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Fathers and sons: Utah’s Iginla-Doan connection is a heart-warming hockey story
Jarome Iginla was up in the stands with his family for the 2024 NHL Draft at Sphere in Las Vegas. Shane Doan was at the Toronto Maple Leafs table down on the draft floor.
When the Utah Hockey Club selected Iginila’s son, Tij, with the No. 6 overall pick, making him a future teammate of Shane’s son, Josh, the two fathers had the same thought.
“We’re going to have the best dads’ trips,” Doan said.
Utah GM Bill Armstrong sees a greater benefit.
“We’re gonna have [Josh] and [Tij] dress beside each other,” Armstrong said immediately after the pick in Las Vegas. “Two great hockey families with a lot of character. It’s a special day for us.”
Shane and Jarome go way back. They are both part owners in the Western Hockey League’s Kamloops Blazers, who hosted the 2023 Memorial Cup, but they first met on the youth baseball diamond in Alberta when Shane was playing for Morinville and Iginla was playing for St. Albert. Their friendship blossomed when the Blazers invited Iginla to camp as a 16-year-old; an honor that Doan had achieved one season earlier.
Doan said the pair formed an almost instant bond based on common ground in past friendships, athletic experiences, and their approach to life.
“When you’re that age, it’s just fun to be around guys, period,” Doan said. “But we have similar personalities and so it was easy for us to become friends. I was a late birthday so we were always involved in the same events and we were drafted the same year (Doan went No. 7 to Winnipeg in 1995; Iginla No. 11 to Dallas).
“We had similar worldviews and we had similar styles as players. I was a little bit heavier and bigger which gave me a little bit of an advantage, but we kind of connected through that.”
Good friend and longtime broadcaster Tyson Nash describes Doan as “country strong.” When Doan played for the Coyotes, it became a rite of passage with the younger players to try to wrestle him to the ground; an exercise they called bringing down the bear. That exercise may have originated in juniors where Doan says he wrestled teammates all the time, including the tag team of Iginla and Greg Hart.
“He was so big in juniors; just this manchild,” Iginla said of Doan. “We always figured that once he got to the NHL he’d lose his advantage and other players would be able to challenge him, but then when he got there he was still one of the strongest guys. And if you ever got him mad at you, oh my gosh, that’s not something you ever wanted to do. He played hard and he’s always very, very competitive, but it would really come out in those moments.”
(Getty Images)
Shane calls Jarome “a little bit of a crazy hockey dad.
“He loves his boys and his girl and he’s very involved in their lives and in what they’re doing and where they’re at. That’s why they moved to Boston.”
Jarome’s daughter, Jade, plays at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (an hour-plus south of Boston) where she earned second team All-Ivy League honors as a freshman and then led the Bears with 16 goals and 27 points last season as a sophomore. Well before attending Brown, she spent two seasons playing at Dexter Southfield School in Brookline, Mass, just south of the city.
To date, the distance between the families has kept Josh and Tij from getting to know each other. Despite their father’s deep connection, Josh said. “I’ve met [Tij] once. They moved to Boston and never went back to Kamloops (where the Doans spend their summers) so we just always missed each other.”
Tij loves the idea of one day playing alongside Doan.
“He had some good success this year with the team so it’s exciting to keep watching him,” he said.
Like Josh Doan’s dad, Jarome Iginla was a major influence in his son’s life and playing career. The two remember the car ride home from less-than optimal performances differently. Tij remembers some tough love; Jarome hopes he wasn’t that harsh.
“I don’t remember those talks being quite as firm as he remembers it, but he says there were some tough car rides where it was just me saying: ‘You’ve got to compete because all these kids want it, too! You’ve got to help your team. There’s only one puck so go out and compete,'” Jarome said.
“We’ll debate different skating techniques, different shooting techniques. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes he’s right, and I’ll tell you, it’s pretty rewarding when he says, ‘Yeah, you know, dad, when you said that this type of stutter step works, you were right.’ At first, he’d be like, ‘No, no, no.’ And then maybe he’ll give me a little credit once in a while.
“I’ll say this: He’s worked very hard at it and he loves it. He studies skating, he studies shooting, and he watches games all the time. He puts his mind and his heart into it. “
Jarome is quick to pass around credit for Tij’s development, including to his wife, Kara.
“My wife doesn’t get enough credit because it’s tiring being a parent,” he said. “We played a lot in the backyard and we played mini sticks all the time. My wife would always encourage me to get in net or to go down and play with them and sometimes I’d be like, ‘I’m tired. You go do it!’ So she’d have to go play goalie for them or go on the rink. She’d be stuck in there taking shots off of her head. They loved the game but they always wanted one of us to play with them.”
When Tij first joined the Seattle Thunderbirds in the 2021-22 season, he didn’t play a lot. He appeared in just three games and managed one assist, spending the majority of his time developing his body and developing his skills.
“It was a tough year for him,” said Utah forward Dylan Guenther, whose rights the Edmonton Oil Kings had traded to Seattle that season — just days after Guenther scored the gold-medal winning goal for Canada at the World Junior Hockey Championship.
“He was a good kid and a really skilled player coming into the league when he was 16 and I was 19, but we had a really good veteran team and he didn’t play a lot. He’d get pretty fired up about it so I would just tell him, ‘You’re gonna be a good player. Just stay patient and keep working.”
Both players said that Guenther took Iginla under his wing that season and helped him navigate the path from bit player to highly touted draft prospect; a process that really took flight over the second half of last season with Kelowna when Iginla exploded to finish with 47 goals and 84 points in 64 games.
Coyotes area scout Kevin Pedersen lives about 10 minutes away from Kelowna’s home rink and estimates he saw Iginla play about 50 times. Those viewings and the second half progression of several forwards led to some surprises early in the draft, including the Iginla pick.
Coyotes director of amateur scouting Darryl Plandowski (at left in the first half of the video below) and associate director of amateur scouting Ryan Jankowski addressed that and their overall approach after the draft.
In the immediate aftermath of the Iginla selection, Tij said he basically “blacked out” and couldn’t remember what happened or what he was thinking in that moment when he embraced his family members, including his dad.
Jarome remembers everything, and he found himself reliving his own experience.
“The day of my draft, I remember getting there and my mom was trying to talk to me but I was so nervous I couldn’t even speak,” he said. “I saw the same thing with Tij. He was pretty cool up until we were at the draft and then whenever Kara would try to talk to him or say anything, he just shut down. It just brought back so many memories because he was tight and he didn’t want to talk.”
One of the first calls he got was from Guenther, with whom he has remained fast friends ever since they played together in Seattle.
“It was a quick FaceTime,” Guenther said. “He’s got so many emotions going through his head at that moment so you don’t want to keep him too long.
“The draft is such a huge day. You work your whole life for that day so I just said, ‘Enjoy it. You’ve worked really hard for this and you deserve it. Go have fun with your family and your friends and I’ll see you at camp.'”
Tij has an internal timeline for when he’d like to join the NHL, but his development will be paramount in the eyes of the Coyotes staff. He won’t turn 18 until Thursday so the logical move is to have him play at least one more season in Kelowna, which acquired him from Seattle last summer.
“I’d like to play a full year [in the NHL] as a 19-year-old, but I mean, it’s hard to say right now,” he said at the draft. “I haven’t shared the ice with actual NHL guys yet so it’s hard to know exactly where I’m at right now, but that’s kind of a baseline goal I have for myself. My family tend to mature a little bit later so hopefully I still have some growth in terms of height left, and then definitely in terms of power and maturity as well.”
At some point, the first draft pick in Utah Hockey Club history will play in the same city where his dad played a major role in ending Canada’s 50-year gold medal drought at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. When it was pointed out to Tij that he already has bragging rights on his dad because he went higher in the draft, the son paused for a moment and then put that notion to bed.
“There’s a little bit of bragging rights,” he said, smiling. “But he had a good [NHL] career so I guess I’ve got to build my résumé a little bit more before I can brag too much.”
Top photo of Jarome Iginla and Shane Doan via Getty Images
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