Nate Schmidt is careful about sharing “the real Schmidty” with his teammates. He said as much at the first availability of his very first Vancouver Canucks training camp.
“Having Holts (Braden Holby) and Beags (Jay Beagle) was an awesome start for me because you have guys that kind of know the true, real Schmidty. And sometimes I gotta make sure I give it to the guys in doses. I don’t know how much they can handle at first.”
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Thankfully his former teammates are less shy.
“Schmidty and I took turns being team donkeys in the minors,” said Connor Carrick.
“The joke is always ‘Hey Nate you’re weirding us out, what are you doing’ and he’d eat that up,” said Erik Haula.
“I was like ‘Who is this guy, he doesn’t shut up,” laughed Marc-Andre Fleury.
In a sport of largely quiet personalities, Schmidt stands apart as a rare gem because he shows his true colours. Schmidt is so boisterous that the Capitals used “penguin” as a safe word in the dressing room if they ever needed him to settle down.
What follows is a compilation of the best testimonials, stories and jokes as some of Schmidt’s former teammates and mentors attempt to reveal “the real Schmidty” and what defines him.
Schmidt went undrafted and his freshman season at the University of Minnesota was a struggle. The coaches weren’t happy with his conditioning, he only played 13 games and had to play forward just to get in the lineup.
Eric Johnson, St. Cloud Cathedral head coach and mentor: That’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen him down. It was the first time that athletically he faced a challenge. In a roundabout way, it was probably a good thing for him to decide how much he loves the game. Because when it’s easy, it’s easy to love what you’re doing. But when it’s a struggle, you’ve got to figure out how to work through this, make the best of the situation and get out of it.
Mike Guentzel, assistant coach University of Minnesota: He could have said poor me, screw you, I’m gonna take my ball and go to a different program and find a coach that will give me a better chance. The fact that he stuck through it says a lot about Nate.
Schmidt: I remember sitting out the last game of the year in the playoffs. We had to sit in this lounge and I took a picture of the lounge door and put it as the background of my phone, I was like “I never want to sit in here and watch a game ever again.”
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Zach Budish, longtime friend and college teammate: Mike Guentzel was the one who recruited Schmidty. He wasn’t there for the freshman year but he came back and that was like a turning point.
Johnson: The day Mike showed up it wasn’t official yet but Nate was in the weight room and he calls me and is really jacked. Nate goes “Hey guess who was at the facility today” and I had kinda heard a little rumour that he was coming back and I asked if he talked to Mike and Nate goes “Yeah, it was a great conversation blah blah blah, I think he’s coming back.”
That really helped him, he really blossomed under Mike and liked Mike’s intensity.
Budish: Guentzel was one of my favourite coaches, he took a chance on Schmidty. That summer Schmidty saw an opportunity that if he really put in the work and fully committed to “OK, I’m gonna be a hockey player” he could do something.
Guentzel: I basically had full autonomy to coach the defencemen and in the pre-planning stages of the season I talked to Coach Lucia and I was adamant that Nate was going to play defence and we’re going to give him an opportunity in our core, that he’s going to be dressed every night.
A couple of practices into the year, we jumped into working on the power play. After watching Nate for five, six minutes on each end of the power play I skated over to Don Lucia and said, “We got the wrong guy on the No. 1 power play, the real number one power play guy is down on my end, he should be down on your end.”
Budish: That summer he f*cking worked his bag off. His second and third year in Minnesota, there was no defenceman better in the country than Nate Schmidt.
Johnson: A lot of times these guys don’t face adversity because they’ve always been so much better than everyone else and you don’t know how to handle it. That’s where getting over that little bit of adversity and having success after his freshman year has obviously paid dividends for him as a player and person.
Schmidt lived in a four-bedroom apartment with Budish, Haula and Nick Bjugstad. There was never a dull moment.
Schmidt: That group was our power play unit. So if we didn’t play well on the PP that night we got back to our room and it was hilarious just guys going “f*cking pass me the puck” or “WTF are you doing” and guys would have to retreat to their rooms to get away from it. It was never malicious, though.
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Budish: For four guys living together in college, it’s obviously not going to be the nicest, cleanest place. He was the mom of the house, he’d be like “Guys, you cannot leave your sh*t on the counter” and was borderline OCD. It was like “Schmidty, we’re four 20-year-old dudes living in an apartment, we’ll be fine.”
Schmidt: I grew up clean and I was like I can’t believe these guys live like this.
Haula: I’m like “Nate we’re in college who cares what the kitchen looks like it’s beat anyway.”
Bjuggy’s the dirtiest guy of all of us and he’d leave his sh*t everywhere all the time. Nate would be all over him like “Bjuggy, Bjuggy, Bjuggy.” So that was funny for me and Zach to just let those two go at it.
Schmidt: Zach, Erik and I would hide one piece of Bjugstad’s clothes in the closet that nobody went in every day. When we were moving out he opens it up and clothes pour out of it. He’s like “Oh my god no wonder where all my sh*t’s been this year.” It happened from the day we moved in, it was probably 50 shirts, 20 underwear pairs and he’s like “Man, I had to ask for all this stuff for Christmas.”
Budish: I remember I was cooking chicken on the burner stove using one of his pans. I had to slice into the chicken on the pan and see if it was cooked through all the way and Schmidty just lost it. He yelled like “On this burner stove you cannot have a knife go to the pan, you’re gonna ruin the f*cking pan” and just got so mad at me.
Schmidt: I got it for Christmas and I was all excited, like a brand new set. These guys would just go in there and use it, mark it up all the time. I remember one day looking at it and I frickin lost it I was like “Are you f*cking guys serious?” It was the one thing that fires me up, when people deliberately try and be dirty just to piss me off.
Budish: I was like “Dude, I’m just making sure the chicken’s cooked through, I’m not making marks” but he was so mad. Like it was a huge deal for him he got so mad and I was like “Schmidty, this is like a 30 dollar pan from f*cking Target, I’ll buy you a new one just relax.”
Haula: As cheap as he is, I was in Vegas, I had a house and he didn’t have his place yet so I called him and said he could live with me, I wouldn’t charge rent or anything. He had a really strict diet so he liked making the food, I disliked it most of the time, I wasn’t used to eating quite that healthy and so we bantered a bit about that.
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In an interview he said that I was basically the towel boy and he’s the chef. And I was like “Are you serious, dude?” It pissed me off. A week passes by and to get him back I pulled a pretty good prank at the rink.
Fleury: Oh man, that was a good one. (laughs)
Haula: I was messing around in the training room, put my hands in hot wax, molded a creative figure. Basically, molded a wax penis on top of his helmet. It probably weighs a pound and a half, so I thought he’ll grab his helmet, feel the weight and he’ll take it off immediately and it’ll be a nice laugh.
Schmidt: I was a little late into the dressing room for practice so I was rushing to get my stuff on. The rule in Vegas is you just have to beat Flower (Fleury) onto the ice. Once Flower’s on the ice you’re late. He was almost done so I just grabbed my helmet and put it on as fast as I could and just sprinted to beat him.
(David Becker / NHLI via Getty Images)
Haula: I see him rushing and not notice it and I’m like oh it’s going down. Probably not the smartest idea because it was an open practice with fans. I was kinda timing myself to get on the ice at the same time as him. Some guys see it right away and just drop. These guys, Flower, James Neal are just howling, like literally dying. You know Nate he’s just like “Gosh, everyone’s in such a great mood today, I love this!”
Schmidt: I had literally no idea. Guys are laughing, rolling around and I’m like “Wow, what a great day, everyone’s buzzing like me.” I take a couple hot laps. People are pulling their phones out taking pictures of me, I’m like “Man, this is weird.”
Haula: He’s doing his routine stretch on the red line and I just let it play out. He does a couple laps, plays around with the puck and then I nicked him in the shin pads and went “Hey Nate, look into the glass and take a look at your reflection” and he sprints to the bench and takes off my well-molded figure.
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Fleury: I think that made the news in a few places. (laughs)
Schmidt: I don’t think my face has ever been so red. I’m walking out to the parking lot and some guys start laughing and shout “Hey dickhe*d.”
Schmidt’s sense of style has always been a running joke wherever he’s played.
Brady Skjei, University of Minnesota: His style was bad and it hasn’t gotten much better over the years. (laughs)
Fleury: What else do you expect from a guy whose favourite colour is orange? (laughs)
Budish: We train and skate together in the summers. Two or three summers ago he would wear this same fedora hat every single day of the week. I’m like “Dude, Schmidty, you’re being a total weirdo, this is the fourth day in a row that you’ve worn it to the rink, what are you trying to get across?” Me and the other guys were like “Stop it, you can’t wear that every day.”
If we worked out for 50 days that summer, he wore that stupid fedora at least like 40 of them.
Tom Wilson, Washington Capitals: He wore lots of colours like turquoise that most guys in the league wouldn’t touch. He’s not afraid to wear the Average Joe’s yellow T-shirt and gold shorts down to a meal or attire that you haven’t seen in 10 years or since middle school.
Fleury: Some days he’ll have a hat with pineapples on it. Or a short sleeve shirt with oranges. (laughs)
Carrick: I remember he would wear this black shirt, black pants and white tie and I would joke that he looked like he was going to high school homecoming because all I remember was that in high school you’d be nervous about wearing a white shirt and sweating through it while dancing
Wilson: One day we even swapped out his pocket square for a napkin and he didn’t even realize for like 24 hours.
Life in the dressing room with Schmidt is an experience like none other.
Carrick: I came in as a young guy and kept to myself and thought that was the proper way. My head coach at the time, Troy Mann, pulled me in and he said, “Connor we have a quiet group, we need some energy and you are talkative when you’re playing well and you need to do that all the time.” So it was permission to lighten up.
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If I felt someone wasn’t going well, I’d push a button and either chirp them or call them out about it in a humorous way. Or the first whistle in a game I’d whisper to somebody “We’re gonna face wash some guys, let’s get the car wash going, let’s mess with their visors.”
In warmups in Hershey, there was a song “Revolution” by Diplo and when the beat would drop I would zoom around NASCAR style in our half of the rink. It was ridiculous. Schmidty had his version, we’d play Chandelier by Sia in the locker room before the game.
I have vivid memories of the crazy stuff he did with that. (laughs)
Schmidt: I remember watching that music video with the gymnastics and I was like “You know what, I’m gonna do this before the next game,” so it was about 20 minutes before the game began, song comes on and I start doing somersaults, cartwheels, jumping over trash cans, jumping on the stalls, flick my hair back.
Budish: We had a two-game set once in college and normally we don’t play two-game series in St. Cloud. Joanne, his mom, messaged the coach and said ‘Hey, we’ll be happy to host the whole team over at our place.’
The entire charter bus of 23 guys or whatever pulled up on their driveway. Me and one of our buddies were laughing on the bus ride, giving him sh*t like ‘Hey Schmidty, you claim to be a blue-collar guy but we’re going through a gated community to get to your house.’ It was always the running joke that he wanted to be a blue-collar guy in terms of being around the wringer, in and out of the lineup and we would just give him crap because his family has a nice house.
Carrick: We had one Halloween party, he and Patrick Wey had a house together and we all went over. Let’s just say if we were having fun, Schmidty was usually in the middle of it.
Wilson: There was a hump day GEICO commercial with a talking camel and he did an awesome impression of the camel.
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Budish: Everyone’s always excited to see him because he’s got a stupid one-liner joke to light up the room. He’s got the stupid, “The Office” type humour.
Wilson: He’s got a very unique sense of humour and he’s not afraid to embarrass himself. There’s some guys that are like “Oh my god Schmidty, enough is enough like just stop” and then there are guys that are rolling around laughing.
Budish: You go out for dinner and a couple beers and it’s like “Schmidty let’s not be totally weirdo today, let’s keep it tame, fly under the radar.” And he’ll raise his voice super loud in a sarcastic voice and go “What? What? You don’t want me to weird you out today, what, you can’t handle it?”
Haula: We always joke that he’s a total weirdo.
Carrick: There was one call-up in Washington I had and Schmidty, Niskanen and Holtby asked me to go to dinner at a place called Blue Ribbon. They talked about sushi like it was this religious, unbelievable experience and I’m like man, I want to love something the way they talk about sushi.
Wilson: I remember when we were rookies going to a masquerade party at Mike Green’s house and he threw on his mask. He did some stupid pose for a picture and ripped his pants right down the middle. That was just so Schmidty.
(Photo: Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press via AP)
