How Senators prospect Zack Ostapchuk turns everyone into his biggest fan
A little more than half a decade ago, as Tyrel Spitzer was recruiting players to play for his Northern Alberta X-Treme Prep (NAX) U15 team, he found himself spending a lot of time in suburban Edmonton watching the St. Albert Sabres.
The Sabres were loaded with second-year Bantam stars Carter Savoie, Michael Benning and Ethan Edwards, all three of whom were already NAX-bound. There were two other first-year Bantam kids he was after, too: Savoie’s younger brother Matthew, who was by then a minor hockey phenom, and Marc Lajoie, a big, strong, two-way defenceman.
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During discussions with the Savoies and Lajoies, though, they brought up a third name, almost as if it was assumed.
“Oh, and we’d bring Zack with us,” they said.
Initially, Spitzer’s first thought was “Who’s Zack?”
His second thought, after they told him that he played on the Sabres, and after he scraped his brain, was still, “Holy cow, I don’t even remember seeing him.”
Assuming he’d be a fine depth player after the two families wouldn’t stop vouching for him, he caved: “If you guys speak this highly of him, that’s good enough for me.”
“I watched him play a full playoff series against Fort Saskatchewan and I can’t even remember him being on the ice. I had no idea,” Spitzer said, chuckling to himself as he recalled that introduction on a recent phone call. “I was like ‘This guy’s basically a throw-in,’ right? And I was jacked to get Lajoie and Savoie.”
And yet, all of these years later there’s no bigger fan of Zack Ostapchuk than Spitzer. Spitzer’s not alone, either. Everyone who has been a part of his journey — a path paved by overcoming adversity with head-down hard work to become a surprise second-round pick of the Ottawa Senators, a late addition to Canada’s 2022 world junior team, a captain of the WHL’s Vancouver Giants, and now a returnee with Canada for the 2023 world juniors — thinks they’re his biggest fan.
The more you understand where he has come from, and who he is, the easier it is to realize why.
Ostapchuk and Spitzer at the 2022 world juniors in Edmonton. (Photo courtesy Tyrel Spitzer)What Spitzer didn’t know when he’d missed Ostapchuk on the ice in St. Albert was that in April of that 2016-17 season, a month and a half before his 14th birthday, his father, Dennis, after battling kidney failure, died of a heart attack at the age of 56. What he also didn’t know was that Ostapchuk was an only child, and that Dennis’ passing left his mother, Charlene, to raise him alone.
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What he quickly learned, though, was first that Charlene was “an incredible woman” who “thinks the world of Zack and really takes care of him,” and second that the Savoie and Lajoie families had become “a really good support network” for him, helping him with drives to games, training whenever needed — and even with costs.
Once Spitzer finally got to know Zack, he realized that everyone loved Zack for a reason.
Off the ice, he was the kid who never complained or asked for anything. On it, though he didn’t have the skill of his peers, he had three things going for him when he arrived at NAX: He was big, he could skate and he was tenacious.
Spitzer started by pairing Zack with another big kid whose skills weren’t polished, Lucas Ciona (now a prospect of the Calgary Flames), and a small but smart and crafty player, Ben Hemmerling (now a prospect of the Vegas Golden Knights), in hopes that the former two could pull from the latter and vice versa.
The result?
“Oh my God, it was wicked,” Spitzer said. “His second and third efforts were through the roof, so automatically he became the coach’s favourite because of all of the details in his game.”
By year’s end, Spitzer guesses that Zack, that throw-in from a year earlier, had played the most minutes on the team because he’d become his Swiss Army knife. He was the fifth guy on the first power-play unit with Savoie (now a Sabres first-rounder) and Dylan Guenther (now a Coyotes first-rounder) and company, the first guy over the boards on the penalty kill, the guy tasked with checking the other team’s top line, the guy out for late defensive zone draws, and “so frigging responsible.” When Spitzer needed a forward to step back on defence a couple of times, he automatically went to Zack then too because he knew he’d step in and be successful.
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“There was never any ‘I didn’t score today because I was playing defence so put me back on forward’ or the token text message ‘Hey, do you mind if someone else plays defence next game?’ I could have said ‘Hey Zack, you’re going to play defence for the rest of the year’ or ‘Hey Zack, can you put the goalie pads on today?’ and it would be ‘Yep,’” Spitzer said. “He just goes out and plays and I have so much respect for that. I just wanted to give him opportunity and put him in good spots because he never asks for it. I’ve been coaching for 16 years and that’s rare. Unfortunately, it’s just rare.”
He was so good in his role that teams even began splitting up their top lines when they would play against NAX in an effort to prevent Zack from shutting them down. Whenever they tried to do that, though, NAX would then load up a line with Zack and he’d “feast” offensively in those games. It was even Zack who scored the shootout winner to advance against Logan Stankoven (now a Stars first-rounder) and the Yale Hockey Academy in the playoffs.
The 45 points he scored in 30 games in his U15 year under Spitzer (fourth on NAX in scoring), and the 28 points he scored in 31 games the following year with the U18 team, never did his game justice according to Spitzer.
“He was always the puck luck guy. He’d hit the post twice and the crossbar once so at the end of the game he’d have nothing to show for it but you’d be like ‘Man, he was all over them’ because he was so relentless. So even when he didn’t have the personal success he deserved, our team had success because he was in our lineup that night,” Spitzer said. “He’s just that guy.”
(Rob Wilton / Vancouver Giants)One of Vancouver Giants general manager Barclay Parneta’s first memories of Zack is of his first WHL game.
He flew into Victoria in December of his second and final season at NAX and Parneta had his daughter — who was in school at the University of Victoria at the time — and her friend pick him up and drive him to the game.
He remembers it because he was surprised by how excited the two girls were for him, cheering him on all game after having just met him.
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Parneta was even more surprised when he recently asked Zack if he remembered that and he did, telling him all about how nervous he was.
From that moment until today, now more than four years later, Zack has been Parneta’s “zero maintenance player.”
“He has never asked for anything. He just comes and performs, which is incredible,” Parneta said. “I have had not even one thing. It’s unbelievable actually that it could go as smoothly as it has over the course of the last four years.”
It’s not as though there weren’t opportunities to pout, either. From that first call-up in December 2018 through to January 2020, Zack registered just eight points in his first 50 WHL games. Then he blew his ACL.
Nonetheless, when the pandemic hit late in the season and delayed the start of his draft year the following year, the 16-year-old got to work making the most of the time off and his rehab to add 30 pounds of muscle to his 6-foot-3 frame.
“I never had to phone him to tell him to do physio, he was actually probably two months ahead of schedule. His mom has done a tremendous job through what they went through. He’s really got his s— together,” Parneta said. “He’s almost innocent in a way still too because so many guys are worried about peripheral stuff of ‘oh, what stick am I using?’ or ‘what’s the newest skate?’ That’s not Zack. Zack’s just like ‘give me whatever, I’ll play.’”
When he returned from the injury for the WHL’s COVID-19-shortened bubble season, Zack entered the year as a C-rated prospect by NHL Central Scouting, which “indicates a fourth/fifth/sixth-round candidate.”
But once he got back on the ice, Mike Dyck, the Giants’ head coach, couldn’t believe what he saw.
Before the ACL injury, Dyck thought Zack would become a good two-way player and teammate with his size, skating and competitiveness. He wasn’t sure how far he would go offensively, though. When he got back, he looked like a different player — another three steps quicker, bigger and stronger.
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Though he had just 22 games to make his case for the draft, Zack registered 16 points in them and rose all the way to No. 60 on NHL Central Scouting’s final ranking of North American skaters. The Senators were so impressed by his play that they then drafted him with the No. 39 pick in the 2021 draft.
“He took off and I don’t think there was anybody who drove the net like he did and was drafted much higher than I think anybody would have anticipated starting that season,” Dyck said.
Still, even after that progress, the 2022 world juniors never looked like they were in sight for him. When the first iteration of the tournament began last December, Ostapchuk had registered just three points in his first 10 games that fall to start his post-draft campaign.
When the tournament was cancelled just a few games in, though, he set out to change his slow start and decided to use the tournament, which he’d hoped would be re-played, as motivation.
From there, when the calendar changed from 2021 to 2022, Dyck says he took off. After Parneta traded team captain Justin Sourdif to the Edmonton Oil Kings ahead of the January trade deadline, Dyck and his staff knew immediately that Ostapchuk was going to wear the ‘C’ next too (they waited to name him until March so that he could grow into it, though).
While he finished with just 43 points in 60 games because of his slow start, Ostapchuk wrapped the regular season as the Giants’ leading goal scorer with 26.
Then he played the best hockey of his young career in the playoffs, leading his No. 8-seeded Giants to a stunning first-round upset over the No. 1-seeded Everett Silvertips with 15 points in six games, including five in the series clincher.
Behind his bench to witness it? Dyck, an assistant coach for Team Canada’s 2022 summer world junior team. Behind the Silvertips bench, more importantly? Dennis Williams, another of Team Canada’s 2022 assistants (and now the head coach of the 2023 team).
(Rob Wilton / Vancouver Giants)When Team Canada’s management group lead James Boyd gathered his staff to decide on the second version of the 2022 world junior roster, he was deep into the depth chart due to unavailable players when Williams, not Dyck, raised Zack’s name, lauding his speed, competitiveness and how good he was in the playoffs.
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After surveying a network of people for a second opinion, Williams’ opinion was confirmed by everyone Boyd spoke to before he finally came back to Dyck for his perspective.
“I got to know him last year,” Williams said on a recent phone call, laughing about the first-round upset. “I thought he was the biggest difference in that series with their goalie Jesper Vikman. Zack, what you get from him is what I consider a real honest, 200-foot hockey player. He’s got great details to his game, heaviness to his game, he goes to the tough areas to score goals.”
Added Dyck on another recent call: “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really even have to say much. Zack was the one that earned that opportunity in the way he played. Outside of what he did shift-to-shift that maybe fans wouldn’t recognize but hockey guys would, he was putting up some big numbers and the amount of minutes he played with (Fabian) Lysell and (Adam) Hall, those guys were upwards of 25-30 minutes a night against the best D pairings, against the best lines, and outplaying them. And so it was something that lots of guys, including Hockey Canada, took note of. All I could do is just re-emphasize his character and what a great person he is.”
Feeling as though he could be a good depth player for the team, Boyd added him.
Then, once Zack got into camp, he made the same mark on Boyd and the rest of that staff that he had with the Giants and NAX before them. Off of the ice, Boyd says he “endeared himself to everybody with his positive attitude and his work ethic.” On it, Boyd says he “was really effective in the games on the forecheck and was kind of the perfect fit for the group that we had.”
When the tournament was done, Zack had played an important role on the penalty kill, “heavy, grinding minutes” at five-on-five, and had chipped in three points in seven games to help Canada to a gold medal.
Parneta could see it coming.
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“The fact that he was able to put it all together at our level and put up the numbers and consistently have a positive impact on every single game he’s in whether he’s scoring or not, that’s really the beauty of Zack Ostapchuk,” Parneta said. “He can play anywhere. That Team Canada roster, he could play as high as the first line and he could also serve a purpose on the third or fourth line. He’s really a very versatile player. His soft skill has come along great but a lot of his goals are in the dirty areas and driving. And he’s fearless. He’ll drive to the net with three guys on him knowing that it’s probably not going to end well. He really is a video example often of how to do things right.”
So could Spitzer. He’d seen it firsthand again when, in the weeks before the summer tournament, Zack had returned home following the Giants’ eventual second-round defeat last June and had joined his four-on-four tournament that he runs with local players.
“He was like the best player on the ice and there’s guys 10 years older than him playing professional hockey. Like he was fast, they couldn’t handle his speed, and his hands,” Spitzer said. “Like it went to another level.”
He wasn’t surprised when Zack returned to Vancouver following the world juniors and got off to a better start, posting 29 points in 21 games, either.
“He’s in the weeds, he does his job, he does it well, he’ll be a coach’s favourite all the way up, the guys love him because he plays the game so honest, and he always shows up in the big moments,” Spitzer said. “He’s a true representation of earning it all the way through the right way. So it’s no surprise that he’s the lowkey captain of the WHL team, second showing at the world juniors, and all this other stuff, because with the attitude that he has you just never bet against a kid like that. You’re like ‘Why can’t more hockey players have this attitude and approach to the game?’”
(Rob Wilton / Vancouver Giants)Standing inside Moncton’s Avenir Centre with a Team Canada sweater on as he prepares for his second run at a world junior gold medal, Zack is reluctant to take credit for just how far he has come.
His torn ACL right before the pandemic hit, he says, was actually good luck, because he only missed about 15 games in the seven months that it took him to get fully cleared. He credits his physio in St. Albert, the Giants, and his strength coach Dan Lajoie (no relation to Marc), for getting him back and ready for that draft year rise.
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His skating ability for a player as big as he is (now 6-foot-3 and over 200 pounds), wasn’t his doing either, apparently. He’s actually not very flexible, he says, and it was Erin Baker of True Movement (an Edmonton-based studio that works to build mobility through injury prevention and a zero-compression approach to training that puts no pressure on any of the body’s joints) who loosened him up so that he can skate like he does.
Some of the skill he’s now displaying he says he found at NAX when he was surrounded by guys like Guenther and Savoie, as well as at Spitzer’s four-on-four skates.
He does give himself credit for two things, though.
The first is that post-Christmas surge into the playoffs last season.
“That second half of the year and playoffs kind of changed things for me. I stepped it up,” he says.
The second is everything he overcame after losing his dad.
“You’ve got to grow up a little quicker, especially helping my mom out and just being a good son. I know it’s hard on her, too, so I’ve got to be there for her,” he says. “It allowed me to grow up quicker and not take anything for granted. It was adversity but it drives me. I want to do it for him.”
That bond with his mom is unbreakable. She recently moved to Vancouver to go back to school, so she’s only a 40-minute drive from where the Giants are in Langley, B.C., now too, which has allowed them to spend more time together and share dinners during the season.
“I was 13, it was kind of just us two from there. I’ve got a really special bond with her. We rely on each other quite a bit,” he says.
But if you tell any of those people about his efforts to give them credit, they all scoff.
Baker, who has worked with him for three years now after his friends brought him into her studio (a lot like they brought him to NAX), insists that what he says about not being flexible isn’t true.
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“Zack moves quite well,” Baker said. “For some players it takes a little bit longer for that body awareness piece but Zack caught on quite quickly. Zack has a lot of integrity, he’s very friendly, and you can tell because all of the players that he also comes in with, his friends are as kind as he is. They’re birds of a feather. And I heard this before they even brought Zack in. They were saying ‘You’ll love him, he’s so great’ and he really is. He’s so professional, he’s sweet, and he just gets the work done.”
Asked for the one thing he’ll remember most about Zack, Dyck answers without hesitation: “The humility.”
“Everyone goes through trials and tribulations in their careers but for some younger guys, they haven’t really been through that outside of a five-game scoring slump. Zack has encountered some adversity so when we go into situations where we’re on a losing streak, or whatever it may be, he’s able to deal with that and move forward. His focus and mental toughness is something that makes him a real special person and player,” Dyck said.
That humility, combined with his work ethic, size, strength, speed and approach, will carry him far in life and in his career, they all agree.
“I honestly think he’s going to have a long career in the NHL and I can truly say that,” Parneta said. “This guy will go play in the NHL and nobody’s talking about him sort of thing. And he doesn’t care! That doesn’t bug him.”
Finished Spitzer: “If more people knew Zack like I do, there’d be jerseys sold for Ottawa already.”
With reporting in Moncton, N.B.
(Top photo: Rob Wilton / Vancouver Giants)
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