Shooting for the NHL

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This article was published 08/07/2021 (1769 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pucks clanking off iron or smashing holes in a plywood backstop are a familiar sound in Eric Alarie’s backyard.

Lately, it’s been a steady drumbeat. He fires at least 200 shots per day in the improvised shooting gallery wedged between his house and a neighbour’s in River Park South.

His dad, Richard, never tires of the racket.

“I love that. I love hearing that because it means he’s working on it,” says Richard Alarie. “That’s why it was installed there — first for his (older) brother (Luc) and then after for him. In wintertime, we have a setup downstairs with the 10-ounce (weighted) pucks. The orange ones… When you train with those, boy, after a month or two, you start shooting hard.”

Hard is also an apt description for Eric’s presence on the ice.

The 18-year-old Winnipegger, who patrols left wing on the top line of the Moose Jaw Warriors, blossomed into one of the WHL’s top snipers last spring, scoring 10 goals in 19 games during the Regina hub.

Armed with a powerful release and a pugnacious playing style, he’s caught the attention of NHL talent evaluators for the 2021 draft. Question is, how will that interest present itself on draft weekend?

Rated 51st among North American skaters by NHL Central Scouting, the 6-1, 197-pounder figures to be a second- or third-round pick when the draft is staged virtually later this month.

Members of NHL scouting staffs have formed opinions but, by way of pre-draft phone and Zoom call, they also ask prospects for an honest self-evaluation.

“They say, ‘What are your weaknesses?’… I say to them I think it’s my mobility, my skating, for sure,” says Alarie. “And I’d like to be a bit more physical in coming years and improve my defensive game. Then they ask you how you plan to correct it.”

If anything, the son of two educators (dad Richard is a middle school teacher in Lorette and mom Danielle de Moissac is a professor at Université de Saint-Boniface), can be brutally frank about his shortcomings.

He’s also willing to listen to critiques, however difficult it may be to accept.

“I’m really motivated so if I ever hear someone criticizing my game, saying go do this or do that better, I just want to prove them wrong,” says Alarie. “So just saying that, criticizing me it’s something — not that I enjoy it — but I accept it. I want to prove them wrong, which actually makes me more motivated to be better.”

Moose Jaw head coach Mark O’Leary says Alarie’s ambition is intensely focused but his personality, especially as a 16-year-old rookie, was stoic. The pressure seemed to ease in Year 2 as Alarie found a comfort level in his new hockey home.

‘The first word that comes to mind with Eric is ‘driven,’” says O’Leary. “I think when he wakes up in the morning he’s thinking about being a hockey player and when he goes to bed at night he’s thinking about being a hockey player. He’s got a great work ethic and he’s very diligent on what he’s what he’s trying to do. He always wants feedback good or bad.”

In heart-to-heart discussions with O’Leary after his 16-year-old season and again following the Regina hub earlier this year, there would no glossing over the main area of need.

“For him, it’s his footwork,” says O’Leary. “Going into last off-season, the challenge for him was to work on his agility. He’s got great straight line speed, there’s not many faster than him but it was just that agility work. So for him, (it was) what do I need to do to work on that? And so he put in the time in the summer.”

This off-season, even with limited access to ice (he only recently returned to on-ice workouts at The Rink Hockey Academy), Alarie has pushed himself again.

“I know in a straight line I’m pretty fast as a player but when I turn or need to get away from other players, sometimes my edges aren’t so good,” he says. “It’s something I’ve been working on since I got to the WHL. It’s something me and coach (O’Leary), we’ve been talking about and that’s my focus every summer to get better mobility — whether it’s off-ice stuff or on-ice stuff or just stretching more.”

Filling the back of the net has never been an issue for Alarie.

In minor hockey and during his two seasons at the RHA (a combined 49 goals in 69 games), the puck followed him. At the major-junior level, however, he’s had to learn to play without the puck more often and the transition wasn’t always easy.

“Sometimes my coaches told me that when I didn’t have the puck that was my biggest weakness, along with my skating,” says the fluently bilingual Alarie, who recently graduated from Centre scolaire Léo-Rémillard, a French-language high school in Winnipeg’s south end.

“I was so used to having the puck on my stick, I didn’t know what to do when I didn’t have it. So playing in the WHL with older players and not having the puck on your stick as much, You got to find ways to get open and find those scoring chances.”

For another clue to Alarie’s physicality, it’s worth investigating his career on the gridiron. From the age of seven to 14, he starred at linebacker, punter and kicker in the St. Vital Mustangs program.

“I loved hitting players,” he says. “That’s why I always played defence. I was quite good at it, so they kept me there.”

As a 12-year-old, Alarie teamed with fellow linebacker Nathan Carabatsakis to lead the Mustangs to a provincial peewee title. At 13, when Carabatsakis and other prominent players graduated to the next age group, Alarie was the star of another provincial peewee championship squad.

“He basically led our defence,” says Paul Weekes, the head coach of both championship teams. “We won back-to-back provincial championships, but really if he didn’t play defence for us that (second) year we wouldn’t have been able to keep up.”

Carabatsakis is currently playing Division I NCAA football at Robert Morris University and Weekes believes Alarie’s football career could have taken a similar trajectory.

“If he didn’t play hockey he certainly would still be playing football,” says Weekes. “He was a quiet, intense, very focused and very physical.”

Eventually, the demands of playing both sports at a high level became too much. Hockey won out.

“The thing is with Eric he’s always been very, very driven — very determined,” says Richard Alarie. “As soon as he started playing hockey at four, playing football at seven, he was very intense, always wanted to win, always want to be the best. So that really hasn’t changed a lot since he was five, six years old.”

In Moose Jaw, projections will continue to rise for Alarie. This fall, he’s already pencilled in for a role beside No. 1 centre Ryder Korczak and O’Leary is hoping to put one of the club’s two most recent import picks — 2021’s Robert Baco of Slovakia or Czech winger Martin Rysavy, chosen in 2020 — on the right flank.

Alarie’s production in his third year as a WHLer should shed some light on what his NHL potential could be.

“When you talk to scouts about Eric and what we see is it’s his hockey sense that allows him to score goals,” says O’Leary. “So, I think whether you’re playing on a top line or if you’re playing in the bottom six, there’s guys that can think the game and put themselves in spots to be successful. I think Eric can do that at our level at even a higher rate than he has.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14