Cale’s strengths are his overall foundational hockey abilities (skating, puck handling, checking, etc.). Cale also has a love and passion for the game. He loves to play and he loves to practice.
— Crowchild Pee Wee coach John Smith’s end-of-season report card on Cale Makar, April 2010
It wasn the way Cale Makar toed the line that is blue, pinballing between elegance and fury. It was the eyes or the palms, the 1-2 mixes that allowed a tiny ninja to consistently create space, and shots, for himself out of nothing but kismet and thin air.
It was the ears that sold John Smith.
“It’s a really moldable set,” says Smith, who coached Makar, the Avalanche’s wunderkind defenseman, with the Crowchild Pee Wee Blackhawks in their native Calgary a decade ago. “There are a lot of kids with gift … eventually that gift takes them up to now and then they go away. Cale had a passion. He’s a student of the game and it’he was served by s really well. ”
He’s a white lion, a freak of nature blooming on the stage. Every change with the Avs, who visit San Jose Friday in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, is a dance with background: The 20-year-old Makar is just the fifth National Hockey League player in the past 30 years to go straight from the skillet of the NCAA’s Frozen Four baseball tournament to the fire of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
The winner of this 2019 Hobey Baker Award, presented annually to the top collegiate hockey player in the country, the Avs’ 2017 first-round pick out of the University of Massachusetts is the first rookie to go from the NCAA tourney into the NHL postseason since the spring of 2012. He’s the first NHL player to hop from a Frozen Four into the Stanley Cup Playoffs and score in his debut pro appearance — a first-period wrister through the bottoms of Flames goaltender Mike Smith last Monday — as a teenage Rod Brind’amour turned the same trick for the St. Louis Blues in 1989.
“I was like, ‘Pinch me,’” Smith says of Makar’s debut at the Pepsi Center, a target that helped power the Avs to a series upset of his hometown Flames. “I frankly had shivers. Really cool. ”
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Continue to work in your offensive gain the zone options. As you expand your attention (net drives, flaws, stop-ups, middle drive, etc.), you may become more “dangerous” as a player.
–Smith’s report card on Cale Makar, April 2010
Gary Makar and wife Laura raised sons Cale and Taylor, off on and ice, to subscribe to a fundamental tenet: Whenever you point a finger, bear in mind there are always three other digits coming back at you. In good times or bad, be accountable.
“I find the psychology part of (the game) very interesting,” Cale tells The Post. “When I was 14, when my dad introduced the first (sports psychology) book to me, ‘Hockey Tough. ’ I began to be very interested in the side of the match. And as a pro nowadays, it plays such a major part in everyday life, just being able to stay mentally strong concerning every game. ”
That strength faced its toughest test around Makar’s 14th birthday, during the tryouts for the Alberta Cup. Makar was blessed with an engine straight out of a Porsche 911, but the child stood about. To help close the gap on his peers, Gary taught him a hip check that allowed for leverage over bigger forwards.
“Cale had a phenomenal tryout,” the Makar recalls. “I nearly got 100 e-mails saying, ‘Oh, your child ’s great. ’ But he was really small. ”
When the Cup teams came out, Cale didn’t make the cut. It was his Michael Jordan moment. The nadir. The motivator. The ash before the rise.
“That was the turning point,” Gary says. “That was where he realized, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? ’ And so he went out and just had. ”
Makar’s team won the Calgary city championship and a silver medal in the Alberta provincials in 2012; another year, he’d be drafted in the eighth round by Medicine Hat in the Western Hockey League’s Bantam draft.
“When they said, ‘It’s your size,’ well, he couldn’t ” Gary says. “You come to grips with it. ”
Gary, a marketer by trade, got Cale and Taylor on the sports psychology kick at an early age — even going so far as to stick a chart from the book “Mindset” by Dr. Carol Dweck on the boys’ walls as a daily reminder.
“We’ve harped on him ever since he was small: The 1 thing you can control is your effort and your attitude,” Gary explains. “The one thing you can control is you. ”
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Cale’s physical play also developed really well as the season progressed … An area of his game that I was most impressed with was Cale’s advancement in using his players and making others around him better.
–Smith’s report card on Cale Makar, April 2010
You can&rsquo. After Cale posted 135 points — 35 goals and 100 assists — over 111 regular-season with the Brooks Bandits of the Alberta Junior Hockey League (AJHL) from 2014-17, the scouts were asking fewer questions about his size and more questions about his ceiling.
Makar helped lead Team Canada West into a gold medal in the World Junior A Challenge in 2015. Comparisons with defenseman Erik Karlsson — like Makar, an scoring threat from the line — abounded. Although on the personality front.
“(Cale) was actually quite booked,” Bandits coach and general manager Ryan Papaioannou notes. “Very much to himself. ”
So much so, in actuality, the Calgary native would occasionally vanish from his room for 45 minutes or so at a time unannounced — only to return and find a bewildered teammate with a curious eyebrow.
“And he’d inquire, ‘Hey, where did you go? ’” Papaioannou says of Makar, who would become the highest-ever draft pick from the AJHL ranks when the Avs made him the No. 4 overall selection two decades ago. “And (Cale) stated, ‘I just had an interview with TSN. ’ He didn’t attempt to blow things up.
“I think plenty of kids his age would’ve needed to broadcast to everybody, ‘I’m gonna do this interview. ’ Cale was the reverse. If you want to know what was happening, you had to kind of poke and prod him for to start up a bit. ”
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You are well-positioned to be a leader next year on the PW1 team. Continue to work hard, enjoy the sport and things are in store for you in the future I am sure!
— Smith’s report card on Cale Makar, April 2010
If you poke and prod him, you’ll discover that the child ’s got a penchant for the oldies — ’80s music, ‘80s pop culture, ‘80s films such as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Breakfast Club. ” Point the finger at Dad for this one: Gary used to get a foot in the film business, and Cale grew up surrounded by posters of the classics.
And when the Avs rookie sensation isn’t waxing poetic about The John Hughes Cinematic Universe, he can regale you with takes on Marvel Comics films, especially the Spider-Man and Avengers series. Or on he got bit hard by the golf bug during frequent visits s lake house in British Columbia, having swung a fair stick since the age of 6 or 7.
“I think that’s his goal,” Gary chuckles, “to break 70. ”
Although the links can wait. Makar’s NHL induction was a crash course in dividing family loyalties, a matchup with the Sharks promises to be the song in a whole new round. Makar is related to Sharks defenseman Justin Braun during union — Braun’s wife, Jessie, is the daughter of the late Tom Lysiak, the former NHL All-Star who had been Gary’s cousin. Braun also excelled at UMass, and if the Makars were exploring colleges, Tom had steered them Justin’s way.
“Jessie is a woman,” Gary says. “It would be really fun to meet with Justin, too. ”
Small world.
Smaller sport.
Funny how things come full circle, often when you least expect it. About a month ago, Smith, who’s been training youth hockey for nearly two years, happened to stumble upon the report card he’d filled out on Makar during the child ’s 2009-10 season with Crowchild.
Agility: A
Puck control: A
Aggressiveness: A
“I said, ‘Gary, you’re not going to believe what I tripped over in the basement just recently,’” says Smith, who handled the elder Makar a copy during a recent breakfast junket. “We had a good laugh about it. It’s been fun to watch this. ”
Attitude: A
Work ethic: A
Rating: A
The more things change …
“A great deal of it still holds true, in a way,” Dad says, then corrects himself. Proudly. “In many ways. ”
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