Tyler Bertuzzis Red Wings origin story

Kris Draper made his way through the Prudential Center, doing some final research on something for which he could never be fully prepared.

It was June 30, 2013 — NHL Draft day in Newark, New Jersey — and Draper, in his second season as the special assistant to Red Wings general manager Ken Holland, had been texting with a man named Scott Walker about a prospect Detroit was considering picking.

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The two had known each other since the early 2000s, when they were teammates for Team Canada at the World Championships. Now, Draper’s team was thinking about drafting one of Walker’s players from the OHL’s Guelph Storm.

The two had a good relationship, and in this case, that served Draper. It can be hard to find good information when scouting amateur hockey players. No matter how many games a scout goes to, there are certain things that just can’t be seen in a game. In his old teammate, though, he had a particularly good source for insight into what this particular prospect was really like.

At some point, as the two exchanged messages, Walker recalls telling Draper, “Well, I’m up in the crowd.”

“So he just walked up and he picked my brain,” Walker said. “Honestly, he was just grilling me about him.”

Walker was fuzzy on the exact details, but he says that conversation went something like this:

Do you really believe in him? Is he a good kid? No problems?

You’re gonna love him. You’re gonna love him.

Some 700 miles away, in Sudbury, Ontario, Tyler Bertuzzi was entirely unaware he was about to be drafted by the Detroit Red Wings.

He hadn’t gone to the NHL’s draft combine. He hadn’t interviewed with Detroit. He wasn’t even at the draft.

In fact, he was about to go for a boat ride with some of his buddies.

“I didn’t think I was going in the second round, so I thought we could go kill a few hours outside and we (would) just come in, see who got drafted after, and kind of go from there,” Bertuzzi recalled.

Instead, as his father, Adrian Gedye, remembers, when Bertuzzi and his friends came upstairs before heading to the boat, Tyler’s name was called out at the draft.

“He was just like a ghost,” Gedye said. “He was in shock. And I was picking him up and cheering — he was just, like, stunned.”

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Because they were on a lake, the cell reception wasn’t great. So when Draper phoned Bertuzzi to tell him personally that the Red Wings had selected him, Gedye remembers his son running barefoot down the driveway, just trying to get service.

In the end, the two connected, a highlight moment on what Gedye now calls “a perfect day” for the family.

But back in the States, there was a different reaction to the selection. One instant analysis called the pick “puzzling,” noting that Bertuzzi had been ranked 207th among North American skaters entering the draft.

At No. 58 overall, it was seen as something of a reach.

Nearly six years later, however, any lingering qualms with the pick have long since faded. Bertuzzi is one of the most promising young players on the Red Wings, consistently a top-line player in recent weeks. He has an outside shot at reaching 20 goals this year, in his first complete NHL season.

“Tyler Bertuzzi’s making us probably look a little smarter than we are,” Draper said. “But it’s a credit to Tyler.”

In reality, Bertuzzi has been doing this for far longer than he’s been with the Red Wings. These results are a product of the same traits that drew Detroit to him in the first place, but have manifested in ways it could only have hoped for on draft day.

“Now,” Draper says, “it looks like a fantastic day for the organization”

The Red Wings were only ever in position to take Bertuzzi with that pick because of a trade down earlier in the draft. When Detroit moved back from pick 18 (eventually Mirco Mueller) to pick 20, it was able to select Anthony Mantha while also adding San Jose’s pick at No. 58 overall.

Detroit actually went with Zach Nastasiuk with its next pick, but by the time it got around to No. 58, it was time for a decision on Bertuzzi.

“When Tyler’s name came up, the table all agreed,” Draper said. “We want this player. The thing that you can’t do … is you can’t try to predict the draft. You can sit there and say you’d love to get this guy in the third or fourth round, but unfortunately when you make that pick, chances are, you have to wait. Unless you have multiple picks, 30 names are coming off the board before you make that next pick.”

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Translation: They weren’t positive they could have afforded to wait. Which means for as easy as it can be to think in terms of “reaches” and “steals,” those distinctions can only ever be made in theory when drafting.

After the draft, for example, Gedye said multiple teams told him they had planned to take Bertuzzi in the third round. Who knows if those teams had picks between No. 58 and Detroit’s next selection at 79, but that’s a long time to wait on eggshells for a player you want.

Every time Draper had gone to watch Bertuzzi that year, he recalled, Bertuzzi had been consistent. Draper had gravitated toward his competitiveness. He called his stick “unreal,” and remembers noticing his hockey sense.

Of course, Draper also knew Tyler’s uncle, former Red Wing Todd Bertuzzi, which only added fuel to the idea Detroit had “reached” for Tyler on draft day.

But in reality, if Todd was at all a factor in Tyler’s selection, it was for another reason entirely.

Detroit’s primary concern with Bertuzzi was his footwork. In the modern game especially, slow foot speed or inadequate mobility can make it tough for even the most skilled players to get by. But the Red Wings were comforted, in part, by what they saw as a good stride. That gave it potential.

If Bertuzzi got bigger, and put in the work to improve his skating, their concerns would be nullified.

“You’re just like, ‘I hope he gets stronger, I hope his skating improves,’” Draper recalls thinking. “And then that’s where I think you have to take into considerations that the bloodlines kick in, that he has an uncle that played in the National Hockey League and had an excellent career. So he’d been around it, he knows.”

Whether Detroit knew it at the time or not, Bertuzzi was also a player who, on his chest, had tattooed the phrase “No guts, no glory,” around a red Canadian maple leaf and a hockey player’s silhouette. It was his first tattoo, and he got it when he was 16.

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Before that, when he had first started playing baseball as a kid, Bertuzzi stole his first-ever base by sliding head first — without any formal training, his father said.

That instinct, and the message inked over his heart, both foretold the type of player the Red Wings were seeing perform on the ice.

“He looks like a throwback hockey player,” Draper said. “He played that way when he was 17 and he does it now. The fearlessness. He’ll fight. He’ll block shots. There’s a lot of intangibles, and he had those things when he was 17 years old.”

Back when Bertuzzi first got drafted to the OHL in 2011, he wasn’t actually expected to make his junior team in Guelph. He was a fourth-round pick, but the Storm had selected six players ahead of him thanks to a glut of picks in that draft.

“I remember when he came in as a rookie, he was about 5-foot-9, he would just run around hitting everybody, smashing the glass, making lots of noise,” Walker recalled. “You noticed him every time he was out there.”

“He just hit everything that moved,” said Senators defenseman Ben Harpur, a Guelph third-round pick that same year.

Walker had planned to send Bertuzzi down after training camp, but at the last minute, he had a change of heart. He didn’t know where Bertuzzi could go and develop more. He decided to keep him.

The problem was, since that hadn’t been the plan, there was no billet family lined up for Tyler.

He had become friends with Harpur, however, and had been staying with his billet family during training camp. So when the roster came out, the family decided to let him move in full-time. They lived together until Harpur was traded to Barrie in the 2014-15 season, after the Storm had won the OHL Championship and gone to the Memorial Cup final in 2013-14.

That experience is an almost perfect encapsulation of Bertuzzi’s career trajectory. He was never supposed to make that Guelph team to begin with, but played so well that the team had to make literal, physical room for him. Then, it was rewarded for doing so.

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That team success came a year after the Red Wings had drafted Bertuzzi, of course, but even before that Draper got an up-close, early view of the playoff prowess that would eventually become one of the young forward’s calling cards.

When Guelph began an OHL playoff series with Kitchener in spring 2013, just months before the draft, it was only a three-hour commute for Draper to get there.

“I was pretty well at every one of those games,” he said.

Bertuzzi didn’t actually end up on the score sheet in any of them, but he was making a consistent impact every game as a 17-year-old, Draper recalled. And there was much more where that came from.

Since his draft year, Bertuzzi has been part of five playoff runs: two more in Guelph, and three with the AHL’s Grand Rapids Griffins. In every single one, he’s averaged nearly a point per game.

He was the playoff MVP when the Griffins won their last Calder Cup in 2017.

“And to me, I love that stuff,” Draper said, “when, obviously you have players that have very good regular seasons, and then all of the sudden elevate their game in the playoffs. I was fortunate, I played with a lot of those players that would do that come playoff time, just found a way to elevate their games. … And the expectation is the next time the Detroit Red Wings are in the playoffs, Tyler Bertuzzi is gonna impact our hockey club.”

Among the messages Walker tried to convey to Draper, the most important might have been this: Yes, there may have been valid concerns about Bertuzzi’s foot speed. However…

“I know lots of guys that are fast that are slow in traffic and slow with the puck,” Walker said. “Bert’s fast, or faster than anybody, in traffic, with the puck. In the danger zone? He’s fast. He’s not scared at all. He’s going in there, he’s got lots of skill in tight, around the net. Head down, beating guys, shooting, going to all the hard areas to score.”

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At first glance, this could be read as more or less a riff on a phrase that Red Wings fans have no doubt grown accustomed to hearing about Bertuzzi. His reputation for going to the “dirty areas” has long since become an easy catch-all for what he brings. And especially as a prospect, it’s been important to highlight. Not every player does that in the modern era, and it’s not something that will leave his game. It’s his brand.

But in Walker’s description is also something beyond a willingness to just go to those areas. He can win in them, and not only that, he can win there with skill — not just muscle. It may best explain why Bertuzzi has been able to evolve into the player he has.

He doesn’t have to hit everything that moves to get noticed at this point. He can make plays and score goals. But that also hasn’t stunted his willingness to play hard. It’s one reason Walker was so confident recommending him to Draper six years ago.

He couldn’t know then exactly what Bertuzzi would be, but he did know he’d be something.

“There’s lots of guys we coach that we like,” Walker said. “But then there’s certain (ones), if you coach, that you’ll put your name on the line for. He was one of them.”

(Top photo: Dave Reginek / NHLI via Getty Images)

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