Seattle Kraken prospect Shane Wright has the spotlight on him as he attempts to solidify his status as a Grade-A NHLer.
Flash back to two years ago, and the spotlight was on him as a potential No. 1 pick.
In this cover story from The Hockey News’ May 23, 2022, edition (Volume 75, Issue 15), editor in chief Ryan Kennedy profiled Wright as he prepared for the NHL draft.
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The road to the NHL has since been bumpy for Wright, who played most of last season with the AHL’s Coachella Valley Firebirds. But on an evolving Kraken team, Wright’s development will be crucial.
Wright’s agent, Cam Stewart of KO Sports, sees a maturity in Wright that will be a benefit to him as he climbs the NHL ladder.
“He’s well beyond his years,” Stewart said. “Even though he was the youngest player on his teams growing up, he has always been the captain. And it’s not just about giving the best player the ‘C,’ he’s the leader right off the hop. He’s got a very quiet confidence about him.”
Here’s the full original story unlocked from the Archive.
TRAGEDY, TRIBUTE, TRIUMPH
Vol. 75, No. 15, May 23, 2022
By Ryan Kennedy
Pinpointing the origin of Shane Wright’s competitive streak isn’t too hard when you talk to those who know him best. When he was three or four years old, his family was at a cottage, taking part in some goofy summer games with friends – you know, the types of games that are fun for the kids and also fun for the adults, once they’ve had a wine cooler or two. The Wrights were doing a ski relay and not taking things too seriously. Except Shane, that is.
“He exploded in anger,” said his mom, Tanya. “He. Could. Not. Lose.”
More recently, there was the period when his dad, Simon, consistently beat him at golf. Shane wasn’t having any of it. So during the 2020-21 season lost to COVID-19, when not training for a return to the ice, Shane could be found working on his golf game in the garage by hitting balls into a net, even in the middle of winter. “He’s propelled himself from shooting in the 100s to the low 80s in 12 months,” Simon said. “It’s incredible when he gets it into his head that he wants to get better.”
So, at the very least, Wright has become better at channeling his competitive fire as he has gotten older. Still, he doesn’t deny his unquenchable desire to win. “Oh yeah, definitely true,” Wright said. “I’ve always been a competitive guy. I’ve always liked winning and hated losing. That’s my mentality. I hate being bad at anything. Whether it’s golf or hockey, I want to be the best I can be.”
The Wrights have seen their son mature into a young man who has faced some incredible challenges while rising to the top of the 2022 NHL draft rankings. Now, he’s poised to become the No. 1 pick for the most storied franchise in NHL history.
Born and raised in Burlington, Ont., just east of Hamilton and about 45 minutes from Toronto, Wright is the son of Simon, who works for a major vitamin company, and Tanya, a high-school teacher. His older sister, Maddie, plays soccer at the University of Waterloo.
Wright and his teammates dedicated a dominant GTHL season to their lost friend.
Right from Timbits hockey, Wright was controlling the play – as much as one can “control the play” at that age, of course. But the first signs of phenom status came when he played in the famed Brick Invitational tournament for under-10s in Edmonton. Suiting up for a Toronto Pro Hockey all-star squad that also featured future 2022 NHL draft prospects Ty Nelson and Paul Ludwinski (now Wright’s teammate in OHL Kingston) and 2023 top-ender Adam Fantilli, Wright led the team in scoring and won the championship. From then on, he played up a year.
“It was mostly other people that would tell us there was something about him,” Tanya said. “Or the phone is ringing off the hook, asking him to play in some weird tournament for a team that has to have him.”
As the years went by, Wright continued to progress. Eventually, the decision was made for him to play in the vaunted Greater Toronto League for the Don Mills Flyers, the program that has developed a wide swath of NHLers, from Rick Tocchet and Larry Murphy to Mitch Marner and Darnell Nurse. “The progression was really ramped up when he played for Don Mills,” Simon said. “If there was something there, you need to play against the best day in and day out and, frankly, that’s what the GTHL is all about. As well as being on one of the top teams and being one of the better players on that team, a lot of pieces need to come together.”
And come together they did. The Wrights saw continual growth from their son year after year, and the Flyers were overstuffed with talent.
Then on March 14, 2018, tragedy struck.
That’s the day Don Mills goaltender Roy Pejcinovski, his mother Krassimira and his sister Venellia were found murdered in their Ajax, Ont., home. The killer, Krassimira’s ex-boyfriend, was convicted in April 2022 and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. The murder was a devastating blow for everyone who knew the family and a trauma that rocked the tight-knit hockey team.
“To sit in grief sessions where you’re in a circle and your coaches are grown men and they’re bawling their eyes out and the parents are all crying, these were big emotions,” Tanya said. “The boys were encouraged to feel their own emotions as well and share them and communicate them. I feel Shane became a different kid in a lot of ways. His relationship with his teammates and coaches was definitely altered.”
It was a lot to digest for Wright and his fellow Flyers at such a young age. “It definitely impacted us a lot,” he said. “Definitely hard times there, and it was really difficult. It made us a lot closer as a team and brought us together.”
The next season became, in many ways, a tribute to Pejcinovski. The Flyers would meet up with Pejcinovski’s father, Vas, several times a month during the season (older sister Victoria was not at home the night of the murders and provided a victim-impact statement in the court proceedings) and got together for a memorial one year after the tragedy.
On the ice, the Flyers honored Roy the best way they could by putting together one of the most dominant seasons in GTHL history, led by Wright and future NHL first-rounders such as Brandt Clarke (Los Angeles) and Brennan Othmann (Rangers). Don Mills lost only one game all season, blitzing its way to the OHL Cup, the end-of-year tournament featuring the best teams in the province and some top American OHL hopefuls (Luke Hughes played in the tourney that year, for example). Every Don Mills player wore a jersey bearing Pejcinovski’s No. 74 in warmups before the first game, and the tournament ended with Wright feeding Othmann for the winning goal in overtime of the final, a 6-5 win over Fantilli’s Toronto Red Wings. Wright, who had recently been granted exceptional-player status to join the OHL a year early, ended the campaign with 168 points in 79 games, playing in the most competitive minor hockey league in the world.
And this is where Wright’s ability to deal with pressure will come in handy from here on out. Not only is he expected to go first overall to the Montreal Canadiens this summer, but the draft is in Montreal, promising a packed house of rabid Habs fans for the event. After being taken first overall by the Frontenacs in the 2019 OHL draft, he headed to Kingston as a 15-year-old following in the footsteps of previous young phenoms such as Connor McDavid, Aaron Ekblad and John Tavares.
“Not a lot of people get that exceptional status, and with that comes tons of pressure at a young age,” said Kingston coach Luca Caputi. “He handled that with maturity you don’t really see in a 15-year-old. The way he goes about his life and how he was raised helps him stay even-keeled and focus on the important things, himself and his family. He tries to block out the outside noise as much as possible, and it works to his benefit more times than not.”
Wright paid immediate dividends, racking up 39 goals and 66 points in 58 games to earn himself OHL and CHL rookie-of-the-year honors. Still, he does see a difference between his rookie OHL year and this NHL draft season.
“They were pretty different, to be honest,” Wright said. “Going into my first year, I didn’t really have many expectations. I was new to the league and new to my team, so I just wanted to play as best as possible and learn as much as possible. This year, I’ve taken a lot of pride in helping the team win games, making sure we’re a winning franchise and developing a culture. I’m a captain now and one of the leaders, so I could be more of a role model.”
This season has been an intriguing one for Wright. Last year, the entire OHL campaign was canceled due to provincial COVID-19 restrictions, making it the only one of the three CHL circuits not to have some semblance of a schedule. Tremendous development opportunities were lost, and scouts still saw a lag in many OHL draft prospects this year. But Wright made the most of his time away from the rink. He had workouts scheduled and had his garage set up for additional training on his own (with a little spare time mixed in to work on his golf game). In the spring, he did a lot of rollerblading on his Marsblades for his legs.
Wright’s only action in 2020-21 came at the world under-18s in Texas, where he led a super-group of players to the gold medal. Despite being one of the youngest players on the team as a 2004 birth year in a 2003 tournament, Wright was named captain and tied with 2023 draft phenom Connor Bedard for tops on Canada with 14 points – only Wright did it in five games, missing two due to a hairline fracture in his foot that he ended up playing through.
Taking on a leadership role is nothing new for Wright. In fact, it’s the norm. He was 13 when he first met Cam Stewart, his agent with KO Sports, and Stewart has seen his client impress coaches and teammates ever since. “He’s well beyond his years,” Stewart said. “Even though he was the youngest player on his teams growing up, he has always been the captain. And it’s not just about giving the best player the ‘C,’ he’s the leader right off the hop. He’s got a very quiet confidence about him.”
So expectations were high when this year’s OHL season finally began. Initially, Wright’s numbers were a little ho-hum. But he wasn’t concerned with individual stats, as long as the Frontenacs were winning.
Wright is the type of two-way player who matches up against the other team’s top lines and faces the best defensemen himself. He takes key faceoffs on the penalty kill and lines up on the top power-play unit. Early on this season, he also helped his coach in another valuable yet subtle way. Because much of the league was filled with first-year players, Caputi was putting him with younger linemates, even though they weren’t at the same strength level or pace as Wright.
“As the season progressed, those younger kids found their game, and we put our older players in a cluster, and that’s when his production took off,” Caputi said. “No one understands how Matthew Soto and Paul Ludwinski got off to such a good start, it’s because they played with Wright every night. Those are the things people don’t know unless they ask. And credit to Shane, he just put his work boots on to help our team win. He never complained.”
At first, the numbers weren’t as expected for Wright. And at one point, some pundits even questioned whether he would indeed go first overall. But once Wright began playing more with older linemates, such as NHL prospects Martin Chromiak (Los Angeles), Zayde Wisdom (Philadelphia) or Francesco Arcuri (Dallas), the points began to flow more freely. In the end, all the hand-wringing from doubters ended up for naught, as Wright finished eighth in OHL scoring with 94 points in 63 games.
“I’ve always liked him and still like him,” said one NHL scout. “Everything about his situation has been overblown. He was never going to be a pull-you-out-of-your-seat guy. He plays an understated game. He’s a very intelligent player. The comparison has always been guys like Patrice Bergeron and Jonathan Toews.”
Wright specifically cites Bergeron as someone he follows closely, and he’s also been watching Auston Matthews, for the obvious reason that the Leafs sniper is one of the deadliest shooters around. Hitting the net more is something the Kingston coaches have been working on with Wright, along with controlling the pace of a game for longer stretches of time – something that will come as he continues to get stronger.
Based on how thoroughly he throws himself into his passions, it’s not hard to see him turn his weaknesses into strengths as he prepares to go straight from the draft podium to the NHL. After all, that’s just what he does: Shane Wright is not here for half-measures.
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