published on May 20, 2024 in celeb

Will Smith, the Sharks ankle-breaking No. 4 draft pick, is just scratching the surface

(Editor’s note: Will Smith was drafted at No. 4 by the San Jose Sharks on Wednesday.)

BASEL, Switzerland — The first time Will Smith showed up at the Boston Sports Performance Center in Wellesley Hills, Mass, in the fall of 2020, the gym’s director, Joe Van Allen, was “not overwhelmed” by what he saw.

It was the heart of COVID, and the 15-year-old kid was about to begin his first season at St. Sebastian’s School, an independent, all-boys school in Needham, Mass. when he showed up with a small group of his teammates. Van Allen had just wrapped up 18 seasons with the dynastic New England Patriots, winning six Super Bowls as their strength and conditioning coach. His experience working with hockey players was limited to his son’s hockey and his own hockey as a house league player as a little guy growing up in Chicago.

Before Smith got into the gym, Van Allen got a look at him on the turf. Before he’d shown up, he kept hearing the same thing.

“Oh, that kid’s sick out on the ice.”

“He’s sick.”

“You should see that kid on the ice.”

Though Van Allen didn’t see it at the time, three years later he knows exactly what everyone was talking about.

Today, Smith is a star — the star — at USA Hockey’s national development program and a potential top-five pick in the 2023 NHL Draft, with ankle-breaking hands and the speed and playmaking to be a star at the next level someday soon, too.

Today, everyone’s overwhelmed by what they see.

(Rena Laverty / U.S. NTDP)

Believe it or not, no one in Will Smith’s family ever played hockey. He got into the sport through one of his dad’s friends, bugging him from the age of five to help get him into house league, and constantly asking him to bring jerseys over to the house so that he could run around in them and play pretend.

As soon as he started playing, though, there was no going back. Everything came naturally to him on the ice. It always has.

Additional reading: NHL Draft 2023 prospect rankings: Bedard No. 1, Will Smith rises

That was true with the Boston Jr. Eagles AAA program, where he and longtime friend and teammate Will Vote made everything look easy. It was true at St. Sebastian’s. It has been true for the last two years at the national program. And those around him are certain that it will be true next year at Boston College and beyond in the NHL for whichever team selects him this June in Nashville.

In his first year at the national program, his 37 points in 35 games with the under-17 team made him the most productive player. He also registered another 27 points in 28 games playing up a year with the under-18 team, again the most among the 2005-born players who played up.

This year, he has centered the under-18 team’s first line, with wingers Ryan Leonard and Gabe Perreault, since Day 1. Together, they’ve formed the most-productive line in the history of the program. Smith has played to above two points per game, and was named MVP of the BioSteel All-American Game along the way.

This week, he has kicked off his last hurrah before the draft with 11 points (four goals, seven assists) through his first three games of U18 Worlds in Switzerland. With as many as four games left to play in his season, his 118 points in 56 games is now the second-most productive season in the history of the NTDP. On Saturday, he passed Jack Hughes with a four-point night against Norway. On Sunday, he passed Auston Matthews with a five-point, player-of-the-game showing against Finland.

The latter performance was punctuated with one of the goals of the tournament, attacking one-on-three through the Finnish defence to score.

No words @_willsmith2. None.#U18MensWorlds pic.twitter.com/GgXP1zTaIi

— USA Hockey (@usahockey) April 23, 2023

When it was over, the under-18 team’s head coach, Dan Muse, called his game, in the biggest game of the tournament so far, simply “outstanding.”

And the brilliant individual effort on his goal? That’s just what he does.

“I think he recognizes when guys don’t have great gaps on him, or maybe they’re taking a bad angle,” Muse said. “And we want to play a winning brand of hockey, we talk to our guys about that all the time, and so do they, but we also want to keep their sticks in their hands and their brains in their heads and they’ve got to play hockey. These are the top players in the world. And one of the things with Will, and Gabe (Perreault), and (Oliver Moore), and (Ryan Leonard) is those guys recognize situations a lot better now too. It’s not just doing it for the sake of doing it.”

When Smith was asked postgame about the play, and whether he feels he can score on any play, he smiled.

“I was thinking about chipping it in because my legs were gassed and then I kind of looked up and I said ‘Why not?’ and then I sort of just threw it to a hole and it went in,” Smith said. “I mean, I feel comfortable going into any situation. I didn’t want to make a stupid play on a one-on-three at the end of a shift, but luckily it worked out.”

Plays like those, which he has made again and again this season, have made him NHL Central Scouting’s third-ranked North American skater behind only Connor Bedard and Adam Fantilli.

Smith calls himself an “offensive talent that makes everyone on my line better,” prides himself in making the right plays with the puck, finding the open guy, and says his biggest strengths are his hockey IQ, his shot, his hands and his skating. He wants to round out his game by becoming a more frequent penalty killer in college next year, and believes he can be a threat offensively while short-handed because he knows the way opposing forwards think and has the skating and the skill to capitalize.

The shot and hands were honed in a shooting room at his suburban Boston home, where he spends most of his days in the summer blasting music and taking rep, after rep, after rep, sometimes with his dad feeding him pucks. The hockey IQ, he says, has always been in him, but has been honed in Boston skates led by renowned skills coach Adam Nicholas — and opposite NHL players like Matt Boldy, Alex Newhook and Kevin Hayes.

Muse called his skillset “obvious to see” in a conversation with The Athletic earlier this year.

“His hockey sense and the ability to anticipate the next play and what the defenders are going to do in order to manipulate defenders just with the head fakes and the general deception, he combines it to make himself a player that’s really hard to play against and a guy who can really create space for himself and his teammates,” Muse said. “Then you combine that with the skillset that he has and he can execute plays whether it’s in tight areas or in time and space. He just does such a good job getting to that space in order to position himself to make it harder to play against.”

His patented head and shoulder fakes to send defenders the wrong way have also been honed in his basement, though others have tried to take credit.

“My mom (Colleen) says she was the one that built (the fakes) into me when I was a young kid on the couch and she would always throw balls at me,” Smith said, chuckling. “It might be that but a lot of it came in the basement just working on it.”

When he talks about it, he can’t help but demonstrate it.

“On the ice, if I see a defender and I’m looking that way,” he told The Athletic earlier this year, looking left while he said it, “he’s going to have a little question on what to do so that once I make one quick move now I have three steps on him and now I have an open shot. That’s one thing that’s huge as you get older: you need that extra and you get it through deception.”

Next year, he’ll get to show off that deception when he becomes the 14th member of his family to attend Boston College, joining his sister Grace, who will be a senior studying biology, in Chestnut Hill, Mass., on a campus he says he has grown up visiting since he was a baby. All of Perreault, Leonard and Vote, as well as teammates Drew Fortescue and Aram Minnetian, will join him, too.

Brendan Buckley, the Eagles’ associate head coach (who has watched Smith for years because his nephew is an ’05), can hardly wait.

For Smith.

“(Smith) can really skate, he’s got high, high-end skill, he can really shoot the puck, he’s got a quick release, and he loves to be a disher as well,” Buckley said. (And) he has it (the puck) a lot. And he sees what’s happening around him. When he gets going, he doesn’t drop his head and then lift it and go ‘Oh s—.’ It’s up the whole way.”

And for the entire line, and the potential to try them together as a full-time freshman trio in college hockey.

“They’re fun to watch. They seem to be on the same page on the ice, they make good reads off of each other, so I’m excited and the whole staff is excited to get them in in the fall and see what they can do in an Eagles jersey. And usually in college you’re getting guys from tons of different teams and it takes a while for them to get used to each other. This particular group will be right on the same page right away,” Buckley added.

“When they’re playing together, they do really play well together. I think the biggest thing from watching them play is they can all play with pace. It’s not like they want to always slow it down. And I think that’s why they’ve had so much success is because they’re a lot to handle, they’re quick, and they can all make high-end plays while skating.”

Smith jokes that he, Perreault and Leonard “wouldn’t be mad” if they stuck together, either. He also jokes that he “definitely put in some work to get Gabe (the last of the three to commit) there.” He, Leonard and Vote have even lived together while at the program, sharing a house in nearby Novi, Mich., with Colleen and Vote’s mom rotating in and out every two weeks to stay with them.

They already spend all of their time together, hitting the local bowling alley or the steam room at the local Life Time Fitness whenever they’re not at the rink or on the road together.

On the ice, they’re constantly looking for one another, so much so that they know they can overpass.

“If we have a shot, we’re going to score, but giving them an open net always feels nice,” Smith said. “We love being and playing together. We’re really good buddies and me, Gabe and Leonard all work really well together. Me and Gabe, we think together almost the same, we always know where each other are going to be. And then Leonard can get into the corners and get the puck, and he’s a strong kid, and then when he doesn’t have the puck he’s always finding open areas for a shot and when he finds open areas we find him and he buries it. We all have our little thing that contributes to the line.”

(Rena Laverty / U.S. NTDP)

Three years after Van Allen was a little surprised by what he saw in his introduction to Smith on his turf, he no longer talks about him in the same way.

When he returned for his first full offseason of training after his year at St. Sebastian’s, Van Allen noticed a difference — a greater focus and maturity — right away in Smith, who was preparing to head off to the NTDP.

“He wasn’t one of the guys in the back losing focus and whatnot. He was starting to dial it in. It was fun to see,” Van Allen recalled. “You’re watching a little kid really grow up in front of you to the young man that he is now.”

At the start of last summer, after his under-17 year at the program, Van Allen then pulled him aside to tell him “Look, you’ve been here for a little bit now, I expect you to lead this group. People look up to you.”

Smith rose to that challenge, too, joining Van Allen’s college group because that’s where his skill level now was on the ice. As the summer progressed, he caught up quickly on the turf and in the racks, too, and “definitely held his own around a handful of athletes who are in their early-to-mid-20s.”

“He has made very nice gains in his time with us. And that’s a testament to their program out there in Michigan, too. You start to see some power output on the turf. Now you’re not saying ‘This kid’s a kid’ anymore,” Van Allen said. “You’re watching a little kid really grow up in front of you to the young man that he is now. It’s so cool to see athletes with the trajectory such as Will’s and to see him realizing the progress over time. He comes in ready to work every day. There’s never a day where he’s just not feeling it. And there’s always a level of confidence, even when in our space there wasn’t much reason for one at the start. I’m sure that comes from the athlete that he has always been on the ice.”

After 90-minute sessions four days a week, and continued work with national team strength coach Brian Galivan, Smith is now listed at six feet and 181 pounds.

At the program, Smith has put in similar work to round out his game on the ice as he has in the gym, too.

“He’s a guy too where his play away from the puck, just in the time that he has been here, has really come a long way and it’s something that he has really worked on,” Muse said. “And because he has put the work in, he has made some really big strides there. It’s something he probably doesn’t get enough credit for but it has really come a long way.”

His next evolution? He wants to become a penalty killer in college.

“I want to be out there. You can still be a threat even when you’re down five-on-four, especially knowing how guys are on the power play I know how to read them,” Smith said.

This is all just the beginning for Smith, according to Van Allen, too. He’s a long way from being a finished product. He’s still got room to get stronger, and even faster than he already is.

“Now Will’s into that developmental phase I think where he’s going to be able to start to put on some quality muscle mass,” Van Allen said. “And hockey’s so different from football where you’re not fighting to put on every pound of muscle that you can. In hockey, you’re trying to find balance and he’s going to be able to come into his skates so to speak.

I’ve really enjoyed watching him move along in his journey. Couldn’t happen to a better guy. It’ll be fun to watch him continue down his path.”

With reporting in Plymouth, Mich.

(Top photo: Rena Laverty / U.S. NTDP)

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