An hour before puck drop Feb. 17, Brad Hunt strolled into the Colorado Eagles’ visiting locker room in Calgary for his first AHL game in more than two months. He heard from across the room: “Hey, go look at your jersey.”
It wasn’t at Hunt’s stall. He looked around and noticed team staff sewing a “C” patch onto the chest.
“That’s the first time I saw it,” Hunt said Thursday, wearing an Avalanche practice jersey for the first time since being named captain of the AHL affiliate.
Nobody had told the 34-year-old journeyman in advance. He hadn’t been a captain of any team since junior hockey.
But there was no time to think about it in the moment. Hunt shrugged, donned the sweater with its updated swag and warmed up. “I didn’t really think too much about it until after the game, like what it meant,” he said.
That reaction about sums up Hunt’s 15-year hockey career, 10 of which have been spent bouncing between the NHL and AHL. Hunt has been rolling with the punches through stints with 10 organizations — whether it’s unexpected good news like being named captain, or cloudier developments like being placed on waivers.
The way he sees it, being along for the ride is fun, considering “I never thought I would be in the NHL.”
Growing up in British Columbia, Hunt breathed hockey but didn’t consider it a realistic career. His friend’s dad was in the Canadian Air Force, so he thought it would be cool to be a pilot someday.
“I dreamed to be in the NHL,” he said. “Whether that helped, I don’t know. But I think it was just something where you can tell kids, ‘Why give up?’ That’s just something that I never gave up.”
Bruce Boudreau, who coached Hunt in Minnesota and Vancouver, lauded his contributions as a teammate.
“Still comes to the rink every day, feeling great and wanting to play and loving the game,” Boudreau said. “How you can’t like a guy like that is beyond me.”
A waiver revelation in the sauna
The reason Hunt was back with the Eagles to begin with was that he cleared waivers Feb. 12, after an anxious 24 hours. Any other team could have claimed him.
Hunt had been through the process before. In January 2017, he says he didn’t even know he was going to be on waivers when Nashville claimed him from St. Louis. He was in the sauna at the Blues’ practice facility when coach Craig Berube found him: “Hey, you’ve gotta go look at your phone.”
Hunt was confused. “I had, like, 15 missed calls from (general manager) Doug Armstrong,” he remembers. So Hunt called back. “He’s like, ‘Hey, you got claimed on waivers.’ I was like, ‘Huh?’”
Five minutes later, Predators general manager David Poile called with the details.
“If you’re a single guy, you just pack a suitcase and you’re gone,” said Hunt, whose son Colby was born two years later. “But if you have to try to explain to your family what’s going on, it makes it more stressful.”
So this time was different. Hunt was with the Avs in Tampa when he heard. He played that night with uncertainty hanging over him. Some players want to be claimed to continue playing in the NHL. But Hunt hoped to clear so that he could stay in Colorado and not uproot his family. He lives halfway between Denver and Loveland.
“It’s stressful because nobody knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “I have no idea if anybody can even see on a computer if some team is going to claim or not. I have no idea how it works. All I know is that there’s not really much information until 12 (the next day) hits and you’re waiting for a phone call.”
Waivers were how Jayson Megna ended up in Anaheim and the Eagles ended up without a captain earlier this season. But Hunt cleared, clearing the way for him to inherit Megna’s “C.”
It also allowed him to stick around longer for a winning organization that’s pursuing something Hunt has only come close to achieving. Twice in his career, he has been on NHL teams that made the Stanley Cup Final: Nashville in 2017 and the expansion Golden Knights the next year. He didn’t appear in a playoff game for either team, but he traveled with both and watched both Stanley Cup Finals from the press box as a No. 7 defenseman.
The Predators lost in six games. Vegas lost in five.
“It was fascinating,” he said.
From a shabby practice rink to the NHL bubble
Those boyhood dreams in British Columbia often involved the Stanley Cup.
Hunt made his on-ice playoff debut for Minnesota in 2020, but it was during the bubble season and “didn’t really feel like a playoff debut,” he said.
This is the time of year when playoffs creep into the brain. With his entire career as evidence, Hunt said he isn’t thinking that far ahead, and that his priority is to help the organization wherever he’s needed. He has three goals in Denver and seven in Loveland, good for the second-highest PPG (0.88) on the Eagles roster.
But for all of the historic moments Hunt’s last decade has allowed him to witness — the rise of Connor McDavid in Edmonton, plus championships for Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — the one thing he hasn’t checked off is playing in a playoff game, before a real playoff crowd.
The biggest stage he has played on was in 2009. Hunt registered 32 points as a Bemidji State freshman. The team made history as the first No. 16 seed to ever reach the Frozen Four, toppling Notre Dame 5-1 and Cornell 4-1. (“As soon as we beat Notre Dame, there was no way we were losing the second game,” Hunt said. “We steamrolled them.”)
It was the season that Hunt realized his dream was maybe more than that.
“A national championship is so freakin’ cool, but being Canadian, it wasn’t something that I grew up admiring,” he said. “It’s not something that from when I was a kid I dreamed of, like the Stanley Cup.”
That season was the perfect origin story for Hunt’s underdog career of pinballing around North America. Bemidji State’s home venue, John S. Glas Fieldhouse, was booked by other entertainment the week before the Frozen Four. The ice was removed. Even at home, nobody expected the Beavers to make it that far. So they practiced for the biggest game of their lives in a shabby old rink across town with no showers.
Hunt rolled with the punches.
“It didn’t matter,” he remembers. “It wasn’t like it was that big of a deal. It had no meaning toward whether we were going to win or lose. Just couldn’t practice at our own rink.”
