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Capitals: “It’s awesome to see the look on the teachers’ faces and all the kids in the classroom — just the pure excitement.”
As we celebrate Educators Appreciation, take a look back at Leno’s surprise visit to Ms. Joyner’s second grade classroom.
How Capitals’ Ryan Leonard used ‘bulldog’ mentality to become 2023 NHL Draft’s No. 8 pick
by Scott Wheeler in the Athletic 1.17.23 (x)
With the No. 8 pick in the 2023 NHL Draft, the Washington Capitals selected Ryan Leonard. Follow our live NHL Draft blog for analysis from all our writers and columnists.
PLYMOUTH, Mich. — It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Friday, and Ryan and John Leonard are in the same place they always are on that day, at that time, from late spring to late summer: doing their weekly speed and explosiveness workout in a gym in Springfield, Mass.
Lined up in front of them is the morning’s circuit: a belt squat, into an earthquake bar movement, into a box jump.
Ryan has just messed it up for a third time.
“Hey, do you understand?” his strength coach Christian Ferrara asks him each time.
“Yes coach, yes coach, yes coach,” he answers.
When he gets it wrong a fourth time, Ferrara blows a fuse.
“Listen, if you don’t want to do this just grab your stuff and go home! Maybe you’re not ready for this! Everybody talks so highly about you but in reality, to me you just look like you’re a lazy punk kid!” he shouts at him.
That was three years ago. Ryan, then 15, was a star hockey player at Pope Francis Prep School who’d never really trained before but needed to prepare for USA Hockey’s national development program. He was in the gym with Ferrara and John — by then college hockey’s leading goal scorer and on his way to the NHL with the Sharks — because John and his Western Massachusetts buddies had vouched for him to join their group much earlier than Ferrara would normally be comfortable with.
“He’s like a little brother to us, we’re going to him under our wing,” they — a group that also includes longtime NHL forward Frank Vatrano and Leafs goalie prospect Keith Petruzzelli, among others — had pleaded.
When that first workout was over, John pulled Ferrara aside.
“Chris, you’re the first person to ever light him up like that,” he told him.
After that moment, a switch flipped.
“Every workout since has been everyone else trying to catch up to him,” Ferrara said on a recent call. “I have to give it to the kid for being so young because he attacked every workout like it was his last.”
Today, Leonard is the No. 4-ranked prospect on NHL Central Scouting’s midterm rankings of the top North American skaters eligible for the 2023 NHL Draft. He’s going to be a first-round pick. The only question is how high. When scouts watch him, they consider top 10, or top 15, or top 20.
He might also be the strongest prospect in the class. When you run into him in the halls of USA Hockey Arena, you can feel it in a handshake and see it in his shoulders.
“He’s a specimen,” Ferrara said. “He’s completely way in advance of where any kid his age should typically be.”
And his game on the ice reflects his strength off of it. He’s a force of nature. When asked, everyone uses the same word to describe him: Power.
Patrick Tabb is an assistant coach with American International College (AIC) men’s college hockey program. He also runs a summer skate at Olympia Ice Center in Western Springfield once Ferrara’s morning workouts are done.
When he’s asked on a recent phone call if the 17-year-old Ryan can hang with his pro group, he scoffs. He has been able to hang since 15 when Tabb moved him from a group of his peers to the pro skate. Now Tabb finds himself tailoring drills so that Ryan’s not dominating guys like Vatrano all the time.
In a one-on-one battle last summer against Peter Crinella, a 26-year-old, 6-foot-2, nearly 200-pound forward who is now playing for the Guildford Flames in Britain’s EIHL after several seasons in the AHL and ECHL, Ryan “sent Pete flying.”
Ryan has always been that competitor. According to Tabb and John, that chip on his shoulder has a lot to do with where he comes from.
“He has always had a target on his back because he always played up a year in Mass., and he has always been that Western Mass kid where in Massachusetts, once you cross Exit 9 on the Mass Pike it’s like a different world when it comes to hockey because they don’t think it exists and Boston supposedly dominates the game,” Tabb said.
“He would go out to Boston and if you live in Springfield you have to travel an hour and a half to get to any legitimate competition, and he would always have a target on his back. We have so much pride in the 413. So much. That’s our area. Like Frank, Keith, John, myself. We train together. There’s no need for Ryan to go outside of Western Mass to train in the summer and get better, and we’ve proven it across the board with all of our guys.”
John says that where they come from has as much to do with their success as what they’ve put into it.
“There’s six pros that are in the gym and on the ice with him every single day and from a personal standpoint I try to be a good role model and show him the habits that guys taught me when I was that age. But him being able to be around those types of players on a daily basis is a pretty cool thing for him,” John said. “I don’t think every kid gets the ability to do that with where they’re from, but Western Mass is a pretty special place.”
On top of where he comes from, Ryan’s also the byproduct of a family of athletes, with a stocky, 190-pound build to show for it. His dad, John Sr., was drafted in the 1982 NBA Draft by the New York Knicks as a guard who averaged 18.3 and 15.1 points per game in his last two years of college basketball at Manhattan College. He later coached basketball at UMass before becoming a principal at an alternative school in Chicopee, Mass. Both of Ryan’s sisters, Brianna and Alyssa, played Division III college basketball themselves. Alyssa now works at Vanderbilt and Briana has followed the family’s matriarch, Cindy, into nursing. John, after playing 58 NHL games for the Sharks across two seasons, is in his first season with the Milwaukee Admirals, the AHL affiliate of the Nashville Predators.
Though he played basketball growing up, Ryan fell into hockey following John to the rink. Cindy got her eldest son into the sport after she saw a sign for the learn-to-skate program at UMass.
His strength isn’t just about genetics, though. It’s also about how he was raised.
When he first came to Tabb a couple of summers before he started with Ferrara, Ryan’s singular focus was to pull himself out of his age group to make the U17 team at the national program.
The first two things Tabb noticed in their first skate together were:
1. That he could already move to the second or third step he had planned for his training and;
2. He was already stopping on the pucks he started each drill with. Ever since then, he has been insistent on skating four days a week for at least an hour and a half to two hours.
“You mess up an individual skill drill, he starts it over on his own,” Tabb said. “He already had that at 13-14 years old.”
Tabb believes that comes “from an unbelievable family.”
Ryan says it comes from being the youngest of four where everything in their childhood home in Amherst, Mass., was competitive, from card games and board games, to mythologized road hockey games that ended with the gloves dropping, to shooting competitions (in hockey or basketball) in the driveway, or even who got the TV remote.
“We’ve always been fighting over pretty much anything,” Ryan said with a smile.
Ferrara believes it comes from the example John set.
“He respects John. He puts John on a pedestal. Like ‘That’s my big brother, he has shown me the ropes.’ But when it gets going, it’s like they’re enemies. It’s like ‘no, it’s go time.’ And then all of a sudden the energy revs up and all of the boys start going,” Ferrara said. “Because those two brothers aren’t going to let anyone outwork them. John has groomed him exactly how he needed to be. So hats off to John but also hats off to Ryan for respecting him the way he does. He’s very quiet, very humble, very respectful. ‘Yes sir, no sir.’ When he comes in here he goes to work. ‘I’m here for a reason, I’m going to do what I’m here to do, and that’s it.’ He looks the part, he plays the part, and he practices the part.”
Ryan credits John, too.
“Anything I need, I can ask (John) for help or just how he has gotten through it. He’s there for me. He has gone through tough times with his career and he has a lot of experience because of it,” Ryan said. “He’s my biggest role model.”
The respect is mutual. There was a time, because of their six-year age gap, that they weren’t actually super close after John moved away for hockey and Ryan was too young to have a cell phone to stay in touch. But as they both got older, and they began to train and skate together, they grew inseparable.
“We just got closer, and closer, and closer and now it’s a pretty special thing we have,” John said on a recent call after an Admirals practice. “He means the world to me. I’m excited to see what he does in the future. It’s a pretty cool thing to be able to wake up every day in the summer and be able to train with him.”
In their skates, Tabb runs an “old school approach” where the drills are about competitive game scenarios rather than individual skills. Ryan feasts in that setting.
“Him and his brother just go at it. It’s unbelievable. It’s fierce. It’s all out,” Tabb said. “I’ve seen Ryan leave the rink not speaking to anybody after losing a day … but it stays at the rink and he’ll show up the next day at the rink smiling and ready to go.”
In recent summers, when they aren’t in the gym or on the ice together, they’re usually golfing together. Ryan gets the better of his big brother there, too.
“I never golfed at a very young age and he has been playing for a long time. He’s a low handicap so I’ll take my strokes off of him every day of the week. But I’m climbing up to him and he doesn’t like to admit it, so be sure to mention that,” John said with a laugh.
Ryan’s always been that way: a natural at almost anything he tries.
“Nobody has found anything that he’s not the best at except fishing,” Tabb said. “He does not have the patience for fishing. But he can go on the golf course and hit the best ball and just crush it to help you win a foursome, baseball he’ll dominate, it’s unbelievable.”
From his very first skate in Plymouth with the national program, everyone knew Ryan was a step further down the development path than his peers.
He could feel it — the strength when he would lean on his new teammates — in their first practices.
Dan Muse, the head coach for his 2005 age group, could see it too.
“His physical maturity enhances that bulldog game that he plays. He’s a powerful player, he’s a powerful skater, he’s powerful physically. His game drives and leads with power. He’s got a great shot, whether it’s from distance or from in tight he positions himself well there, but all parts of his game really drive off of that (build),” Muse said.
But he wasn’t just stronger, he was also more competitive. Though Muse felt he had a “really competitive group” to work with, Ryan was a tone-setter even within them.
“I think (with) Ryan Leonard it doesn’t matter whether you’re on the ice, in the weight room, or playing tic-tac-toe against him, he’s going to do everything within his power to beat you,” Muse said. “That’s in his DNA. That’s who he is.”
Before long in his time at the program, he was playing up with the U18 team. At year’s end, his 36 games played with the 2004 age group were the most by a 2005-born player, punctuated by a five-goal, six-point performance in six games at under-18 worlds in Germany as an underager.
This season, in his second year at the program, he has played on the U18 team’s top line with fellow Boston College commits Will Smith and Gabe Perreault, since Day 1. Heading into Monday’s BioSteel All-American Game showcasing the top U.S.-born players in the upcoming draft, Ryan had scored 23 goals and 44 points in just 30 games. Then he added a 24th in his 6-3 win with Team Blue over Team White on Monday.
He says Smith and Perreault are his playmakers, and he’s their physical, go-getter two-way power forward and finisher.
For that reason, the Eagles staff can’t wait to get their hands on him.
“He’s a big, strong kid and he’s got a little bit of a mean streak in him, which I like. He loves to rip pucks and he’s powerful, and he’ll go and finish hits, and he’s going to the net. He’s the sandpaper, the guy who can get in there and be the physical guy who can also rip it,” said Brendan Buckley, BC’s associate head coach (who has been watching Ryan for years because he’s got a nephew who is a 2005).
John, Ferrara and Tabb can’t wait to see what he does in college hockey and beyond in the NHL — a place they have no doubt he’s getting to.
“He was put on this earth to play hockey,” Ferrara said. “And it’s starting to show now. I think whoever gets him is getting a special kid. He deserves it, man. He’s such a good kid.”
John can see it more and more whenever he gets to see his little brother.
“Every time I see him he seems to get a little bigger. I’ll guarantee that the next time I see him he’ll probably be close in size to me now,” John said.
When Tabb had an opportunity in his own schedule at AIC to watch the national team play Yale at the end of November, he saw an NHL player.
“He laid some heavy hits against men,” Tabb said of that game, in which Ryan registered a goal and five shots. “I’ve seen him push those guys back on their heels. And (Petruzzelli) can tell you how heavy Ryan’s shot is, too. He can skate, he’s strong, he can shoot it. (And) he might be the last man out of the zone in the D-zone, but hey he’s getting up there and he’s getting into scoring areas. That’s what I like about him.
I think a team just can’t go wrong with Ryan, to be honest.”
