Milan Lucic returns to Vancouver tonight to play his first National Hockey League game in his hometown. Province sportswriter Steve Ewen takes a look at how Lucic's career in junior hockey nearly ended before it began.
There was a time it looked like Milan Lucic's hockey career might end in tears on the dinner table.
Her son may be part of revitalizing the Boston Bruins now but Snezana Lucic says he wanted to quit the sport after being passed over in the 2003 WHL bantam draft.
“He'd look at the computer every five minutes to see if anyone would pick him up,” she said. “Nobody picked him and at the dinner table that night he started crying. I asked what was wrong and he said, 'Nobody drafted me. I feel like quitting. I'm going to quit.”
“I told him that he was so much better than that. I told him that his father and I were here to support him. If that's [playing in the WHL] what you want to do, someone is going to notice you, someone is going to pick you up.”
“It was touch and go then. He was really disappointed.”
The story, of course, has a happy ending, as Lucic caught the eye of the BCHL's Coquitlam Express, then the WHL's Vancouver Giants and finally the NHL's Boston Bruins.
There was another tough chapter along the way, though. Lucic admits that he nearly quit after he was initially cut by the Express from rookie camp. Sean Crowther, the team's coach then, opted to bring him to main camp after all and then got Lucic to agree to play for a time in Junior B with the Delta Ice Hawks. He joined the Express full time later on in the season.
“I had a great rookie camp and then they cut me,” said Lucic, who's now 20 years old. “I was so down, because there wasn't much more I could do, I thought, and there were people who were putting me down also. Then I got the call a week later from Sean Crowther about main camp and from there I took it seriously.”
“I don't know what I'd be doing right now if it wasn't hockey. It just goes to show that if you want it real bad and you work at it, it can happen.”
Crowther would later become an assistant coach with the Giants. He heard the story from Lucic about wanting to quit only after the team won the Memorial Cup in 2007.
“He worked his way to camp with us that year and he worked his way on to the team,” said Crowther, who's taking a break from coaching these days.
“With Milan, first and foremost, he's a good person and good things happen to good people. He flat-out works and he works that hard with a smile on his face all the time.”
Story courtesy Steve Ewen, The Province
