Who Is Connor Hellebuyck? The U.S.A. Hockey Goalie Nobody Wanted Who Just Won Olympic Gold
When Jack Hughes scored in overtime to clinch Team USA's first gold medal since 1980, the camera found him mobbed by teammates at center ice. But ask anyone who watched that game against Canada (including Hughes), and they'll tell you the same thing: the man who actually won it was standing in the net.
Connor Hellebuyck stopped 41 of 42 shots he faced in the gold medal game. He stoned Connor McDavid on a breakaway. He got his stick on a wide-open rebound with the net gaping. He was, as they say in hockey, standing on his head. By the final buzzer, his performance was being compared to Jim Craig's legendary 1980 run — the last time an American goalie carried a team to gold.
Where is Connor Hellebuyck From?
Hellebuyck grew up in Commerce Township, Michigan, about 45 minutes north of Detroit. While most of Michigan's top hockey prospects take the AAA travel team route — playing for elite organizations like Little Caesars and Honeybaked alongside future NHLers — Hellebuyck stayed in local high school hockey at Walled Lake Northern. It was an unconventional choice in a state that takes its hockey pipeline seriously.
In his senior season in 2011, he earned Second-Team All-State honors, posting a 93% save percentage, but the Knights went just 6-16-1, and his high school career ended with a first-round playoff loss. Not exactly a recruiting poster. The big programs weren't calling.
@teamusa The chemistry. The details. It all mattered. ???? #teamusa #hockey #connorhellebuyck #gold #USA
♬ original sound - Team USA
Hellebuyck's Foray Into Professional Hockey
After graduating, he headed to Odessa, Texas — a city better known as the football-obsessed setting of Friday Night Lights — to play for the Jackalopes of the North American Hockey League, a second-tier junior circuit. He stayed with a billet family, far from home, and went to work. He posted a 2.49 goals-against average and a 93% save percentage that season, good enough to earn a look from the Winnipeg Jets, who selected him in the fifth round of the 2012 NHL Draft. Not a ringing endorsement, but a foot in the door.
At UMass Lowell, he kept climbing. He won the inaugural Mike Richter Award as the top goaltender in college hockey, and departed as one of the program's all-time greats. From there it was a slow climb through the Jets' system.
The rest is history that even casual hockey fans are starting to learn. He's a three-time Vezina Trophy winner as the NHL's best goaltender, and won the Hart Trophy as the league's MVP — one of the rarest individual honors in the sport, and one that hadn't gone to a goalie since Carey Price in 2015. He's spent his entire career in Winnipeg, a small market that doesn't generate the spotlight of Toronto or New York, which is part of why his name hasn't always registered outside hardcore hockey circles.
It's registering now.
The kid who stayed in high school hockey while everyone else chased elite travel teams. The fifth-round pick who played in West Texas before anyone knew his name. The goalie who, on the biggest stage in the sport, stopped everything Canada threw at him and sent a gold medal back to the United States for the first time in 46 years.