NHL: Devan Dubnyk’s Wild ride

By Chad Graff
St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL - By the time last season ended, Devan Dubnyk’s career was in doubt. He was on his third different team and stuck in the minor leagues.
He has the hockey scars to remind him of a difficult 12 months that saw him shuffled from the Edmonton Oilers to the Nashville Predators to the Montreal Canadiens and finally to the Arizona Coyotes at the start of this season.
But he has the goalie masks, too.
And those are keepers.
On the back of each mask is a picture of Dubnyk’s only child, his son Nathaniel, who turned 18 months old Thursday, the same day his dad secured the Wild’s 2-1 victory over the Florida Panthers at Xcel Energy Center.
“I’ve pretty much documented him from a newborn to a year-and-a-half-old on a whole bunch of helmets,” Dubnyk said.
He keeps each of the masks at his family home in Canada. Together, they depict the growth of a child, but they also say something about the growth of a man.
At the end of last season, Dubnyk was in the minor leagues, wondering if he would ever make it back to the bigs.
And yet, since the Wild traded for Dubnyk exactly one month ago, there hasn’t been a better goalie in the NHL.
Dubnyk, 28, has helped pull the Wild out of the penalty box and back into playoff contention, resurrecting his career in the process.
He has lost just once in 12 games with the suddenly red-hot Wild, who are now 27-20-7 and just two points out of the eighth playoff spot in the Western Conference.
With the Wild, he’s got a new mask adorned with his son’s face. That’s five masks from five teams in 12 months.
He’s hoping there won’t be a sixth team - or mask - next season. He would like to be the Wild’s goalie of the future.
“I would love to stay here,” Dubnyk said.
Striking a spark
The reeling Wild were desperate when they traded a third-round draft pick to Arizona four weeks ago to get Dubnyk, a first-round pick himself back in 2004. They needed a goalie. They needed him.
After two teams got rid of him during the 2013-14 season, it was the first time in years the 6-foot-6, 210-pound goalie was traded to a team for the right reason - to play.
“To come here, it was a very positive feeling,” Dubnyk said. “It was: I’m here because they want me to be here, not because another team was getting rid of me.”
The results have been positive, too.
Dubnyk has started all 12 games the Wild have played since he joined the team, and Minnesota is 9-1-2 in those games.
They were 2-8-4 in the 14 games before his arrival.
Two weeks ago, the NHL named Dubnyk its third star of the week. Last week, he was the first star. His four shutouts in his first nine games with the Wild set an NHL record.
His numbers speak for themselves: He has a 1.48 goals-against average and a .943 save percentage.
His performance has lifted the Wild from 12th in the 14-team Western Conference to ninth, just one win outside the final playoff spot.
“I think it probably starts with him,” coach Mike Yeo said of the Wild’s turnaround. “Just in the sense that he’s making the key save at the key time and he’s got a sense of control and calmness back there that has trickled through to the rest of the group.”
The Wild say they will wait to address Dubnyk’s future with the team until after the season. But this much is clear: They need a goalie in the worst way.
Niklas Backstrom allowed three goals or more in 10 straight games leading up to the trade for Dubnyk. The 37-year-old will be a prime candidate for a buyout this summer.
Josh Harding is in the final year of his contract, and his career is likely over.
And while Darcy Kuemper, 24, is under contract, he hasn’t shown the consistency to be a No. 1 starter in the NHL.
Blessing in the desert
Dubnyk finished last season, a contract year, in the minor leagues.
His .891 save percentage and 3.43 goals-against average were worst among NHL goalies who played at least 24 games, confounding numbers for a goalie whose worst save percentage over the previous three seasons was .914.
“If you had asked me at the start of that year, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?,’ ” Dubnyk said, “I wouldn’t have thought half of that season.”
He didn’t get much attention when free agency began July 1, but he was able to sign a one-year deal with the Arizona Coyotes, perhaps a final chance to resurrect his career.
Dubnyk says he was fortunate to work with Coyotes goalie coach Sean Burke in Arizona, whom Dubnyk credits for his turnaround. Burke attributes his improved play to the ideal situation.
In Arizona, Dubnyk wasn’t treated like a goalie coming off the worst year of his career.
“We weren’t bringing him in just to be a reclamation project,” Burke said.
In Burke, Dubnyk learned from a fellow big goalie who had only recently stopped playing.
And for the first time since his struggles began, Dubnyk landed in a place that had confidence in him and trusted him.
“Right off the bat, that was something he hadn’t heard in a while,” Burke said.
But with veteran goalie Mike Smith signed to a long-term contract, there was limited opportunity for Dubnyk in Arizona. He needed a team that needed a goalie who was starting to find his game.
Enter Minnesota.
“It would’ve surprised me if he would’ve gone (to the Wild) and struggled,” Burke said. “I believed he was at a stage where if he was just given an opportunity to play consistently, he would be a good performer.”
Strength from pain
As Dubnyk went through the toughest season of his career in 2013-14, he kept a constant reminder of strength on the back of his goalie mask. Sharing that space with Nathaniel is a pink ribbon and the word “Mom.”
It is a reminder of what his mother Barb went through when she was diagnosed with breast cancer 13 years ago, when Dubnyk was 15.
“It shaped me going forward, and it’s made me so much more of a stronger person,” Dubnyk said.
Barb has been cancer-free for a decade, a milestone that effectively clears her of the disease.
But the memories of her struggle are fresh in Dubnyk’s mind.
During her chemotherapy, Barb continued to fix nightly dinners for the family, which includes Dubnyk’s two older siblings. When the radiation made her sick, she ran upstairs to the opposite end of their Calgary home so her children wouldn’t have to see or hear what she was going through.
“A lot of who I am as a person has so much to do with going through that experience with her and seeing how strong she was and how selfless she was and how she handled that whole situation,” Dubnyk said.
“No matter how sick she was or how bad it looked, her attitude was she just wasn’t going to lose. It just didn’t matter. She was not going to get beat by it because she wanted to be around for us, and we needed her around.”
Another new home
Dubnyk, his wife Jennifer and Nathaniel seemed to be growing accustomed to new places and new faces as they bounced around from city to city and team to team the past year.
Jennifer and Nathaniel recently joined Devan in Minnesota, swapping 75-degree winter weather in Arizona for ice, snow and freezing cold here.
For his off day Friday, Devan set up appointments to put snow tires on the family cars.
They miss being able to take Nathaniel outside every day without bundling him up, but they’re enjoying a new life in Minnesota.
Recently, Devan bought Nathaniel his first pair of ice skates. He’s waiting for warmer weather before he brings his son onto a frozen pond for the first time.
“I’m really looking forward to that,” Dubnyk said.
After last year, he’s learned to appreciate the smaller moments a bit more, even if that requires an extra coat and scarf.
“I’ve really enjoyed this after going through last year,” Dubnyk said. “When you see how quickly you can have it taken away from you, it’s scary.”
It’s also a lesson. When Nathaniel grows up, Devan will show him a series of hockey masks that illustrate the boy’s first 18 months.
But as much as the masks show the growth of a young child, they show the resiliency that has taken Dubnyk from a nearly forgotten goalie to the one leading the Wild. Maybe all the way to the playoffs.
The Pioneer Press is a media partner with the Forum News Service