12. The Luke Schenn Pick

“So, uh, the Leafs haven’t won the Cup since 1967; what are you going to do to change that?”

Not even two or three minutes after pulling his new blue-and-white jersey over his head for the very first time, that’s the first thing Luke Schenn remembers being asked. He remembers it, and not the rest, because it snapped him out of his haze.

Holy man, this is crazy, he thought to himself.

Thirteen years later, on an off day between two April games with the Tampa Bay Lightning, his seventh NHL club, Schenn is able to laugh about that moment. It was, he admits, his first eye-opener to everything that would follow and the pressures that came with being the 18-year-old face of a fragile franchise.

Schenn’s place in Leafs history was determined more by others than by him. That moment set the table.

* * *

The Leafs arrived at the 2008 NHL draft in Ottawa (which would be re-awarded its position as host after having lost the 2005 draft to the lockout) with the seventh overall pick, five months after firing general manager John Ferguson Jr. and naming long time executive Cliff Fletcher as general manager for a second time (he’d previously held the Leafs’ top job from 1991 to ’97), this time on an interim basis.

Schenn arrived in Ottawa for draft day as NHL Central Scouting’s fifth-ranked North American prospect. His hockey trajectory to that point had followed the linear path of the typical top prospect. He was born in Saskatoon as the oldest child of Rita and Jeff Schenn’s four kids, with younger brother Brayden and younger sisters Madison and Macy to follow. He and Brayden were just 21 months apart and took to hockey immediately, with Luke gravitating toward defence and Brayden to forward. As children, they both became stars for the local Saskatoon Redwings. As teenagers, they became the same for the Bantam AAA Saskatoon Generals and Minor Midget AAA Saskatoon Contacts.

In 2004, Luke was drafted 20th overall in the WHL’s Bantam draft by the Kelowna Rockets. After playing his 15-year-old 2004–05 season with the Contacts, he joined the Rockets for the home stretch of their season once his had concluded. Though he didn’t get into games for them into the playoffs, the Rockets billeted him with Ingrid and Barry Davidson so that he could be around assistant captain Shea Weber, who was in the midst of his final season in the WHL, had won gold for Canada at the world juniors that year, and was already two years removed from being drafted in the second round by the Nashville Predators. When Weber made the leap to the NHL in 2005–06, Luke took over his bedroom and his role as the backbone of the Rockets blue line, posting 11 points in 60 games as a 16-year-old and serving as an assistant captain for Team Canada West at the under-17 world championships that year. The following year, he added another 29 points and 139 penalty minutes as a 17-year-old and scored three goals in six games with Team Canada at under-18 worlds. In his third full season in the WHL in his NHL draft year, Luke then made Team Canada for a third consecutive year, this time at the under-20 world juniors, where he too won gold as the team’s fourth-youngest player.

Those three years in major junior (where most other draft-eligible players only had two) and three appearances in prominent roles for Canada on the international stage thrust Luke into the spotlight.

The Luke Schenn who pulled this Leafs jersey over his head for the first time had no idea what awaited him in his career in Toronto, nor of the glory he’d find wearing a different blue-and-white jersey long after he’d left. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

In the lead-up to the draft, Luke interviewed with the Leafs a couple of times, meeting with Fletcher and head amateur scout Dave Morrison in-season, at the combine, and again once more after it. But the Leafs never showed preferential treatment and he didn’t feel like they were any more interested in him than the other teams he met with. And despite his high NHL Central Scouting slotting, there was also a ton of confusion about how the draft would play out at the top. Steven Stamkos, who’d just scored 58 goals in 61 games for the OHL’s Sarnia Sting, was expected to go first overall to the Lightning, who’d retained the top pick in the lottery after their league-worst finish. After that, though, Luke was among a handful of defenceman who were expected to be picked in the next few selections.

By the time he’d taken his seat—flanked by Rita, Jeff, Brayden, Madison, Macy, his grandparents, the Davidsons, a couple of aunts and uncles, and his agents, Don Meehan and Craig Oster of Newport Sports Management—Luke felt like he was walking into it blind.

“If you look at the draft, it was crazy,” Luke said. “You had [Drew] Doughty, [Alex] Pietrangelo, [Zach] Bogosian, Tyler Myers, so there was a bunch of different guys within the same grouping.”

After the Lightning took Stamkos first, Doughty, Bogosian, and Pietrangelo were drafted in quick succession. Then the Islanders were up with the fifth overall pick when everything on the draft floor, and TSN’s broadcast of it, paused in anticipation of a trade. Before anything was announced in-house at Scotiabank Place (now the Canadian Tire Centre), TSN’s Darren Dreger broke the news on the broadcast while Leafs brass huddled at the Islanders table.

“Alright James [Duthie], I just spoke with Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher and he confirms that the Toronto Maple Leafs have made a trade with the New York Islanders. He wouldn’t get into specifics before pushing me aside, other than to say that they will swap picks five and seven,” Dreger said.

Seconds later, as boos rained down, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman stepped to the podium to make it official.

“Bear with me on this one. The New York Islanders trade pick No. 5 in this year’s draft to Toronto,” Bettman said as the boos ramped up, this time for the rival Leafs.

“There’s more!” he continued. “For pick No. 7 in this year’s draft and, at the New York Islanders’ option, either pick No. 60 this year and Toronto’s third-round pick next year or pick No. 68 this year and Toronto’s second-round pick in 2009.”

Back on the broadcast, as Bettman announced the deal, host Gord Miller spoke of the pick as the highest one the Leafs had made since drafting Scott Thornton third in 1989, predicting that they’d take Luke and regaling with stories of Fletcher flying through snowstorms to see him play in Kelowna. His analysts, led by Pierre McGuire and Bob McKenzie, lauded the coming pick.

“Hey, I never cheer for anybody, I don’t care who wins or loses, [but] Toronto wins big here!” said McGuire. “This is huge for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their organization going forward. This is the start of their rebuild and you couldn’t build it on better shoulders than Luke Schenn’s. When you can get a player like Luke Schenn, you just go crazy as a scout. This is a franchise player. Barring injury, what a career he will have for the Maple Leafs!”

Back in the crowd, Meehan gave his client a nudge and a wink as the Leafs made their way to the stage to make it official. Luke adjusted his black and grey tie over his belt and smiled as Leafs director of player personnel Mike Penny stepped to the podium.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs are proud to select with their first pick in this year’s draft, from the Kelowna Rockets, Luke Schenn.”

As he lifted out of his seat, the haze started immediately.

“To finally hear my name called, it was an incredible experience with a sold-out building,” Luke said all these years later. “You go up on the podium and you’re not honestly even sure who’s hand you’re shaking. It’s just a whirlwind.”

* * *

Luke’s second “welcome to Toronto” moment came a couple months later. The draft set the stage with all the weight McGuire metaphorically put on his shoulders before his name had even been called, and with that first question that came minutes later. Then came the Leafs rookie tournament in Kitchener against the Penguins, Panthers, and Senators.

“I think my first game I was a little bit too nervous and trying to go out there to do too much and I didn’t have a very good showing. I remember going down to the lobby the next day to grab a newspaper and they were roasting me pretty good in the paper and that’s when it was like, ‘Holy smokes, this is my second taste of the Toronto media,’” Luke said. “So after that I actually never read a paper or listened to the sports radio there.”

That pressure never really faded, either. It was sown early, and it was tightened again and again as the weight of the Leafs’ fledgling franchise, a franchise that had missed the playoffs in three straight years out of the lockout and into his selection, pushed down on him. In Luke’s first training camp, new Leafs head coach Ron Wilson, who was hired 10 days before the team picked at the draft, then told his new rookie—and the press—that the only way he was going to make the team was if he could play in the team’s top four.

After starting camp as the 10th defenceman on the depth chart, Luke worked his way onto the opening night roster, ramping up those expectations even further. Nine games later, after playing the third-most minutes on the team (21:34 per game, including more than 25 minutes in the third and fourth games of his career) to start the year—and two weeks before his 19th birthday—Wilson and Fletcher told Luke to start looking for a permanent place to stay.

The first offer came from Leafs assistant general manager Joe Nieuwendyk. But Nieuwendyk lived in Oakville, a suburb west of the city. Luke didn’t have a car and there weren’t any other players out there who could’ve helped him make the commute in for skates. Several other players also offered to move him in with their wives and families, including veteran goalie Curtis Joseph, who’d signed a one-year contract to return to the Leafs for a second time for what would be his last season in the NHL. But Joseph had four kids and he too lived in the suburbs.

So an 18-year-old Luke declined each offer and instead found a place on Queen’s Quay next to the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, a few hundred metres south of the then named Air Canada Centre on Lake Ontario.

A couple months later, his whirlwind rookie season got another new face, one who could take a little bit of the attention away from him, when the team’s 10-month search for a permanent general manager finished with a late November press conference to introduce Brian Burke as the team’s new boss.

But as Luke settled into his new home—and its giant spotlight—he always felt like he was on a bit of an island.

“It was my first time living by myself and I kind of just had to figure it out on the fly. There were like no other young guys on the team at that time too. Now you come into the league and there’s a handful of rookies on every team. When I came into the league, there were really no other young guys. Everyone was married. The only other single guy on the team was Jeff Finger and I hung out with him quite a lot, but I was 18 and he was 29,” Luke said with a laugh of his rookie season. “It was interesting. We were kind of in a rebuild even though we were an older, veteran team.”

That veteran team included a 41-year-old Joseph, 34-year-old Jason Blake, 33-year-old Jamal Mayers, 31-year-olds Vesa Toskala and Pavel Kubina, and 30-year-olds Boyd Devereaux, Jeff Hamilton, and Tomas Kaberle. It even traded for a 36-year-old Brad May and 33-year-old Martin Gerber at that year’s deadline.

With one foot into the rebuild and one foot out, they sputtered to the bottom of the Northeast Division.

* * *

The 2008 draft wasn’t the only one Luke attended. While he played out his rookie season in Toronto, Brayden (who was born two calendar years apart from him but just one draft class apart) followed in his footsteps in the WHL to emerge as a top prospect in the 2009 NHL draft with the Brandon Wheat Kings.

After scratching a handful of veterans and recalling some Marlies for the final game of Luke’s first season against the Senators in a blatant effort to finish as low in the tightly packed standings as possible, Toronto defeated Ottawa 5–2 to finish the year with 81 points. The win moved them out of a tie in the standings with the Coyotes and Kings, who both finished with 79 points. Had they lost to Ottawa, the Leafs would’ve lost both tiebreaks to the Coyotes and Kings due to their lower win total of 33. The result? Instead of drafting fifth for the second year in a row, the Leafs’ pick slid down to seventh, leaving them with less of a chance at a second Schenn, as Brayden was slotted fourth among North American skaters by NHL Central Scouting.

Still, Luke and Brayden arrived in Montreal for the 2009 draft hoping that they might end up on the same team. On the morning of the draft, the pair ran into Burke at the hotel and the Leafs general manager pulled them aside to tell them they weren’t alone in that.

“I hope to have both of you in the Blue and White,” he told them.

So when Luke and Brayden arrived at the Bell Centre to take their seats, they both crossed their fingers for another Leafs draft day move-up to select Brayden.

But the uncertainty that had lingered over Luke’s day a year earlier hovered over Brayden’s too. They knew that John Tavares and Victor Hedman were going to go one-two to the Islanders and Lightning, in that order. But after that, each of the Avalanche, Thrashers, Kings, and Coyotes, who held picks No. 3 through 6, had expressed interest in Brayden and posed a risk to the Leafs’ plans. In advance of the draft, the Kings, who selected fifth, had flown general manager Dean Lombardi and some of his scouts into Saskatoon to meet with Brayden in an effort to court him in a way that Luke never had been.

When the Kings made a Schenn the fifth overall pick for the second year in a row by taking Brayden, the Leafs missed on their guy and Luke missed out on playing with his brother. Two picks later, Burke stayed put at No. 7 to draft Nazem Kadri.

“It was just wild the way that it worked out. I still can’t believe that because we won that stupid game in Ottawa we slid down to seventh and Brayden ended up going No. 5 to Los Angeles,” Luke said.

* * *

Luke never did become the franchise-altering defenceman he was pedestaled as, but that pursuit was doomed by expectations and circumstance before it was ever allowed to build any momentum. In Luke’s second season in Toronto as a 19-year-old, the Leafs again finished last in their division, missing the playoffs for a fifth straight year. In his third, modest improvement pushed them fourth in the division with a 37–34–31 record, which still left them on the outside looking in for a sixth straight year. In his fourth, they bottomed out again, finishing 13th in the Eastern Conference for a seventh and eventually final season outside the playoffs.

Luke never got to be anything but the youngest player on flailing veteran Leafs teams, either. Throughout that fourth season, rumours of a potential trade swirled all year long.

“Hey, this is all just smoke, don’t worry about it,” Burke told him throughout.

Those rumours never let up, though, and eventually something changed leading into a third memorable draft day for the Schenns.

On Day 1 of the 2012 draft, then Flyers assistant captain Claude Giroux had just finished housing Brayden through his rookie season with the Flyers. (Brayden was traded to Philadelphia in a package for captain Mike Richards.) Giroux had also just played with Luke at the world juniors, and he told Brayden they might get their reunion after all.

“Hey, I think there’s a real strong chance he’s coming to Philadelphia,” Giroux said.

On a group text throughout the evening of the first round, they waited for it to happen. But as the night wound down, they began to question whether it would. Eventually, after a restless night of sleep, Luke’s phone lit up with Burke’s number. He’d been traded—and it was to Philadelphia after all, a one-for-one trade for forward James van Riemsdyk.

He still remembers the conversation that followed.

“You know, this was a tough deal to make but we had options to trade you to other spots too and if we were going to do it, I wanted you to be able to play with your brother and get to experience that,” Burke told him.

He was dealt at 22 years old, still the second-youngest player on that year’s Leafs team to defenceman Jake Gardiner. After spending another four seasons in Philadelphia, all with Brayden, Luke was traded to the Kings along with Vincent Lecavalier for prospect Jordan Weal and a third-round pick in 2016. His stint in L.A. began a series of quick pit stops with other teams as he bounced in and out of lineups with the Coyotes, Ducks, and Canucks.

Brayden emerged out of Luke’s shadow to surpass him, becoming a 50–70 point player through the prime of his career. In 2019, Brayden won a Stanley Cup as a top forward with the Blues. Luke watched Game 7 of the Final from the crowd, celebrating with his brother on the ice.

“I couldn’t have been more proud of him as an older brother and I was just so pumped to see him get his name on that thing,” Luke said. “And then for him to have his day with the Cup, it was basically everything I ever wanted to do, and I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to do it getting later on in my career.”

Later that summer, after Brayden’s day with the Cup, a 29-year-old Luke set out to chase his own day with it in free agency while he still could. When the Lightning called, fresh off a historic season that ended in a stunning first-round sweep to the Blue Jackets, he pounced.

“I knew they’d be coming back hungry with the same core, and I took the opportunity to sign there, thinking I never know how many chances I’m going to get for a team to call,” Luke said.

In Tampa, Luke followed his younger brother to make history as one of only a handful of brothers ever to win the Cup in back-to-back years.

That experience has given him a newfound appreciation for everything that led to it, including his four years in Toronto. He says he still has “an unbelievable relationship with Burkie” and keeps in regular contact with the general manager who shipped him out of town.

“Having Burkie unite me with Brayden was pretty surreal,” Luke said. “I’ll always thank him for that.”

He also points to the mentorship he received from Matt Stajan, Mike van Ryn, and Jamal Mayers, among others, as formative—as was all the attention and pressure that came with playing 310 games in the sport’s biggest market as a fifth overall pick without a playoff game to show for it. For as scary as his two “welcome to Toronto” moments were, he cherishes those too—especially draft day.

“The whole thing was just a whirlwind and surreal and you can’t even believe that you’re experiencing it. I was a Leafs fan growing up and to actually get the chance to experience it and wear that uniform and the history that goes along with it, it’s pretty special to be a part of it all. I’m grateful for my whole time in Toronto. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The ups and downs and everything that goes along with it, I’d do it all over again,” Luke said.

The Islanders turned around and traded all three of the picks they got from the Leafs for Luke again. They dealt the seventh overall pick to the Predators, who used the Leafs’ pick to draft Colin Wilson, who became a third-line forward in Nashville. They traded the Leafs’ 68th pick in the 2008 draft to the Chicago Blackhawks, who took defenceman Shawn Lalonde, who went on to play just one NHL game. And they traded the Leafs’ second-round pick in 2009, which became the 37th overall selection, to the Ducks, who got nine NHL games out of defenceman Mat Clark with it.

The Islanders used the picks they got from dealing the Leafs’ two 2008 picks to draft Josh Bailey, who became a staple of their franchise for two decades; Aaron Ness, who played 72 NHL games; forward David Ullstrom, who played 49 NHL games for them; and Finn Jyri Niemi, who never made it. A year later, they parlayed the Leafs’ 2009 second rounder to move up from 26th overall to 16th overall to draft Nick Leddy, a second staple of their next chapter.

Back on that off-day April call between games with the Lightning, when Luke looks back on the trade that started that ripple effect, the one that was meant to turn him into Toronto’s franchise defenceman and set him on his path, he sighs as if he can’t believe it.

“When you first come into the league, everyone dreams of winning the Cup, and you’re never really sure what your path is going to be. I never would have guessed in a million years what mine would’ve been, starting in Toronto as a high pick coming in, to all of a sudden fighting to stay in the league and grinding, to going through a few different organizations, to finally getting a crack at a Stanley Cup. It has [taken] a lot of resilience. It was tough to get there,” Luke says.

But when he reflects on his draft day and that haze he found himself in, the sigh makes way for a laugh.

“I was actually more nervous for Brayden’s draft day than mine. I typically am like that with watching him on TV or him in the Cup Final versus me playing in it. It was crazy how everything kind of worked out. At one point we thought we were both going to end up in Toronto playing together, and it turns out years later we were both in Philadelphia together,” Luke says.

Today, he and Brayden spend their summers together in Kelowna, back where his career started with the Rockets, seven doors down from each other in homes on the lake. He now gets to welcome the Davidsons, the billet family who hosted him in their home all those years ago, into his for regular summer barbecues (the Davidsons also visited him at his place in Toronto in that rookie year). His dad, Jeff, has just recently retired from a career in firefighting, and though his parents still technically live in Saskatoon, he guesses that they spend the majority of their time in Kelowna as well.

Between the nearby vineyards, golf courses, hiking trails, time spent on the lake, and the special journey he and his brother have shared, he considers himself only lucky.

“It’s crazy the way everything has happened. It has been a roller coaster. But it has all worked itself out in its own way, and I got my name on the Cup because of it,” Luke finished. “That’s so special for Brayden and I and our family. It’s just a little feather in the cap that we were both the same draft pick.”

A couple months after we spoke on the phone, Luke Schenn added another feather to his cap.

He won the Stanley Cup with the Lightning. Again.