Steve Magness@stevemagness
Connor Hellebuyck made 41 saves in the gold medal game for team USA. Canada outshot the US by 15.
Without Hellebuyck, the US gets blown out.
But a decade ago, not a single major junior league in North America thought he was worth drafting.
The story of how he got from there to here tells you everything about what resilience actually looks like.
Hellebuyck came out of Walled Lake Northern High School in Commerce, Michigan.
They weren't a hockey factory, and he was basically a nobody as a prospect.
He went undrafted by both the the two main junior leagues that feed college and pro hockey.
No one wanted him.
So as an 18 year old, he drove 12 hours by himself from Michigan to Minnesota for an open tryout.
He got one shot...for the Odessa Jackalopes. So he moved to Texas...
His former GM and goalie coach Joe Clark remembers: "We had like eight goalies at tryouts, no one knew anything about him. Connor stood out. He made the team and he was a no-brainer for us as a staff. But he really had no resume whatsoever before that."
Hellebuyck led the league in games, minutes, and total saves. Won Rookie of the Year and Goaltender of the Year.
All in a city where football is religion and few know hockey even exists
Even with his performance, his next opportunities were few and far between...
UMass Lowell was the only school to offer him a spot. His first college start went so poorly that he got pulled and benched for over a month.
Most players spiral in that moment: "I'm not good enough, the stage is too big, I don't belong here."
Hellebuyck called Joe Clark and said, "The game is not as fast as I just made it out to be."
Clark couldn't believe it. He'd just gotten pulled and his takeaway was that he'd been over-prepared. That he expected the game to be faster.
It gave a clue into how he saw failure, and why he's so resilient.
When something bad happens, we have a choice: how are we going to integrate this into our story.
Story one: I got pulled because I'm not ready or good enough.
Story two: I got pulled because I was putting too much pressure on myself and expecting the game to be better than it was.
Hellebuyck chose the latter.
"I was more ready, more prepared than I had given myself credit for."
By the end of the season, he'd backstopped UMass Lowell to its first Frozen Four in program history.
The numbers after that benching are absurd. In two college seasons, he had a 38-12-2 record, .946 save percentage, and 12 shutouts.
He won the inaugural Mike Richter Award as the best goalie in college hockey.
All from a kid who couldn't get drafted by a junior league three years earlier.
"All the hardships that I had to go through early in my career were lessons learned. That's all I use them for. I didn't let them knock me down. I just kind of created a version of myself where I was just going to continue to adapt."
Even after college dominance, it wasn't smooth.
He was drafted in the 5th round, 130th overall by the Winnipeg Jets. He worked his way up from the AHL to becoming the starter in 2017.
He's now won three Vezina Trophies. The Hart Trophy as league MVP. And according to most measure, he's the best regular-season goalie of his generation.
But the one knock that wouldn't go away? He couldn't win in the playoffs. Whent he lights shined brightest, the media and fans said he struggled. Last spring, he got pulled three times in the first round of the playoffs against St. Louis.
Just like before, others were trying to write his story: great in the regular season, can't show up when it matters.
And once again, he showed that resilience is about ignoring what others write, and penning your own narrative.
Canada threw 41 shots at him. He stopped all but one. Star Connor McDavid had a breakaway in the second period that he denied. Devon Toews had a wide-open rebound with Hellebuyck out of position. He got his stick on it.
He played out of his mind. Or as the hockey saying goes, he was standing on his head.
"Those critics, they can keep writing. But they don't understand goaltending. They don't understand my game. I know what I'm putting forward. I know what I'm building. These are the moments that prove it — not that I need to."
We often get resilience wrong. We think you either have it or don't. That it's about toughening it out. It's what I kept coming across while researching my book toughness, Do Hard Things.
But Hellebuyck's story gives us the nuance:
It's a skill built through repeated encounters with failure...but only if you process those failures correctly.
Every stop in his career told him he wasn't enough. Undrafted. Benched. Cut from camp. Pulled in the playoffs.
But at each stop, he chose the same interpretation: this is information, not my identity.
Most people let setbacks become self-definitions. Hellebuyck let them become data points.
And the guy who processes failure as calibration rather than catastrophe is the guy you want when 41 shots are coming at him in a gold medal game.
Hellebuyck described his own story today the way he always has: "I would probably say the underdog story. Constantly going and being an underdog and just making it work, persevering and getting through."
He drove 12 hours alone to a tryout in Minnesota when no one wanted him. His only shot was in the Friday Night Lights town of Texas. He got pulled from his first college start and decided the problem was that he'd overestimated the difficulty, not underestimated his own ability.
He got pulled three times in last year's playoffs and showed up to the Olympics as the best goalie in the tournament.
Write your own story. And tell it well.
