8. From a Lost Draft Year to Developing the Leafs’ Lost Prospects

As soon as Drake Berehowsky delivered the hit, searing pain shot through his body, and he knew that was something was seriously wrong. Instead of pushing through his opponent’s chest to deliver the clean hit he was looking to hand out, he’d missed him—at top speed. When he did, he’d stuck out his right leg as a reflex, clipping his intended target with his knee and spinning off him. And now he was rolling on the ice in pain.

When the trainers finally got to him, all he could get out through that pain were the same few words, repeated until they picked him up and carried him down the tunnel to the dressing room.

“Get me off the ice as fast as you can!” he shouted. “Get me off the ice!”

As he laid in the room and they cut off his equipment, his mind raced and wandered as he talked himself into a panic.

My career is over, he thought to himself.

My dream is over.

My life is over.

Before that moment, before Berehowsky’s knee popped and blew in the ninth game of his NHL draft year with the Kingston Frontenacs in the fall of 1989, he’d felt he was destined for stardom.

Everything about his hockey career to that point had gone exactly as it was supposed to.

* * *

Berehowsky was born in January 1972 to immigrant parents, with a father from the United States and a mother who was born in Estonia. (His grandmother fled to Canada during the war and left his mother in Germany for a year before sending for her when she was just three years old.) He was raised in Etobicoke, close to where his dad was a schoolteacher at Western Technical-Commercial School in Toronto’s West End. They settled there because his father didn’t like to drive and never wanted to commute to his work. Ironically, though, when Berehowsky took up hockey as a way to fit in and to keep himself from going stir-crazy as a kid, almost all of the city’s competitive hockey played out of its East End (which has reversed these days), forcing his dad into driving to all his games anyway.

Berehowsky quickly became one of the city’s top players and a star defenceman of the Toronto Marlies’ AAA team. He grew up going to Saturday 6 am practices at Maple Leaf Gardens before the Leafs had their morning skates in advance of Hockey Night in Canada. One of his fondest childhood memories is of the Sunday morning he dragged his parents out of bed at 3 am so they could take him down to the Gardens for 4:30 am in the hopes that if he got there before his practice, he might be allowed to skate by himself before the rest of his teammates arrived. That morning, arena staff, who were still cleaning up from the Leafs game the night before, let him on the ice with three pucks and one light on, warning him that his shots better hit the net because Leafs owner Harold Ballard was sleeping in his apartment. (He still has the photo of him alone on the ice with one light on to prove it.)

By 15, he was already posting 46 points in 40 games with the Barrie Colts, who were then a Junior B team. At the end of that season, the OHL’s Kingston Canadians (who became the Kingston Raiders and then the Kingston Frontenacs in quick succession in his first and second seasons with the team following a pair of ownership changes) selected him first overall in the 1988 OHL draft. In his rookie season in Kingston, he posted 46 points in 63 games, fourth among all the OHL’s under-17 players. Before he injured himself early in his second season, Berehowsky, a 6’2”, 200-plus pound defenceman who played a physical and talented game, had already posted 14 points in nine games on Kingston’s backend. In the days before the injury, that impressive early play, which paced him to lead the league’s defencemen in scoring that year, had brought swaths of NHL scouts through the Kingston Memorial Centre to watch him and pull him aside for post-game chats to express their interest.

Before he knew it, though, in the days after the injury, he’d moved from Kingston back to Toronto and was sitting in the office of Dr. Michael Clarfield, who was then the Leafs’ head physician. In his first visit with Dr. Clarfield, when his muscles wouldn’t relax to allow his knee to shift out during the tests the doctor ran, Berehowsky was misdiagnosed when Dr. Clarfield told him he didn’t think it was anything serious. But when the pain, instability, and discomfort didn’t fade and he returned to Dr. Clarfield for a second visit and a scope into his knee, the scope revealed a complete tear of his ACL and some structural issues with his right leg.

Hours later, Berehowsky, who’d never even heard of an ACL tear and knew nothing of the severity of knee injuries before then, woke up with a 20-pound cast on his leg to learn that following the scope, Dr. Darrell Ogilvie-Harris, another of the Leafs’ old team physicians, had operated on him.

News of the surgery also came with news that his draft year was over. Both Ogilvie-Harris and Clarfield told him he would have to come to terms with setting his sights on next year’s draft.

He remained in the cast for two and a half months, and a gruelling year of rehab followed.

To lift his spirits, his mom purchased some self-help books for Berehowsky to read. As a way of keeping himself motivated and out of the black hole he’d felt himself sink into, he read voraciously and did his own research into the knee problems that Detroit Red Wings captain Steve Yzerman had battled and overcome.

Beyond the reading, the only thing that kept Berehowsky going was the continued interest from NHL clubs in advance of the 1990 draft.

Throughout the year, the Rangers, who would eventually hold the 13th overall pick, showed the most interest. David McNab, then an amateur scout for the Rangers (today he’s the Ducks’ longtime senior vice president of hockey operations), kept regular tabs on him, checking in to see how he was doing and even purchasing him tickets to several Leafs games so that he could at least watch some hockey during his time off.

Though there was no scouting combine at the time, several other teams also flew him into town to test out his knee themselves and take him to dinners or baseball games.

One of those final visits was with his hometown Maple Leafs, who held the 10th overall pick and were already familiar with his injury through their doctors. When his meetings with Leafs brass were over, they told him he was going to be their guy if he was still available, meaning McNab and the Rangers were never going to get the opportunity to select him.

In the final weeks ahead of the draft, which was set to be held for the first time in Vancouver, that information gave Berehowsky life.

The first thing he did was the first thing every kid did when they got that news: he got a haircut and he purchased a new suit. Then he and his family got on a plane and flew to Vancouver a week in advance of the draft to do some sightseeing.

On the day of the draft, though he knew the Leafs would take him if he got there, he didn’t know if he’d go earlier, or if the Rangers would try to move up to grab him. While his eventual selection by the Leafs felt inevitable, he still had to wait anxiously in the stands for it.

And the blur that followed felt the same for him as it did for the other players—maybe even different because of all that he’d been through.

When they did call his name, it still felt surreal. So did everything that followed. The speech he made from the podium. Placing the hat on his head and lifting the jersey over his shoulders. The rush of interviews.

When it was over, he spent the night in a hotel room to which the Leafs invited all of the players and their families back to socialize, circling the room to meet scouts, the team’s other picks (including future Leafs starting goalie Felix Potvin, whom the Leafs drafted 31st overall with their second-round pick that year), and other members of the organization he hadn’t yet met through his rehab process or his pre-draft day with the team.

It didn’t really sink in that he’d just become a first-round selection of his hometown team until he returned home to the unexpected chaos of it. When he arrived back to Toronto, the first thing he thought was OK, I’m going to the cottage to wind down, and so he quickly packed his bags to get away. But as he prepared to leave the house, his phone began to ring. When he picked up, there was a reporter on the other end of the line looking for an interview. Then came another. And another.

It wasn’t until a few days later, when things had finally begun to settle down, that he managed to escape the city for a short while. When he returned, he spent the rest of the summer after his draft rehabbing his knee with Leafs athletic therapist Chris Broadhurst. Once he began to feel closer to 100 percent, he’d ride his bike down to Maple Leaf Gardens, where the security guys would open the side door and he’d ride right into the Leafs dressing room for treatment and skates.

With each skate, he began to feel better and better about his ability to keep his career on the track it had been on before the injury.

Against the odds he’d even set for himself, Berehowsky made the Leafs out of camp the following fall as an 18-year-old, playing in eight games in October before a demotion back to Kingston and an eventual trade to the OHL’s North Bay Centennials, where he finished the year.

In his second year post-draft, though, he was less successful in camp. The Leafs returned him to North Bay and he made just one appearance for the Leafs that year in January, playing the full season for the Centennials, where he posted a combined 113 points in 83 regular season and playoff games, winning CHL Defenseman of the Year. After losing in the 1992 OHL Final with the Centennials, Berehowsky joined the St. John’s Maple Leafs and played in the final six games of their seven-game series against the Adirondack Red Wings in the Calder Cup Final, falling just short of a second championship that spring.

His knee and leg never did fully heal in those first couple of years after the draft. After being sent back to St. John’s following his third training camp, a pin in his leg started to come out and he was forced to return to Toronto to have it removed. After a few weeks of additional rehab in Toronto, by the time Berehowsky returned to St. John’s, a local municipal workers’ strike, which had begun in December of that season, had raised tensions so high in the city that the team decided to forgo playing their home games and go on an extended road trip. Though the team briefly returned to St. John’s in February to try to play home games again, unrest amongst the strikers spilled over when the team crossed over their picket lines to play. When they did, the protesters surrounded the team’s bus and tried to tip it over while the players were on it, breaking several of its windows in the process. After the incident, the team, which had by then been joined by a healthy Berehowsky, went back on the road for a second time, playing all its games away from Memorial Stadium until its second-round playoff series that April against the Cape Breton Oilers. The season was one of the most tumultuous in the history of the Leafs’ first AHL stay in St. John’s, with ownership threatening to relocate the team to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. The team eventually took over the Halifax Metro Centre for its first-round playoff home games. By the time St. John’s returned to Newfoundland to play Cape Breton on April 29 of that year, it had been four full months—and 44 games on the road—away from its home rink, with so-called home games played wherever it could find an available arena (in Stephenville, Newfoundland, for two games after the bus incident, and then in Toronto, Montreal, Cornwall, Charlottetown, and Halifax).

Through it all, though, Berehowsky calls that season, his first full professional one, the most memorable of his career. With St. John’s as a 20-year-old, he became one of the league’s best defenders almost right away, posting 27 points in 28 games. That year, he also played a further 41 games in the NHL, posting 19 points on a Maple Leafs team that went all the way to its infamous defeat to Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings in Game 7 of the conference finals. He didn’t play in any of those playoff games, though, and split his time between the Leafs’ NHL and AHL clubs one last time again the next year, playing another 49 games for Toronto in 1993–94.

A 22-year-old Berehowsky eventually stuck in the NHL full-time in 1994–95 with the Leafs, only to be dealt to the Penguins at that year’s deadline for defenceman Grant Jennings. Though he never had the career he felt he was destined for before the injury, or the one the Leafs gambled on when they drafted him 10th overall, Berehowsky went on to play 571 NHL regular season and playoff games for six NHL organizations, registering 153 points and nearly 900 penalty minutes. After additional stops in Edmonton, Nashville, Vancouver, and Phoenix, he finished his NHL career with a nine-game stint with the Leafs at the end of the 2003–04 season after the team reacquired him from a second stint with the Penguins in a trade for defenceman Richard Jackman.

* * *

Berehowsky always said that if hockey didn’t work out, he would have followed in his father’s footsteps to become a teacher. So once he’d retired from his playing days following two years in Europe prompted by the 2004–05 NHL lockout, Berehowsky turned his attention to coaching and found a gig as an assistant coach with the OHL’s Barrie Colts in 2007 at the age of 35. After two seasons in Barrie, he made the jump to the professional ranks, joining the AHL’s Peoria Rivermen as an assistant coach. After Peoria, he then pounced at his first head coaching job with the ECHL’s Orlando Solar Bears in 2012, followed by two seasons as the head coach of the WHL’s Lethbridge Hurricanes, two more as an associate head coach with the OHL’s Sudbury Wolves, and a return to Orlando to take over behind the Solar Bears bench for a second time in 2016—a role that also came with the team’s general manager duties, which he still holds today.

When he took the Solar Bears job for a second time, it also marked his third time as a member of the Leafs organization, who held Orlando as their ECHL affiliate for five seasons from 2013 through 2018. (The Leafs only ended the affiliation because they eventually reached an agreement with the ECHL’s expansion Newfoundland Growlers to return professional hockey to St. John’s.) Faced with a decision on whether to keep himself and his young family in Orlando or move into a different role within the Leafs organization, Berehowsky decided to stick with the Solar Bears as the NHL’s Lightning took over the affiliation for the 2018–19 season.

In retirement from his playing days, Berehowsky and his partner, Danielle, also started Statstrack, a hockey analytics firm and software company that enables teams to track their own data, cut their own tape, and produce live intelligence reports (reports that Berehowksy and clients in the CHL, USHL, college hockey, the DEL, and the CJHL use in their work with players).

In his second career as a coach, Berehowsky has gone from prospect to teacher in his own way after all. Two and a half decades after the Leafs made him one of their draft picks, he was overseeing the development of theirs, helping former Leafs prospects Mason Marchment, Kasimir Kaskisuo, J.J. Piccinich, Martins Dzierkals, Garret Sparks, and Aaron Luchuk at some point along their journey with the Solar Bears—or would-be Leafs prospects Andrew Nielsen and Giorgio Estephan along theirs in Lethbridge.

Today, when he looks back on his life in hockey as a player and the painful draft year that led him to the Leafs back in 1990, he considers himself only fortunate for how it all turned out. He’s too far removed from how he felt at the time, when the disappointment of the injury felt like it had crushed him.

“At that age, you think you’re invincible. It was a shock to my system. It was a long year. It was a long rehab. I was very fortunate to even be able to get drafted given how bad it was. I consider myself so lucky that the Leafs drafted me after only playing nine games,” he said.

When he talks about that rehab process, he pauses to marvel at how ahead of his time Broadhurst was, too.

“He knew that these injuries weren’t the end of the world and he put a plan in place to get me to where I wanted to be,” Berehowsky said of the Leafs’ former head athletic therapist, who now runs Toronto’s Sport Medicine Clinic.

Berehowsky also credits his mom for keeping him focused on what mattered most, for instilling in him an attitude that said, “No matter what you do, do it the best that you can,” and for keeping him reading and learning so that he wouldn’t lose sight of his dream.

When he looks back on his draft day, he still can’t wrap his head around the experience of getting selected, after all that he’d been through, by his team. There aren’t many, he says, who get to go from practicing on the Maple Leaf Gardens ice as a kid to paying on it as a Maple Leaf.

“It was pretty amazing. You’re waiting there and then your name finally gets called and for me especially, because I sat out a year, I felt so privileged,” he said.

He laughs as he retells his post-draft cottage story and the delay he had to put on his trip up north as those phone calls started to roll into his family’s home.

“I didn’t realize what a big deal it was,” he said. “I don’t think anybody fully realizes the coverage that Toronto players get.”

He says he never really felt the pressures of being a 10th overall pick, though. He was having too much fun. He remembers too fondly the sold-out buildings of that Calder Cup Final run when he first arrived in St. John’s, or the NHL buildings full of Leafs jerseys when they travelled to places like Edmonton and Florida, or that year on the road during the strike, to have any regrets about how any of the rest of it turned out for him.

“I wanted to be up with the big club and play with them, but we had such a good time down in St. John’s,” Berehowsky said. “It was just such an amazing thing to be a part of the Toronto Maple Leafs that you were just happy. And wherever I was, they treated us well. I was pretty fortunate, all told.”

And he’s thankful that the Leafs believed in him enough a second time to trade for him and a third to trust him to run their ECHL team all those years later.

His second career in the sport has also given him a greater appreciation for how his first one played out. In it, he got to watch kids who look just like he did try to do what he was so lucky to do for parts of 12 NHL seasons.

“There’s nothing better than being a hockey player, but the one thing I’ve come to learn is that there’s a lot more pressure on players nowadays. There are a lot more camps. There’s social media, which I promise you they read. So they see where they stand on the ice constantly and then they have this constant wave of information, as well,” Berehowsky finished. “When I played, I had no idea what was going on and I never came from a hockey family, so I didn’t understand any of it. And maybe that was a good thing because I didn’t feel any type of pressure. Kids now train 12 months a year, where we took six weeks off in the summer. They play all of this spring hockey, too. It’s amazing how different it is. It’s a 12-month game now.”

But he loves nothing more than being a part of that process and shaping the direction of today’s players in some small way. Right through to the end of his time with the Solar Bears, he still pinched himself every time he stepped behind the Solar Bears bench.

“I’ve always wanted to stay involved in hockey. I think it’s the coolest game and I think I’m so lucky and fortunate to live my dream and I’ve always wanted to teach people what I’ve been taught,” Berehowsky said. “I’ve had so many great coaches that have taught me so much and so many great players I’ve played with that I’ve learned things from, so I’ve always wanted to give back to the game. It’s an amazing sport.”