted white, with a nice finish so you could slide around in your socks. His friends and his teammates would come over to work on their shots — sometimes wearing rollerblades so they’d be at skate height — or play wild two-on-two games of knee hockey with mini-sticks.

Baco: Most families had a net and a shooting area in their basements, but he had two nets, which was great. What was also cool was he had a jersey for every NHL team. Each one had the captain’s number, but more often than not, he had KANE on the back instead of Paul Kariya or Mark Messier or whoever. So it would say No. 11, but Kane. So when we’d play knee hockey or hockey in his basement, we’d all pick a team and wear that jersey. Certainly, that’s where his ability to so accurately pick corners comes from. He had a nice setup down there to really hone the skill even further.

Combs: Kaner was on the ice literally as often as you possibly could be. He would do a camp and he would just stay on the ice and practice with the next team. Anyone, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew him.

Zengerle: He would be at every Wednesday night clinic. Any hockey camps, any skating stuff. He was always there. Holiday Arena, Amherst, anywhere. A skills coach or a skating coach would come down from Canada, and he would be there every time. And the coaches would always use him as an example if the other players were messing around. “Look, he ain’t messing around, and he’s that much better than us. We should be looking at him.” For all the drills, going around tires or whatever, he would always demonstrate. He wasn’t the superstar that was goofing off because he knew he could, he was the superstar that was more serious than everyone else. Because he just wanted to keep getting better.

Combs: There were always kids that could compete with him points-wise, but he always would edge you out in the end. The other kids would fall off after a year or two after growth spurts, but he wouldn’t. Despite his size, he was always the leading scorer, always the best. Even in juniors, and Team USA, and the NHL, which obviously everyone sees.

Montgomery: I greatly benefited from playing with him. I got a lot of easy assists — just give him the puck and let him do the work.

Combs: We were actually linemates. I reaped the rewards of his skill set. I was just riding his coattails — just get open and he’ll find you.

Off the ice, Kane was mostly quiet and shy. He had undeniable confidence about him, but he didn’t rub anyone’s face in it. He just wanted to play hockey. Watch hockey. Talk about hockey.

Montgomery: He just went out and did his thing. He just loved hockey. He’s always been a pretty humble player, even when I was his teammate. He lets his game do the talking, he doesn’t need to say anything.

Zengerle: He was a really quiet kid. But what sticks out is how polite and humble he was. To be that much better than everybody — you’d never know it if you would stumble across him at a restaurant or anything. His family was always there. His three sisters were always there, even at tournaments on the road. He had a lot of support from them.

Kane’s parents, Pat Sr. and Donna, and his three sisters were mainstays at every game. Pat Sr. lived and breathed hockey every bit as much as his son, and to this day travels to nearly every Blackhawks game (pre-pandemic, that is).

Keane: Kevin Montgomery and I joined the Saints from Rochester, which is about an hour away. The really cool thing that Kaner and his family did was they would have us stay with them on weekends so we didn’t have to go back and forth. Their family was so accommodating and gracious, even though they’d have to cook a few extra meals.

Montgomery: I went to my first Sabres game with Patty and his dad, I was maybe 12 or 13. Maybe 14. And he still brought his mini-sticks to the game, just to play knee hockey in the concourse during intermission. He was funny like that. He was just a little kid. He matured and grew up later than most kids. But he loved hockey and always wanted to have a stick in his hand.

Combs: He just wanted to play hockey all the time. I do remember one time we almost got in trouble. We were at a Kamloops tournament, bantam age. Me, him and this other guy were on a walk and we were being kids and throwing some rocks near these cars and trying to hide. We hit one car with a rock and then we ran to the hotel, like a five-minute run. The other guy that wasn’t me or Kaner actually got in trouble. Me and Kaner ran to our room and they only caught the other guy.

(Courtesy of Don Harkins)

Far from home

How to describe Donnie Harkins, the despotic, brilliant, possibly unhinged, equally loved and feared youth hockey coach of Kane’s HoneyBaked 16U AAU team? He’s one of those “molder of men” types, the kind who laments the “softness” of America in 2021, the kind you run into a lot in high school football. The kind kids can’t stand while they’re playing for them, then spend the rest of their lives revering in hindsight. Even after all you’re about to read, when Kane’s son was born in November, Kane texted Harkins a picture of the infant and said, “By the way, going to need you to keep coaching. Gonna send you PTK3 at about 13-14 years old.” Harkins describes himself like this: “I’m old school. I coach like Torts.” In fact, he brings up John Tortorella a LOT. That should give you some idea.

Hennig: Donnie (laughs). We all have Donnie stories. I probably have 100 Donnie stories.

Vinnie Bradley, HoneyBaked teammate: Donnie was really good for Kaner because Donnie is just brutal. Just brutal.

Don Harkins, HoneyBaked coach: I hope he doesn’t cry like a baby (at his 1,000th game) like he used to when he showed up in Detroit.

Yep. That’s Donnie Harkins.

Harkins: I first met Kaner when he was going through a handshake line in a summer tournament in Toronto. He was a wee little kid, but high, high, high skill, high hockey IQ. I had just taken over this team that was motherfucking the referees. I sent them to the locker room and told them to take off their shit. I said run the stairs in your equipment. This was while the game was going on. Afterward, Mr. Kane comes up to me and says, “Hey, Coach, can I talk to you for a second? What was going with those two kids in the corner?” I said, “They disrespected the referee and an adult, and I don’t roll that way. So I told them to take off their shit and run the stairs.” Pat Sr. liked that.

With Kane being a late birthday, many of his contemporaries were going off to play high school hockey while he was still in eighth grade. Harkins talked the Kanes into getting him temporarily dropped from the Buffalo Saints roster so he could play for Harkins’ team in Detroit for a few weeks in December. The next year, Harkins finally persuaded the Kanes to send their son away to Michigan full time.

It helped that Harkins’ brother Todd played alongside Pat Verbeek for the Hartford Whalers during the 1993-94 season (Harkins’ brother Brett is a Bruins scout, and his nephew Jansen plays for the Winnipeg Jets). Harkins secured the Verbeeks as Kane’s billet family, and that was enough to win over his parents.

Hennig: For someone at that age to do that, my hat’s off to him. I ended up moving away and playing my junior hockey in Santa Fe, N.M., but I was two years older at that point. I think one of the selling features that made them feel better about having Pat come to Michigan was the fact that he ended up living with the Verbeek family. Having an ex-NHLer as an influence on your son goes a long way. It seemed to be a good fit for him, as well.

Harkins: I recruited him for three years. Pat and Donna finally both told me, “We can’t tell you no anymore.”

It’s a four-hour drive from Detroit to Buffalo. Pat Sr. and Donna made it about halfway home before Kane called them, crying.

Harkins: He was a baby, just a boy, and it was hard for him when his mom pulled away. He called her and said, “Can you come back and pick me up? I don’t want to do this.” She said, “No, you made a commitment to Donnie, you’re going to stick it out, you’re going to try it. And if you still want to change at Christmas, we’ll reassess then.” Just 14 years old, and they’re a very close-knit family. Grandpa lived right next door to him. It was hard at first.

Hennig: We were aware of Kane, we had played against him (in tournaments) in the year prior. On top of that were the Bennett brothers (Brett and Eric, Kane’s friends and Buffalo Saints teammates). All three of them came over that year. The decision for Pat’s parents to have him come to Michigan was really just for exposure to Team USA. The thought at that point, like most U.S. players, was they would pursue a college education and hope for the best. Obviously, his career kind of took off and the decision to go to London (of the OHL) was a better move and obviously worked out.

Kane attended famed prep school Detroit Country Day, the kind of school where you have to wear a dress shirt and tie to class every day — “A nice, safe, soft school,” Harkins said. But after years of being coddled and adored at home, life under Harkins’ glare was quite a shock for Kane.

Bradley: Not only had (Kane) never had a coach like that, but Pat — his parents are awesome, they’re really good people. And they worship hockey. His dad worships hockey and they worship him. He was their oldest. And Pat went from living in Buffalo, living with his parents, being worshipped by his parents, to living away from home at 14, 15. Now I’ve had dozens of coaches, and I’m a tech entrepreneur — I’ve raised money from billionaires that can be sons of bitches. But I can say this: Every coach, every investor, every colleague I’ve ever had in my life, post-Donnie Harkins, has been a cakewalk.

Harkins: His dad knows hockey and would give Pat a lot of advice. But he didn’t have to give Pat advice, he had to pick him up off the ground after I would challenge him mentally. I didn’t have to make Patrick Kane a better hockey player — God gave him all that ability. What I had to do was change his character. I had to change his mentality. He was a baby. He came from a home with three sisters, no brothers to fight and play mini-sticks with and beat the shit out of each other. So I had to make him understand how to be resilient. How when you lose the puck, how hard you have to fight to get it back. Because it’s better when it’s on your stick than other people’s sticks. It was all about changing his character, and that’s harder to do as a coach than teaching kids about X’s and O’s. I could go read a basketball book and run drills in practice and coach kids about basketball. But if you can change their character and get them to be more resilient, better teammates, that’s when you’ve made a difference. And if my best player is Patrick Kane, and I get him to be the best he can be, then our team’s going to be pretty successful.

Indeed, HoneyBaked went a ridiculous 66-3-1 that season, with Kane racking up 83 goals and 77 assists. But early in the season, it was future Hobey Baker Award winner and NHLer Andy Miele who was carrying HoneyBaked, not Kane. That didn’t sit well with Harkins.

Harkins: We have this thing about casual play. I used to get on his ass about it: “Kaner, if you can score three goals and you have the ability to score three goals, why don’t you just score eight? Because you have the ability to score eight, too.”

Early in the season in November, HoneyBaked tied the opener of the Silver Stick tournament in Whitby, Ontario, 1-1. Harkins, furious, decided to test his new star, as well as his teammates.

Harkins: Sometimes you take some shrapnel as the head coach if that’s how you’re trying to form your team. I coach like Torts coaches. And Kaner was very casual in that game, very average. And I didn’t want him to be average. Yeah, I wanted to win the tournament and it was the first game of the tournament, but I also knew how many OHL scouts were in the building, and we couldn’t afford to have him be average. Because I’d been out there beating the drum that he’s not casual, he’s not weak, he’s not this, he’s not that. And that game, he kind of played that way. So now you have these OHL scouts questioning my endorsement of him, right?

So I said, “Kaner, fuck it, you’re sitting out next game. You’re a healthy scratch.” Now who the hell healthy scratches kids in youth hockey? Don Harkins does. Now he’s bawling his eyes out in the locker room. Now when I’d make him cry, I’d be the first one there to hug him. But this time, what I wanted to do was make my team come to his defense. He’s our best player and he had a bad game, but if we tied 1-1, then there were a lot of other guys on that bench who had average games, too. So the captain came to me, “Coach, you can’t sit Kaner out tonight. You gotta play him.” A couple other players came to me and said the same thing. That’s what I wanted to see, how my team was going to react. I knew I wasn’t going to sit Kaner out, but I wanted to see if his teammates would come to his defense and how we were going to mentally become a tougher team.

Bradley: I remember that, yeah. I thought it was the championship game. But I can remember lots of scenarios where Kaner would have a bad game and Donnie would pick on him. Donnie would get in his face, and Kaner would come back and he’d have like five goals or five or six points the next game. There were so many instances like that. Donnie just wanted him to be great.

Hennig: Donnie always pushes his best players the hardest. There were times Pat took the brunt of it. Let’s say we’re in intermission and we weren’t doing well — he comes in and he puts it all on Pat’s shoulders. I will say he was the toughest coach I ever played for. However, I think he was the fairest. He had no favorites. He treated the best and worst player the same. Really, all he expected was our very best.

OK, one more Harkins story from that year.

Hennig: You know how every time a goalie gets scored on, he takes a sip of water from the water bottle? (Brett) Bennett was notorious for that. One game up in Canada, Bennett was getting shelled. At intermission, they used to have little cartons of milk and oranges waiting for us. Donnie thought (Bennett getting water) meant he was treating it like giving up a goal was no big deal. So at intermission, he started opening these milk cartons and acting like he was taking a sip from the water bottle. But all he was really doing was pouring one after another on his face and down his shirt. Those are the things that weren’t funny at the time, but you look back and remember it and it was hilarious. We still joke about those stories.

As the season went on, Kane became more assertive and more productive. He took Harkins’ tough love to heart.

Bradley: That was his coming-out party, that year. I played against him for multiple years when he was on the Buffalo Saints. They were good, but they had a couple of other players that could overshadow Kaner. That midget-minor (HoneyBaked) year is the year before the OHL and other junior leagues start getting very serious about you. And that year was really a big launching year for Pat. That’s also when a lot of people started going through puberty and started getting big. I was 5-8 and then two years later I was 6-1. And Pat was always very small and he still was small. So everyone was like, “Is he going to continue to be one of the best players around?” And the answer was yes (laughs). He was the best player in the country that year. We had an incredible team, and he was the best player we had. Kaner became great that HoneyBaked year. Donnie just set the tone for him. Donnie was crazy, but he was fair. That’s the most important thing. There’s so much politics in youth hockey, but there were no politics with Donnie.

Harkins: I bet our power play ran at 90 percent. You had Andy Miele and Pat Kane on the power play, those are two highly intelligent hockey players. (Lightning coach) Jon Cooper said it best. He told me, “We don’t even practice our power play. I have highly intelligent players that I put on that power play, and they’re smart enough to figure out what’s given to them and what they have to do.” There’s a lot of truth to that. I didn’t have to teach him the game of hockey, or the skill. People ask me how I coached him in youth hockey: You make sure he was at his highest level mentally, and get him on the fucking ice a lot. It’s pretty simple, right? It’s not rocket science.

Patrick Kane, far left, No. 19. (Courtesy of Don Harkins)

Harkins’ methods sometimes made Donna Kane a little uneasy, and Harkins freely admits he probably pushed Kane too far now and then.

Harkins: Oh, she’d be mad at me sometimes after games, but that’s normal youth-hockey stuff. She’d never say a word about it. Big Pat was a great buffer. He’d say, “Donna, he knows what he’s doing, just leave him alone.” Then Patrick would come out and Pat would start talking about strategy and he’d say, “Dad, I don’t need you to tell me what I did wrong in the game. Just be my dad now.” I was hard on him because I saw so much potential.

Hennig: Donnie was very, very tough on the ice, but as soon as the game was over, everything was water under the bridge. I played for coaches who couldn’t even look at you after you played bad. With Donnie, you could have the worst game of your life and he’d be all over you the entire game. But afterwards, it was always, “Where are we going to eat?” We always had fun regardless of where we were. We would intentionally go to the Silver Stick tournament in Colorado because we turned it into a ski trip. We’d skip warmups and you’d see the other team out there warming up, trying their best, the guys were wearing suits and ties to the game at 14, 15. Meanwhile, Donnie would be on the bench wearing shorts and flip-flops. He didn’t care how you looked, what you did, as long as you gave it your all when you played. Those are life lessons, and I think Donnie was really good for Pat.

Harkins is retired now, living in Naples, Fla. So Pat Kane III will never experience what his dad experienced during that life-changing year in Detroit. But Harkins and Kane are still in frequent contact, a lifelong bond forged in fire. (And fear.)

Bradley: Donnie is probably one of the most formative human beings in my life, as well. He’s a phenomenal recruiter and he has no filter. And it gets him in a lot of trouble. Donnie should be a general manager or a head coach for an NHL team right now. He has that kind of talent for recognizing and identifying talent and pulling the strings. But he often takes it too far, which gets him into trouble. I think Donnie knows that. A lot of players and a lot of people who’ve been in Donnie’s life would say he’s made a net positive impact on my life.

Harkins: Your job is to push him to that line. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to bounce back and forth across that line if you’re pushing to get the maximum results out of that athlete. Do teachers push their kids too far to get the best grades? Probably. But we’re in those roles as coaches or teachers or administrators because obviously someone saw something in us to be able to lead people.

Whenever Harkins is in town, Kane takes him to the Chicago Chop House. As a rookie, they ate in the main dining room. These days (well, pre-COVID-19 days), they need a private room.

Harkins: He’s got rock-star status now. But see, I still know him as little Patrick Kane who used to cry and thought I was too mean.

Going national

Despite his gaudy stats, Kane was overlooked by the U.S. National Team Development Program at first.

Blake Geoffrion, longtime friend and USNTDP teammate: He didn’t initially make the team. So the year starts and we had an injury early on, so they called in a couple kids to kind of audition over the next two or three weeks. Kaner was one of those guys. We played the Toledo IceDiggers and Kaner had six or seven points in his first two games and the rest was history. He never went back.

Harkins: He looked like he was 10 years old, playing against kids who looked 16. Kids go through puberty around that 12-13-14 age, so you have some kids with beards that look like men and other kids who look like they’re 6 years old. He was one of those kids. Not a lot of strength. But his brain was already in the NHL. The funny thing is he didn’t get invited to the U.S. NTDP 40-man camp. (Team USA coach) Ken Martell would come watch our team. I would tell him, “Kenny are you crazy? This kid, every time you look around, he’s got two (goals) and three (assists), he’s got one and five, he’s got three and two, he’s got three and three. Every single time! I understand he doesn’t compete as hard as we’d all like him to, I understand he’s not as big as we’d all like him to be, or as fast as we’d all like him to be. But he’s just better than everybody else, Kenny.” He did not get invited to that. He had to lead the U.S. NTDP festival they used to have in Rochester in scoring, and then finally, last minute, they named him to the team.

With Kane having made the USNTDP, Michigan now became more of a permanent home for him. He transferred to Huron High School, a public school, and moved into Vinnie Bradley’s parents’ house in Ann Arbor, as Bradley went off to play in the USHL. Bradley had two brothers, one older and one younger, who became de facto brothers for Kane, too.

Bradley: Kaner basically took over my bedroom, but I was back on weekends and in the summertime. The room had two beds in it, so Kaner and I spent a lot of time together. He and I had a sibling rivalry growing up, I would say.

Geoffrion: I drove him to school every day. He still owes me gas money.

Hockey was still Kane’s all-consuming priority, with Bradley’s mom occasionally having to enter his room after midnight to tell him to stop stickhandling and go to sleep. But whenever he wasn’t on the ice, you could almost surely find him with a basketball in his hands on the Bradleys’ half-court.

Bradley: We’d have three-on-three tournaments with guys from the Michigan hockey team. We’d have 10 or 15 guys there on weekends and the games would always result in fistfights. It was a bloodbath. Kaner’s not a big guy, but he’s a great athlete and he’s ferociously competitive. As were me and my brothers. He’s a good basketball player. He’s a little point guard on the court. Not a great shooter, but a great ballhandler, and very competitive. He loved basketball. He would go outside at my house and shoot hoops all the time.

Montgomery: He always liked playing basketball. He had a basketball court in his backyard in Buffalo. He wasn’t one of those type of kids to play video games, you were always playing some kind of sport with him. He was super-competitive with whatever it is. To play at the highest level, you have to be. I was the same way. You either have that competitive drive or you don’t. If you don’t have it, I don’t think you can go places like he’s gone.

Geoffrion: He’s just the ultimate competitor. He hates to lose. Absolutely hates to lose, whether it’s a game of ping-pong or basketball or whatever. I used to take his lunch in ping-pong. But he was a good basketball player. When he did lose, he’d always get rattled to the point he’d be yelling, “No! That didn’t go in!” I’m like, “Dude, that clearly went in.” “Let’s play again!” “Kaner, dude, you just lost, brother. Accept it. You’re done.” We had a lot of good times. He was a fun kid.

With the Bradleys, Kane paid his “rent” in sweat equity. Another bit of culture shock.

Bradley: We had a nice house, both my parents are doctors. But they were very strict and we had to take out the garbage and mulch the yard and all that. We had a big yard, so there was a lot of yard work to do. That was a rude awakening for him, I think, living in my household. He was the oldest and he had three sisters and his family’s amazing. But he’s like a God in his family. At my house, he was just one of the boys. And there was a lot of yard work to go around.

On the ice, it was more of the same for Kane, who continued to defy all the naysayers who predicted his size would eventually catch up to him. In his first year with the USNTDP, he had 32 goals and 38 assists in 63 games with the U-17 team. The following year, 2005-06, he had 52 goals and 50 assists in 58 games with the U-18 team. He was headed to the OHL’s London Knights, who had taken him 88th overall back in 2004, and he was now seen as a potential NHL draft pick, though nowhere near No. 1.

Hennig: At the time, the sport was still different, and the general consensus was Pat was too small. I’m sure 9 million people thought that at one point. The guys that we had (at HoneyBaked) the year prior, like Peter Mueller and Jack Combs, those guys were truly thought to be the next NHL prospect. Not to take anything away from Pat, but people weren’t envisioning that output for him. He certainly was the best player on the ice, but everyone kept saying he was too small. I really feel like where he turned things around was at USA. That’s when he really excelled and it all took off from there.

Sam Gagner, teammate in London and current Detroit Red Wings forward: It’s his size, and it’s not like he’s the fastest player in the world. His speed is underrated, but when you get those initial prospect rankings, everyone’s looking at size and speed and all that stuff. You have to see him play to see how talented he is. Early on I saw the rankings, and he was ranked fourth round or something. Then you see him in the preseason and you’re like, how is that possible with the amount of skill he has?

Even as his star rose, Kane was still the quiet, unassuming kid who just wanted to play hockey.

Geoffrion: John Hynes was our coach. He was really strict — you couldn’t drink pop, he didn’t want guys eating dessert, your body is your temple. We’d study Bill Belichick and Tom Brady every day. One night in the NAHL playoffs, we played Sault Ste. Marie, and Kaner and I each had good games. We were feeling great. I go to him, “Hey, you want to get a McFlurry?” He was like, “Oh, man, that sounds unreal.” We went through the drive-thru, looking over our shoulders to make sure nobody saw us, and just crushed those McFlurries. Didn’t think anything of it. The next day, we had a team meal and John Hynes comes walking in with this massive ice-cream sundae and starts eating it. We’re all like, “Ooh, we’re getting ice cream tonight, all right.” Hynes says, “Well, gentlemen, two of your teammates decided to be selfish and have some ice cream last night.” He asked if anyone wants to own up to it. Dead silence. Kaner looks over to me like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, don’t.” But I was a loudmouth, so I smirked, stood up and said, “Boys, I’d like to apologize. I got a McFlurry. I had a couple of points and was craving a McFlurry. No one was with me.” Then Hynes said, “Kaner, do you have anything to say?” He was like, “Yeah, I might have had one, too.” We all started dying laughing. Even Hynesy was laughing. We thought for sure we were in trouble.

On long flights to games in other countries, Kane and Geoffrion would quiz each other on obscure stats and trivia from a hockey almanac Geoffrion brought along.

Geoffrion: I was really good at it. But I didn’t win very often.

(Jerome Miron / USA Today)

Looking back

Kane’s one of the biggest stars in all of hockey now, instantly recognizable to any fan in any city. He dines in private rooms and generally keeps to himself in his downtown Chicago high-rise. But his old teammates say he never big-times anyone he came up with. Those Buffalo and Michigan bonds are forever.

Montgomery: If you knew him before he made it, he’s the same person. When you get that big, you have to keep your sphere kind of small. It’s tough to keep in touch with everybody, but I went to his Stanley Cup parties and he’s just an awesome individual, just a great friend. I was honored to play with him for as long as I did.

Hennig: I ended up moving to Chicago. I went to a game and I know his parents go to every game, and I know where they sit. I made a point to get there early and go and chat with Mr. Kane and Donna, and they act like no time has passed. They’re always asking about my dad, my brother, they said, “Hey, why don’t you come down and say hi to Pat after the game.” I’m like, “I don’t want to intrude.” They’re like, “No, meet us here and we’ll walk you down.” I didn’t know what to expect. At that point, it had been five years since I’d seen him. But it was just like catching up with an old friend. He wasn’t too cool for school, or too cool to talk to me. That meant something. Time has gone by and I can’t tell you that I would have given someone I played with five years ago the time of day like he did, so that was kind of cool.

Talking to those who grew up and played alongside Kane, four themes emerge. He was quiet. He was hyper-competitive (still is). He was impossible to hit (still is). And, man, did he love hockey (still does).

Harkins: Mark Hunter (Kane’s OHL general manager) in London once asked me, “Harks, how do you motivate Kaner?” I said just show him (that John) Tavares is ahead of him in scoring and he’ll take care of the rest.” He always wanted to be the best.

Montgomery: Hockey was his life. Still is. It’ll be interesting to see once he stops playing, what his next thing is. I imagine it’ll still be hockey.

Combs: He just loved the game. Of anyone I’ve ever met, he loved the game the most.

Hennig: I honestly don’t know if I’ve met a guy that loved hockey more than him. One time, and this is going to make him sound soft, but there was a big snowstorm and the decision was made to make practice optional — if you can get there, great. If not, no worries. I was pumped, I’m taking the day off. Come to find out Kane showed up to the rink and skated, just he and (Kyle) Verbeek on their own. He just couldn’t wait to get to the arena.

Bradley: He’s hard to explain. Kaner didn’t brag, but I wouldn’t call him some amazingly humble dude. He didn’t talk a lot of shit, he did his speaking with his actions. He just loved hockey. On a Friday night, he’d rather be in the basement stickhandling or looking at stats on the computer. That was his nature. He loves, loves, loves hockey. And I think to be a professional athlete, there has to be a simplicity to you. To be as good as he is for as long as he has, you have to really love your sport. Like, I definitely didn’t. I travel around the world and do a lot of other things and I’ve realized at 32 that I thought I loved the game, but I didn’t. You have to be one-dimensional and he loves hockey. He loves hockey. It’s incredible. He’s incredible.

Kane: When I look back on it, my childhood was pretty much playing hockey all the time. That’s just what I love to do. And it’s still what I love to do.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Getty; Bill Smith / NHLI, Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI; Don Harkins)

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