AURORA, Ont. — The first reaction Leland De Langley had when he saw Dean Letourneau on the ice?
“That’s crazy.”
De Langley, a skills coach at St. Andrew’s College who works with several NHL clients, isn’t the only one who has reacted that way when showing up to the prep school’s La Brier Family Arena, just north of Toronto, to see what all the fuss is about.
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Last fall, word traveled fast within scouting circles about Letourneau, a towering center eligible for the 2024 NHL Draft. When you’ve got size and skating — and he’s got plenty of both — it usually does.
When your NHL Central Scouting listing comes in at 6-foot-6 (SAC measured him at “a hair under 6-foot-7” in the fall and he might even be taller than that now) and 210 pounds, and you start to rack up two points per game against the top prep schools in North America, everyone pays attention. When NHL Central Scouting released its players to watch list in October, Letourneau was given a “B” rating, which “indicates a second/third-round candidate.” By their midseason list, he ranked 20th among all North American skaters.
“He’s a hell of a player and he’s really creating a lot of buzz,” De Langley said on a phone call midway through this season. “I call him like a Tage Thompson 2.0. His skating, his shot, and the way he can control a puck in tight for a guy that’s 6-foot-7 or 6-foot-8, it’s crazy.”
Ask those around him, and they say he’s only just scratching the surface, too — that he’s one-of-one in the draft class, that he’ll be one-of-one in the NCAA when he heads off to Boston College, and that he’s got a chance to be one of a small number of players his height to have ever had a career as an NHL forward.
The first time SAC head coach David Manning saw Letourneau play he was on a scouting trip to Ottawa.
Letourneau, then 15 and in his OHL draft year playing U18 AAA for the Renfrew Wolves, jumped off the page immediately.
“At the time, you had a big, tall, lanky kid who had a scoring touch,” Manning said on a recent phone call. “He was very intriguing to me as a big kid who looked athletic but kind of young. He still has a baby face now. But I just saw that there was a ton of potential as he grew and got more coordinated and used his athleticism. And the big thing that struck me right off the bat was just his touch. He wasn’t your typical kid who is bigger than everybody in minor hockey and just bullies their way around. He played with a lot of thought and he was a good playmaker. It was kind of like ‘Wow, as he learns how to play his size, it’s going to be pretty exciting.’”
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Initially, Manning reached out before the OHL draft to pitch him and his family on why SAC, which has a reputation for developing players for the NCAA and has begun to produce one or two NHL Draft picks a year, would be a great mutual fit.
When Letourneau was selected in the ninth round of the OHL draft that spring, Manning then reached back out.
Luckily, Letourneau’s dad Jeff, a CFO at Arnprior Hospital who played Jr. A hockey and four years at Dalhousie University, was already familiar with SAC’s history as a school and hockey program. Knowing he wasn’t likely to play in the OHL at 16, which is what he always wanted (growing up in the Ottawa Valley, he never considered college), Letourneau eventually decided to attend for his junior and senior years.
When he showed up, he was 6-foot-3.5. A year later, he was more than three inches taller than that.
He was also a “phenomenal athlete” who excelled on the lacrosse field (when hockey season ends, he’s a crease defender for the school’s varsity lacrosse team) and basketball court.
Where most players his size are usually deficient in their skating, he was proficient.
“His skating is one of his best assets I would say,” Manning said. “There’s no level of lack of coordination for his size. He’s quite agile for his size. I mean he’s quite agile just in general, not for his size. He’s got great edge work. He’s got good agility. He can get in and out of spots. His acceleration is good. And then obviously you add in his reach and he gets to where he needs to get to whether it’s with his stick or his feet all of the time.”
Where most players that size usually play the net front on the man advantage, Letourneau was also the most talented player on the team and a natural fit to run their power play instead.
“He wants to have that puck on his stick to create shooting opportunities for himself (and) we have added in layers where he kind of rotates through to the offside to free him up,” Manning said. “Do I see him at higher levels shifting to be closer to the net? I would think so. He’s still so underdeveloped physically. He’s going to gain 40-50 pounds. You start doing that with his athleticism and he’s going to be a tough package to handle. He’s learning now the nuance of playing a bigger game.”
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Manning describes him as a rink rat who is constantly putting in extra time, whether that’s daily work with De Langley outside of what the team is doing to add new things to his game, always wanting to watch video, or prioritizing time in the weight room. He’s also a “great student who wants to do well and cares about achieving and meeting his potential.”
“He’s very, very driven and focused. A lot of the attributes, for instance, his one-timer this year, he didn’t have that last year and he has just put the time in to develop that. He’s just constantly trying to work to get better,” Manning said. “I think he has high expectations for himself. And he holds his teammates to that standard, too. He wants everybody to strive for that level of excellence that he does.”
He has also worked hard to develop some of those atypical tools for a big man with Ottawa-area NHL skills coach Pat Malloy in recent years.
“Hockey has evolved and with him, in the old days, you’d sort of pigeonhole him. The thing for me is, let’s round out your skill set. If you have puck skills where you’re able to be the conduit to offence, let’s really fan that flame and build that,” Malloy said. “The more layers to the game that you have, the more potential you have to play longer. So for him, it’s ‘you’ve got those hand skills, you can see seams, you’re good at making people miss, but you’ve also got the wingspan of a 747’ so shooting around people from the flank for instance, what a weapon when you’ve got that kind of wingspan.”
When Letourneau and his older brother Jace (who is now a star with the Jr. A Renfrew Wolves and recently committed to Clarkson University) first began working with Ottawa-area strength and conditioning coach Tony Greco, they were both tall and good athletes.
When he returned last summer from SAC, Greco’s first reaction was “Whoa.”
At his new height, Greco, who also trains local players like Claude Giroux, Brandt Clarke and Jack Quinn, had to adjust his training.
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They started at his feet, training barefoot with the understanding that if they could stabilize everything from his big toe to his arches, his knees and then hips would also stay in line, regardless of his size.
“Working out barefoot, he’s got more flexion in the foot so that his brain doesn’t have to ask him if he’s good to go for the next stride and he can just keep going,” Greco told The Athletic. “Now when he puts his feet in the boot, he’s more agile and can turn faster and quicker. People don’t realize those little things but those are game-changers, they really are, and we see it in a guy like (Letourneau) being so tall.”
Throughout, even with the minutia, Letourneau has always been with Greco the way he is at school: “Very attentive.”
“He’s very, very alert. And he’s one of those guys that you don’t have to go backwards with. He’s very competitive. And he’s kind of in a quiet zone,” Greco said. “He just cruises. That’s Letourneau. (But) I wouldn’t want to wake him up. It’s like ‘Nice guy, he’s tall but he seems friendly’ but don’t wake the guy up.”
Malloy and Greco, who share many of the same clients, have also worked together so that Letourneau is training the same things on and off the ice.
Letourneau, even with all of the development he still has in front of him, has always been ahead of the curve in both areas.
“You can develop strength over time but athleticism, especially as you grow older, it’s really tough to gain later if you don’t have it earlier,” Malloy said. “And he’s fluid, which is the tantalizing piece.”
By the end of last summer, he was a “monster” according to Greco. When they’d do exercises that are typically hard for bigger guys, like a broad jump that asks them to halt their movement when they land, he’d stop on a dime and the trainers would turn to each other with an “Oh my God, this guy’s going to be amazing.”
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“Coming into this year, I knew that he was going to rock it. Just from his workouts, you could see the overall balance and coordination, especially as a big guy,” said Greco, who will be travelling to Vegas for the draft with Letourneau and fellow client Henry Mews. “His power and his strength has gone way, way up. We knew he could have a huge impact on the ice because a guy with his size and his speed, woof, it’s crazy. And now the results speak for themselves. This kid I think is going to be dynamite.”
Letourneau is OK with being viewed a little bit differently than people first expect.
He never wanted to play defense, like he was told he should. He doesn’t think of himself as the prototypical big forward, either.
“My skills are I’m good with the puck and I’m smart. I feel like I’m more helpful to the power play and my team if I can have the puck and use my skills rather than being in front of the net and screening the goalie,” he said.
He is aware, though, of the criticisms some scouts have of him — mainly, that he’s too passive and needs to impose himself more.
“I personally want to improve my play away from the puck, little things like stopping on pucks and not turning and curling, as well as on the offensive side not watching the play,” Letourneau said. “I want to keep my feet moving and be engaged and move to spots where I can get the puck.”
Those things, Malloy argues, can be taught.
“If those are the things that are all that’s left to add into his game, well he doesn’t need to be a finished product at 18 years old but boy could he be a hell of a player three years out from the draft,” Malloy said.
Manning acknowledges that some of those habits and tendencies had a lot to do with the role he played at SAC. He points to two late-season games at Shattuck St. Mary’s as examples that he can play differently when needed, too. SAC lost both but Letourneau took control to get each into overtime, doing more heavy lifting, lugging more pucks out of his zone, and really taking charge when his linemates weren’t at their best.
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“His identity to himself right now is he’s an offensive player and he needs to lead the charge offensively for us for us to do well. And as he works through his own identity as a player, when he’s at his best for me, he’s around the puck. When he’s focused on playing a complete game, he dominates in all three zones and pucks flow through him,” Manning said. “When he’s like ‘I’ve got to create offence here’ and he’s resting on defense or trying to put himself in a position to transition out quickly, I feel like he can lose some focus. But those things are not for a lack of awareness. It’s more so for what he feels he needs to bring to the table.”
The size and the athleticism? That’s mostly genetics.
His dad is 6-foot-4 and his mom, a high school vice principal, is a 6-foot former two-time All-Canadian basketball player at Queen’s University. Jace is 6-foot-5 and his oldest brother, Ty, who is studying kinesiology at the University of New Brunswick, is up there too.
He never had the big growth spurt that both of his brothers did, though. Where they each had a year where they grew five or six inches, his growth was steadier and he has always been tall, which has allowed his game and body to develop at a proper pace.
But part of his athleticism — and the skating that comes with it — was also his upbringing and the nine or 10 different sports he says he played.
Hockey. Lacrosse. Basketball. Soccer. Tennis. You name it, he tried it.
“As a big guy I don’t look uncoordinated out there because I’ve kind of done all of these different movements that translate into hockey so that I don’t look out of whack,” Letourneau said.
Most importantly, as he looks ahead he feels ready. Next season, the plan is to play for Sioux Falls in the USHL. On Christmas break this year, he went down and got his feet wet in two games. He was supposed to return on March break after SAC’s season ended, but suffered a Grade 2 shoulder separation and AC joint sprain (his second of the season, after previously hurting it in January during the team’s MacPherson Tournament) in his last game and needed to rest it.
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After a year in Sioux Falls, he’ll head off to BC. He thinks his time at SAC has prepared him for both, including the academic side of college. Manning believes he could have played in the USHL in his draft year and “done really well” but chose to return for a second year at SAC because he wanted to prioritize his schooling.
“The thing with SAC is it’s kind of like a college life already,” Letourneau said. “You have your school every day and then you’re going to practice. It’s not really like your junior life where you’re just hanging out with your buddies with no school and you’re just at the rink all day. It has been awesome for me.”
As he moves on, Manning, Malloy and Greco will all be behind him.
He’s made himself easy to cheer for, not just because of his uniqueness on the ice but also who he is off of it.
“I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a bad day out of him. Like he doesn’t get grumpy, he’s not a high-maintenance kid at all,” Malloy said. “I put a lot of stock into the character perspective of it in that he’s a kid that will help you pick up pucks, or make sure the net’s out of the way for the Zamboni, or always come and say thank you at the end of a session, little things that he doesn’t need to do but tell you a lot. And it’s refreshing because for every player like that, there’s 10 that live a bit more of a shielded life. He’s just a good kid, that’s the easiest way to put it. He’s just a good dude.”
(Photos: Paul Mosey / St. Andrew’s College)
