How Auston Matthews came from the unlikeliest place and rose to hockey stardom
By Jonas Siegel | 02.21.2024 | The Athletic
PHOENIX — Zac Larraza was the first player to be drafted into the NHL from the untraditional hockey system in Arizona.
The Phoenix Coyotes, appropriately enough, selected Larraza with a seventh-round pick in the 2011 draft. Larraza never made it to the NHL, but while he was on the rise and playing for the University of Denver, he invited a promising youngster he knew from his hometown to skate with him.
That kid was Auston Matthews.
Matthews was about to turn 16 and join the same U.S. National Team Development Program Larraza had left a couple years earlier.
He was younger than everyone else skating that day. But, right away, they all knew: He was different.
It was the way he skated. How he caught passes. It was his hands and how he carried himself: Confident, but cool about it.
“There’s some people that are just — they found what they were born to do,” Larraza said. “Shohei Ohtani: He was born to be a baseball player. Steve Jobs was born to invent. Thirty-four was born to play hockey.”
But before No. 34, no one from Arizona had ever become an NHL superstar, let alone one of the greatest goal-scorers in the history of the league. No one had ever made it big like that. Not even close.
Auston Matthews is a unicorn in more ways than one. He’s forged a path for the next wave of young players from the desert to follow.
Thirty-four jerseys are ubiquitous here for a reason. Matthews has made it possible to dream and dream big. The next generation has a reason to believe and someone to believe in.
Call it The Auston Matthews Effect.
It’s also a reason to believe hockey in Arizona will persist with or without the long-troubled Coyotes.
As Shane Doan, formerly the face for hockey in Arizona, put it: “Auston is the flag that everyone in Arizona holds their hat on and says, ‘Someone not only made it and played here and grew up and always comes back here, but also excelled.’”
“That gave everyone hope.”
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‘The number 34, you see it all over the place’
You can still feel Doan’s presence here. There’s a Shane Doan rink inside the Ice Den in Scottsdale, where the Coyotes practice.
Doan grew up in Alberta, however. Daniel Briere, another one-time Coyotes star, was also Canadian. Keith Tkachuk and Jeremy Roenick, two more franchise icons, both hailed from Massachusetts.
Matthews could dream of playing hockey in the NHL, could dream of being Doan, but still had no yellow brick road to follow. Matthews had to forge his own path, one that the next generation is now following.
Josh Doan, Shane’s 22-year-old son and a promising prospect in the Coyotes’ farm system, can recite Matthews’ story by heart.
“He came up through the ranks of minor hockey in Arizona and he had done it all and he stuck around till his U16 year,” Josh Doan said. “And then he made the national development program and turned pro at 18 years old to play in Switzerland and then went right into the NHL and had an amazing first year.”
Doan was 14 when Matthews potted 40 goals as a rookie for the Maple Leafs.
“It was really just a sign of hope for a lot of the kids in the area that it was possible,” he said, “not only just to make it but to be a superstar.”
Where once little hockey players here wore Shane Doan’s No. 19, now it’s all No. 34. At least one on every team — and usually the best player.
“He’s an icon,” Marc Fritsche, the director of tier hockey with the Coyotes Amateur Hockey Association said. “Kids know him. They know Auston Matthews. The number 34, you see it all over the place.”
Hundreds of Matthews’ Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys … in the desert.
“There was a guy who I went to school with who played hockey growing up here,” said Coyotes forward Alex Kerfoot, “and he was talking a little bit about how he played hockey with Auston Matthews. I think everyone here just knows Auston … and that’s cool.”
“Everybody back home asks me if I know (Matthews),” said Mark Kastelic, a 24-year-old Ottawa Senators forward from Arizona. “It’s cool to just be in the same world as him.”
On the October night in 2016 when Matthews made history in his NHL debut, Shane Doan was coaching Josh’s 14-year-old squad (which included future Maple Leaf Matthew Knies). Word filtered down to the ice that Matthews had registered a hat trick in less than 22 minutes.
The team rushed down to the lobby to watch him become the first player in league history to score four in his first game.
What could be more inspiring for young Arizona hockey players than that?
Larraza likes to point to his younger pal as a shining light, an example for the kids he coaches to emulate.
If Matthews did it, why can’t they?
“It hits home way more now that there’s a kid that was born and raised here, that they have somebody to look up to,” Larraza said. “I use Auston as an example all the time when I talk to the kids about work ethic. ‘I know 34 is working harder than anybody in my life. What gives you the reason not to work as hard as that?’”
Arizona hockey has grown “exponentially” since Matthews came on the scene, in Fritsche’s estimation.
USA Hockey lists 9,716 total players in Arizona in its 2022-23 report. That’s up from 7,781 players in 2017, a 25 percent increase. More importantly, at the eight-and-under level, there were 795 registered players in 2023 — a 45 percent increase from the 2017 report.
One thing that’s helped is all the ex-pros who have stuck around. “Even guys who didn’t play for the Coyotes have homes here and live here and come here in the offseasons,” said Mike DeAngelis, a Kamloops, B.C., native who arrived in 1999 to play minor pro and now works as the director of hockey operations with the Coyotes Amateur Hockey Association.
What do those former NHLers do? They coach. Steve Sullivan took his Arizona team to the final of a recent tournament in Calgary. His assistant coach was Derek Morris, who ended his long NHL career with the Coyotes.
Then there’s Dallas Drake. Keith Carney. Ray Whitney. Former NHLers are everywhere.
“Not only are they involved, they’re coaching, they’re involved in the programs,” Fritsche said. “And having that wealth of knowledge to bring down to those players and those kids and those families, it’s just so valuable.”
The lack of rinks is a problem. The Coyotes’ uncertain future has also again bubbled to the surface. All anybody can talk about around town, besides Matthews, is the future of the Coyotes, who are now playing on the campus of Arizona State University.
The Coyotes may end up leaving, but the path Matthews laid will remain. Kids will continue to play hockey here and dare to dream because of him.
Kerfoot has been a Coyote for only a little while now and lived at Matthews’ house in Paradise Valley when he first arrived last summer. He’s seen it, too.
“It doesn’t seem foreign to walk on the street and see kids playing with a hockey stick or see kids who are involved in hockey. It doesn’t feel too much different being out in Arizona,” he said. “Auston’s had a huge impact on that. You hear kids at our games even talking about Auston.”
“People see him, and it’s not just this fairytale myth,” Larraza said. “He’s here. He’s a human that’s from Phoenix, Arizona, that’s made it to where he has.”
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‘Elite of the elite’
Larraza had played alongside future NHLers like J.T. Miller and Seth Jones coming up the ranks of U.S. hockey, but teenage Auston Matthews was unlike anyone he had ever seen before. The “elite of the elite” were different like that.
You know it when you see it.
“You just go, ‘OK, we’re all pretty good players, but this is different, what’s going on right here,’” Larraza said.
Every year, by late summer, Coyotes players trickled back into town ahead of training camp. They invited Larraza and his pals to come out and join them. That included Auston, who had become close with Larraza, and Doan, who took notice immediately, asking who Auston was and where he was from.
While the Coyotes had, and continue to have existential problems, if they hadn’t come to town in 1996, it’s possible there would be no Auston Matthews, NHL superstar.
It might have been Auston Matthews, MLB superstar. Auston’s father, Brian, had encouraged Auston’s early adoration for hockey, but he and Auston’s grandfather also hoped he would pursue baseball. Auston liked the action of hockey, though. And he liked scoring goals, especially.
There were no ponds for young Auston Matthews to play shinny on in the desert, though, and very few rinks.
One of the few that does exist, Arcadia Ice Arena, sits in the shadow of a giant Walmart in Phoenix’s sprawl. This is hockey in Arizona. If not for the giant white hockey stick poking out of an otherwise bland building, you wouldn’t know this was an arena, let alone the place where Matthews grew up learning to play the game.
Arcadia isn’t much. One sheet of ice in an otherwise shabby structure but better than nothing in a community where ice is hard to come by. It’s one of the things locals in the hockey community bemoan. There just aren’t many places to lace up the skates and play.
For Matthews, it was Arcadia and the Ice Den, where he returns to skate alongside Coyotes like Clayton Keller every summer.
The locals love that about Matthews. Not only is he one of their own, but he comes back. They see him in the flesh and are reminded of the remarkable path he forged.
And Matthews and his family didn’t do what other hockey parents in the desert might have. He didn’t move to a traditional hockey market to play against tougher competition or increase his visibility.
Matthews’ father, Brian, grew up in Scottsdale. He would ensure his son had every opportunity to fulfill his dream in Arizona.
That meant rigorous training with Boris Dorozhenko, a skating coach who moved to Arizona from Ukraine and even lived in the Matthews’ home. It meant playing for NHL alumnus Claude Lemieux’s team, the Phoenix Roadrunners, among others. It meant spending hours on a now-shuttered three-on-three rink where the quarters were tight and slick puckhandling was mandatory.
“Auston was allowed to skate there as much as he wanted,” DeAngelis said. “And he’d just wheel around and play three-on-three or skate by himself.”
Matthews had incredible skill even then when he was just a kid.
That chuckling you hear in the background? That’s Shane Doan.
Matthews always had a mind for the game, too. His decision-making was strong for his age. His hands were exceptional.
And he was determined.
Dorozhenko remembers Auston struggling with one drill in particular. For 40 minutes, he just couldn’t get it right. He was crying. But Matthews wouldn’t give up and go home until he got it right. With tears in his eyes, he insisted they keep going.
“He never stops on something,” Dorozhenko said. “He wants to be better.”
Dorozhenko proudly describes Auston as a “pioneer” for hockey in Arizona, but no one knew back then that he would become this. How could they? One of the greatest scorers the NHL has ever seen — from Arizona? Get real.
But they knew something was different, especially as he crept closer to the NHL.
“He was a flat-out stud, that’s for sure,” said Keller, the Coyotes star who first met Matthews in 2015 while teammates with the USNTDP under-18 squad.
Keller and Matthews sat next to each other in history class as teenagers in Ann Arbor, Mich. Their nightly ritual: EA Sports’ NHL video games.
“There were like five of us that would play every single night, probably a little too late,” Keller said.
Matthews was Arizona chill — “super laid back” in Keller’s estimation — but maniacal about hockey, even as a teenager.
“You can tell that there’s a purpose to every rep, every shot,” said Keller, who skates with Matthews in the summer. “He’s never going through the motions.”
Larraza sees it firsthand when Matthews makes his annual return home to Arizona in the offseason.
“Like 80 percent of his day is focused on working and getting better, whether it’s on the ice, off the ice, taking care of his body, eating right — having a chef come cook him meals at his house, taking care of himself so that he is in the best possible position to succeed when the season starts,” Larraza said.
For other players, playing hockey is a job that they punch in and out of, Larraza said. “They work hard at it, they want to take care of themselves, but they’re also having fun and they’re golfing and they’re going on all these trips. (Matthews) knows he’s got a short career. I mean, 20 years is a short time in your life. He’s got 20 years to really prove who he is, make the money that he deserves to make, and carry his legacy.”
How much of Matthews is a byproduct of where he came from? Does he have what Kerfoot describes as “internal confidence” because he never had reason to think otherwise, because he towered over everyone in Arizona from the beginning? Is he laid back and chill because he was raised in the desert where the pace is slow and the sun shines almost constantly?
Kerfoot believes it’s just more about who Matthews is than his environment.
He was born for this but shaped nonetheless by where he came from.
“If you grow up in Toronto, or you grow up in a hockey family, you kind of are in the world,” said Kerfoot, a West Vancouver native. “Your parents know the other hockey parents. You’ve kinda got a path that’s all laid out for you. It’s just every day — there is like a hockey world. And he’s kinda carving his own path coming from a non-traditional hockey market.
“Because of that, I think he does things his own way.”
Now his way has become the way for others in Arizona to follow.