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The U.S. Hockey Team’s Mystery Men
With no N.H.L. players available, the American roster features many players who have taken an unusual path to the Olympics.
With no N.H.L. players available for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the United States men’s hockey team unveiled on Monday includes four college players, three from the American Hockey League, 15 playing in European leagues and 38-year-old Brian Gionta, who has not played for any pro team this season.
Gionta will be the captain of the American team, as he was for the Buffalo Sabres and the Montreal Canadiens over his 15 N.H.L. seasons. But he is the only player on the United States roster that has played in the Olympics before, participating in the 2006 Games, in which the Americans lost in the quarterfinals.
“I loved the N.H.L. players, but there’s something fresh about the format this time,” said U.S. Coach Tony Granato, an American Olympian himself in 1988 in Calgary. “We’re going to take advantage of that. We have to see how good we are.”
The four college players selected — Denver’s Troy Terry, Boston University’s Jordan Greenway, St. Cloud State’s Will Borgen and Harvard’s Ryan Donato — have won medals for the United States at the world junior championships over the past two years.
But the rest of the team is a motley crew of surprising Olympians, only 15 of whom have N.H.L. experience.
Broc Little, a forward for Davos who is among the leading point scorers in the Swiss National League this season, told The New York Times in November: “Obviously, the Olympics are a dream as a kid. I’ve never played in the N.H.L., so the dream starts to fade as you get older. But once this popped up, it was like, ‘Wow, this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’ ”
Little, 29, can now call himself an Olympian. Here are some other players on Granato’s roster who followed an unusual path to the Winter Games.
Ryan Zapolski
Zapolski, 31, was the only goalie announced Monday, though two more will be named to the team later, Granato said.
A native of Erie, Pa., Zapolski played four seasons of college hockey at Mercyhurst, compiling a 48-44-11 record. The highest professional level he played in North America was the ECHL, a minor league two rungs below the N.H.L. He bounced around, playing 56 games over three seasons for teams like the South Carolina Stingrays, Gwinnett Gladiators, Toledo Walleye and Florida Everblades.
Zapolski has spent the past five seasons in Finland, first for Lukko of the Finnish league and currently for Jokerit of the Russia-based Kontinental Hockey League, where he has a 1.68 goals against average in 32 games this season.
Bobby Sanguinetti
Sanguinetti, a 29-year-old defenseman, was born in Trenton and grew up rooting for the Rangers, who selected him in the first round of the 2006 N.H.L. draft.
But he would play only five N.H.L. games in four seasons with the Rangers’ organization. He was traded to the Carolina Hurricanes and played most of the next three seasons with their A.H.L. team. He finally scored his first N.H.L. goal in 2013 with the Hurricanes.
“As a first-round pick, you obviously want to prove to people that you're an N.H.L. player,” Sanguinetti said in an The Associated Press article published in November. “More than anything, with the experience, you kind of realize it's not as easy as everybody thinks. Just because you're a first-round pick doesn't mean you're going to be given every opportunity.”
He has most recently been playing in Switzerland, where he had five goals in 31 games for HC Lugano this season. Before this season, his only other experience on a national team was at the 2008 world junior championship.
Chris Bourque
Bourque, a 31-year-old forward, was born in Boston when his father, the Hall of Fame defenseman Ray Bourque, was playing for the Bruins. Chris Bourque played only 51 games in the N.H.L. after being a second-round draft pick of the Washington Capitals in 2004. But he became a star in the American Hockey League, where he has played almost 700 regular-season games, compiling 229 goals and 447 assists.
He was the league’s leading point scorer and most valuable player in 2015-16 and is a four-time All-Star. Bourque currently leads the A.H.L. in points with 39 in 35 games for the Hershey Bears, the Capitals’ A.H.L. affiliate.
In international play, his career peak was scoring seven goals to lead the United States at the 2006 world junior championship.
Ray Bourque represented Canada at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, the first Olympic tournament to feature N.H.L. players, but came home without a medal.
James Wisniewski
Wisniewski, a 33-year-old defenseman from Canton, Mich., seemed to be at the lowest point in his pro career last September. In the 2015-16 season, his last in the N.H.L., he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee 47 seconds into his first game. It was latest setback in his injury-plagued career, which spanned 552 games for six N.H.L. teams.
Two years later, Wisniewski was making a call-out on Twitter, looking for a job.
He ended up with the Kassel Huskies in the second division of the German league, but his goal was making the U.S. Olympic team. When he was not selected for the American roster for the Deutschland Cup, an international tournament in November that was considered a tryout of sorts for the Olympic team, he thought his dream was over.
“Well... the olympic dream won't happen for this kid... what a whirlwind of a career,” Wisniewski wrote on Twitter.
But here he is on the Olympic roster after all, more than a decade after winning gold medals at the 2002 under-18 world championship and the 2004 world junior championship.
Jordan Greenway
Greenway, a 20-year-old forward from Canton, N.Y., could become the first African-American to play hockey for the United States in the Olympics. But once N.H.L. players became ineligible for the Games, it was not a surprise to find Greenway on the roster.
He went to Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the prestigious Minnesota prep school where Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Toews once played. He spent two seasons with USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program. He won world championships with 2015 under-18 team and the 2017 junior team. In 2015, the Minnesota Wild drafted him in the second round. He was a member of the senior national team for the world championships last spring, but did not get in a game.
He could have left for the N.H.L. after last season, but decided to return to Boston University, where he has 22 goals and 52 assists in two and a half years.
“I would have never been saying to myself I will probably be playing in the Olympics in my junior year of college,” said Greenway, who, at 6-foot-6 and 227 pounds, is the biggest player on the American roster. “I am very excited.”
Ryan Gunderson
Gunderson, 32, has never played in the N.H.L., but this season he is highest-scoring defenseman in the Swedish Hockey League with 25 points for Brynas.
After a four-year career at the University of Vermont, Gunderson, a native of Bensalem, Pa., was a top rookie and then an All-Star in the ECHL. He spent one full season in the A.H.L. before his European journey began in 2010. He has played in Sweden, Finland and Belarus.
In his USA Hockey bio, Gunderson wrote that winning the league championship with Brynas in 2012 was the best moment of his playing career.
John McCarthy
McCarthy, a 31-year-old forward from Boston, is the only player on the roster with no experience with the national team at any level.
He is currently the captain of the San Jose Barracuda, the Sharks’ A.H.L. affiliate. He also was captain of the 2008-9 Boston University Terriers, who won the N.C.A.A. championship. (Four B.U. players are on the American squad, the most of any college program. Three former Yale teammates also made the roster.)
McCarthy was selected by the Sharks in the seventh round of the 2006 draft and has played 88 games for them, the last in October 2015. He has played 465 games in the A.H.L.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I couldn’t be more proud be selected to represent the United States,” McCarthy said in a Barracuda news release.
Jonathan Blum
Like Sanguinetti, Blum is a former first-round draft pick who is playing overseas after modest N.H.L. career. But Blum, a 28-year-old defenseman from Southern California, has the distinction of being the American playing professionally the closest to Pyeongchang, South Korea.
For the past two seasons, he has played in the K.H.L. for Admiral Vladivostok, on southeastern tip of Russi.a
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