It’s one to seven on a Tuesday night in February as the number 91 Seattle Kraken steps onto the ice at the UBS Arena in eastern New York. The kit of him and his teammates is white, dark blue and turquoise, the colors of the Puget Sound, the estuary that connects Seattle, a city on the American west coast, to the Pacific Ocean. While the first tufts of fans in the stadium cheer on the players of the home New York Islanders, the teams start warming up. Thirty-one more minutes to the face offthe tee of every ice hockey game.
Above the dark blue shirt number 91, and just below the three diagonal stripes of the clothing brand, is the name of the only Dutchman who is active in the National Hockey League (NHL), the North American ice hockey competition: Sprong, Daniel Sprong in full. The Amsterdam-born attacker routinely completes his match preparation. He shoots at goal a few times, with a loose wrist movement the puck disappears into the cross. Then he makes a cross and stops by the boarding to discuss something with his coaches and take a sip of water. Once he jumps into the air and gives a teammate a chest bump. And then, one of the first on the team, he steps off the ice onto the rubber runner and disappears into the locker room.
It turns out to be a harbinger, because when the ice machines, in the form of a can of Heineken, mop the ice and the lineups for the match are handed out, Sprong is not on the list. passed, scratched as it is called in ice hockey. Because, his coach Dave Hakstol will say after the game: „We have several players who are in good shape, and Daniel was the odd man out Today.”
Never indispensable
His coach’s decision fits the career of the 25-year-old Sprong, who has never made himself indispensable to the four teams he played for in the past nine seasons in the NHL. In the past month, he only played in five of the ten games – the other games he was in the stands.
As a great offensive talent, Sprong joined the top team Pittsburgh Penguins in 2015 at the age of eighteen, which won the Stanley Cup twice with superstar Sidney Crosby in the first two years of Sprong’s career – Sprong himself never played in the playoffs for the championship cup. His real breakthrough failed to materialize, and Sprong navigated between the NHL and the levels below it in the years that followed, playing for the Anaheim Ducks, Washington Capitals and Seattle Kraken.
He was unable to convince the latter team last season and so the Dutchman was without a contract for the first time last summer after eight seasons at the highest level. In the end, Sprong participated in the try-outs for Kraken and his game was good enough for a spot in the selection. He was given a minimum contract that allows him to easily be moved back a level.
Sprong seized that opportunity with both hands. He has already scored more goals (15) and provided assists (15) this season than he ever did in a year. He has also matched his record number of games – 47 – with a third of the regular season still to come. Partly thanks to his – unexpected – share, Seattle Kraken, a team that was founded two years ago, is doing well in the Pacific Division and the chance of a place in the play-offs is looming.
That is why Sprong was disappointed that he had to take a seat in the stands, he says a day after the 4-0 loss against the Islanders. He’s sitting in the locker room of New Jersey’s Prudential Center, the stadium where the Devils await their opponent the following night.
The Kraken players have just finished training, the hall filled with the deafening bang of pucks against the boarding. Sprong himself scored a beautiful goal, after he was nicely cleared by a teammate. After the puck flew into the net, they raised their arms in triumph together.
“I didn’t really understand that I was passed over, because I’m having such a good season,” says Sprong, dressed in a fashionable long gray coat, jeans and white sneakers. He has a hip hat on his head. Then, with an unadulterated Amsterdam accent: “But it is what it is. I have to turn the page and tomorrow is another game.”
At home in Montréal
Sprong may speak Dutch every day with his parents and grandparents, who still live on Amsterdam’s Lindengracht where Sprong grew up, and closely follow the achievements of his favorite football club Ajax, after eighteen years of ice hockey in Canada and the United States, he has States have since adopted the North American never-give-up mentality.
When he was seven, the family moved from Sprong to Montreal. Father Hannie, himself a creditable ice hockey player who played for the Dutch team, wanted to give the talented Daniel the chances for an ice hockey career that he never got. “My parents said we were going to try it for a year,” says Sprong. The family never left. Sprong calls the Canadian city his “home”.
Easy on the ring (the skating rink) it was not. Canadian parents and children did not wish him success as a foreigner, says Sprong. “They were jealous. Then they decided not to pass the puck to me, things like that. It’s not normal what I went through when I was young.”
In that period, between the ages of seven and sixteen, Sprong learned to deal with adversity, he says. “Since then I know: it is part of it that sometimes things go a little less. You can’t have a good day every day, that’s life. What you shouldn’t do is sit there for a long time, you just have to keep going.”
Because of his talent, the support of his parents – he calls father Hannie every day to discuss his game – and also his Amsterdam swagger, Sprong managed to get into the NHL, he says. And that’s where all those experiences came in handy during the first years of his professional career. In four of the nine seasons he played in the NHL, he was dropped to a lower level. “That is a big difference,” explains Sprong. “In the NHL you go to every major city in North America, you travel by plane, you play in front of 20,000 spectators and you eat in the best restaurants. You lead a luxurious life. You can’t do that one level lower. You have to take the bus, there is less public and you are paid a lot less.” Sprong earns $ 750,000 (700,000 euros) at Kraken, the minimum salary in the NHL. This amount will be reduced to $325,000 if he moves down a level.
Defensive skills
In retrospect, Sprong calls the fact that he ended up without a contract “a slap in the face”. It drove him crazy, all those well-intentioned people asking him where he was going to draw. “At first it gets annoying, then it slowly starts to eat you up. I became more and more angry, more and more frustrated.” It was a period in which one day he heard that a team was interested, and a few days later that it fell through. Again and again. Sprong: “Then you have to try to stay calm, but that is not always easy. Surely it goes through your mind: is this the end or will I still get a chance?”
Sprong decided to take advantage of the situation to work hard on his defensive skills. In retrospect, he calls it “a wake-up call”. “I scored enough goals last season, but teams didn’t think the defensive part of my game was good enough. Because I didn’t have a contract, I had more motivation to get started with that.”
Now he plays more physically, interferes more with the game and performs better defensively. This gives him more playing time, especially during power plays, when his team temporarily has one player more than the opponent. Sprong excels in these surplus situations. “I’ve always had a good shot, fast, hard and clean, and during a power play there is more room to shoot.”
Thanks to his good game, a new contract beckons, whether or not with another club. Spring doesn’t really want to talk about that. He prefers to talk about the games that are yet to come, and the play-offs that should follow afterwards. But after some insistence, Sprong says he hopes for a contract for two or three years. “I would prefer to play at the highest level for at least another seven years. This is the best sport in the world and I love it, I will continue with it as long as I can,” he says.
He has therefore never considered stopping, despite all the setbacks in his career. The fact that he managed to push through to the highest professional competition gives him a satisfying feeling, says Sprong. “I made it to the top and so I can now laugh at everyone who used to bother me. It really feels that way.”