KAMLOOPS, B.C. — Seven years ago, Jared Davidson was recovering from breaking his scapula when he passed through all 14 rounds and 308 picks of the 2017 WHL Bantam Draft. Seventy-seven of those picks weren’t even made, with teams having exhausted their lists. No WHL team listed him. No WHL teams even called to invite him to their camps. Nothing.
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Six years ago, he was cut from his midget AAA team and had to play minor midget in his post-draft season instead.
Three years ago, he passed through all 217 picks in the 2020 NHL Draft.
Two years ago, another 224 selections came and went without calling his name as an overager in the 2021 NHL Draft.
And yet today, he’s the leading scorer on the WHL-champion Seattle Thunderbirds and a drafted prospect of the Montreal Canadiens, who finally picked him in his third crack at the draft in the fifth round in 2022. On Wednesday, his three-point night and game-winning goal led the Thunderbirds to a crucial win over the Kamloops Blazers to secure a spot in the Memorial Cup’s semifinal.
His journey from there to here is almost unbelievable.
It all started with a pair of phone calls.
The first call came from the parent of one of his minor hockey teammates during that post-draft season with the South Side Athletic Club, Ian Gordon, who also happened to be the then-goalie coach of the Thunderbirds.
In his Bantam Draft year, Gordon’s son Presley and Davidson hadn’t played together, so he hadn’t seen Davidson post just 17 points in 31 games, or injure his shoulder, before he went unpicked. But he had seen him come back, play with Presley, and lead their minor midget team in scoring with 43 points in 36 games, and he felt he deserved a look.
So he rang Davidson’s dad, Rob, an accountant with the Edmonton Police Service, to see if he had any plans for the following season.
“He’s got nothing going on,” Davidson told Gordon.
With some convincing, he got him an invite to Seattle’s camp. They weren’t going to list him, let alone sign him, but he could show up and give it a go.
The second call came from Bill LaForge, then the director of player personnel with the Everett Silvertips, inviting him to their camp. Though Davidson had to decline, telling him that he was going to Seattle, as fate would have it, LaForge eventually landed there with him, leaving Everett to become Seattle’s new general manager in advance of the 2018-19 season.
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A couple of days into camp, LaForge turned to his guys and said, “I think we’re going to list him.”
They replied, “Yeah, OK, he’ll go back and have a good year in midget and have a chance to play.”
A couple of days after that, talk of listing him became, “You know what, I think we should sign him and maybe he plays in Spruce Grove this year.”
“Yeah, OK, that’s a fine idea,” the rest of the staff answered, again nonchalantly and thinking little of it.
By the end of exhibition, the conversation had shifted once more to, “Well guys, he’s one of our best 16-year-olds, he deserves to be on the team.”
All these years later, LaForge has still never put another walk-on on his team as a 16-year-old. Neither has the team’s head coach, Matt O’Dette. When they talk about it, they laugh and scoff.
It is, according to O’Dette, “basically unheard of.”
“Of course your first-rounders, your second-rounders, third-rounders maybe make it as 16-year-olds. But it’s crazy for an undrafted player to make a team as a 16-year-old,” O’Dette said on a recent phone call. “It’s hard enough to make the WHL as a 16-year-old, but as an undrafted, unlisted, unsigned free agent? That doesn’t happen very often. But there was just something about the kid and the player.”
“He just kept catching our eye,” LaForge told The Athletic. “So we just kept him. It was just like every step of the way he kept impressing us.”
Davidson’s uphill climb didn’t end when he surprised and made the Thunderbirds, though. That season, he scored just two goals and registered just four points in 51 combined regular-season and playoff games. The following year, in what should have been his first kick at the NHL Draft as a 17-year-old, he posted just eight goals and 16 points in 59 games and wasn’t on the radar for clubs.
Then the pandemic hit and while he posted 19 points in 23 games in the U.S. Division’s COVID-19-shortened hub season, he still wasn’t among the 228 North American skaters listed by NHL Central Scouting in his first re-entry year into the draft.
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It took a 42-goal, 89-point season and a 13-goal, 29-point playoff run to get picked in his final year of eligibility for the draft as a 19-year-old, combining for 55 goals and 118 points in 89 combined regular-season and playoff games for the Thunderbirds.
During that first of two consecutive runs to the WHL final, he led the Thunderbirds in goals, assists and points in both the regular season and the playoffs.
Still, when the Canadiens drafted him with the 130th selection in last year’s draft, he wasn’t one of the 225 North American skaters on NHL Central Scouting’s final list either.
He can’t be ignored any longer, though.
After another strong season as a 20-year-old (Davidson will turn 21 in early July, a month after the Memorial Cup finishes) saw him post 49 goals and 105 points in 79 combined regular-season and playoff games, and another four in three games through the round-robin portion of the Memorial Cup, Davidson, a two-time U.S Division First All-Star Team member, has a compelling case to finish his junior career with an NHL contract.
“It has been a great path that he has taken and I feel fortunate to have been a part of it with him,” LaForge said of that journey. “I’ll be honest with you, he has been one of my favourite kids. The thing I like about Davey’s path is he has played every role for us. As a 16-year-old, he was on the fourth/fifth line and tried to play an energy style. At 17, he was moved up a little and he was killing penalties for us. And then at 18, 19 and 20, he turned into one of our best players and now he’s doing power-play and last-minute stuff but all the while he has collected those skills to be able to do a little bit of everything. So it’s a pretty cool story, for sure. And all of the credit goes to him. The kid has put in a ton of work and just loves hockey. I really enjoy Davey as a kid but also the story is awesome.”
When LaForge and O’Dette look back on that story, they both still can’t believe it either.
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Back in that first training camp, though he impressed, they could also see the barriers which had kept him from getting picked: He was “quite small” and “wasn’t a great skater.”
But there were little signs.
“All of the other elements of his game were there. The puck skills, the shot, the compete, all of those things were there,” O’Dette said. “But there was wonder about his skating. And credit to the player. During the pandemic, during that 18-month stretch there, he dropped everything and his whole focus was his skating, strengthening his legs, power skating, that was his sole focus was to improve his skating and speed. And he did that. It was never a negative to his game but it wasn’t necessarily a positive and now he has improved it so much that it’s above average I would say.
“And it allows him to get to places where he can use his shot, use his skill, get in on the forecheck to use his physicality, things like that. It was a 180 on his game to improve his skating like he did.”
Still, while O’Dette remembers seeing a high-character kid who he felt projected to be a good player at the WHL level, he didn’t imagine then that he’d become this.
Davidson made that happen. He turned the little signs into big, “in-your-face” ones.
“He was a tireless worker every offseason and he just showed up and put the work in and got better and better each time he came back,” O’Dette said. “He worked himself to the point where he was one of our top players, top scorers, a 40-goal scorer in the WHL, one of our most effective and highest-producing players in the playoffs both last year and this year. He’s a guy that can obviously score and create offence. I think his shot is his best weapon.
“But he’s got a 200-foot game to him, he’s got a lot of grit and physicality, he can really play the body, he can stand up for himself, he can do all sorts of things and he’s very versatile. And I think when he translates to the pro level, his versatility will be a nice asset for the pro coaches that he’s going to have. He can play in the top half of your lineup and produce offence, or he can play in the bottom half and play a physical checking-type of role if you need him to.”
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Every step of the way, he also set the example — this year while wearing an “A” on his jersey — for one of the most successful eras in Thunderbirds history.
Said LaForge: “He can do a little bit of everything. He’s hard to play against, he’s obviously got a great shot, his offensive abilities are really good, but also the character and the experience. He’s a security blanket for the younger guys and he has that passion for the Thunderbirds and the Memorial Cup where he’s into it. Some guys as they get older they’re not that into it, but he’s definitely not that guy.”
Standing in the bowels of Kamloops’ Sandman Centre on the morning of that crucial round-robin finale with the host Blazers, Davidson’s age and physical maturity show in his full beard and broad shoulders.
As a reporter walks him through his timeline, he shakes his head.
“I just kept staying longer and longer and longer,” he said, recalling his experience as a walk-on at Thunderbirds camp five seasons ago.
He’s proud of himself and everything he has earned since, though.
He’s listed at 6 feet and 183 pounds, a long way from the 150-ish-pound kid he was during that first camp.
He remembers how much of an eye-opener that year was for him and how small and weak he felt when camp turned into real games.
Today, you’d never know it bumping into him at the rink or in the way he describes his game.
“I’m a 200-foot player who has some offensive upside, likes to play physical and take over the game that way, hard on the forecheck, good shot, plays hard in all areas, and can kind of play everywhere and is good in the faceoff dot,” Davidson said.
He has become all of that because of all of the work that O’Dette and LaForge talk about.
“I had to put on a lot of weight and get a lot stronger. So it was a couple of summers in a row of just eating everything I could to try and get bigger and get into the gym and get stronger every day, and now I’m … ” Davidson said, shrugging to demonstrate his physique, “this size, so it’s working out all right.”
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Beyond his work in the gym, he has also spent countless hours on the ice with his skills coach Stephen Zipp, his skating coach Susan Humphreys, and shooting with Gordon and some of his goalies. He even works with a mental coach, Jackie Friedman, a sports psychologist who he says helps him be mentally strong but also trains his mind with what’s called a NeuroTracker, which he says “helps you speed up your brain so you can track the game and process what’s going on a little quicker.”
That work continues through the season in constant communication with Canadiens director of player development Rob Ramage and sports science and performance director Adam Douglas, who sends him things on how to improve his fitness and continue to get stronger.
Still, though he knows how much time he has put in when he looks back on where he once was, he chuckles. Getting cut by the midget team was a blessing in disguise in hindsight because it meant Gordon saw him play with the minor midget team.
“It all kind of happened for a reason,” he said. “It’s pretty cool, especially looking back. Fourteen- or 15-year-old me would not have seen this being an option, not getting any looks or anything like that.”
He’s not the only one who is surprised, either.
A few hours after Davidson’s pregame conversation, Predators prospect Luke Prokop, a friend of Davidson’s for a decade who went to school with him back home in Edmonton, played against him for years, and is now his teammate with the Thunderbirds, said the same.
“I honestly didn’t think he’d turn out to be the player that he is today,” Prokop said. “He has put in a tremendous amount of work in the offseasons. Seeing that success in these last two seasons is something that is really cool and I’m happy to be a part of it with him.”
Win or lose the Memorial Cup, it’s all of that — the work, the journey, the against-the-odds climb — that O’Dette will remember most about Davidson when his time with the Thunderbirds comes to an end.
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“He’s a tremendous person, a great leader for us,” O’Dette said, “and I think it’s a great pick by Montreal and I’m excited to see how his path unfolds.”
(Photos by Candice Ward / CHL)
