Utah's Jaxson Stauber took road less traveled

Jaxson Stauber was a late-starter by Minnesota hockey standards. He didn’t lace up his skates until he was 8 years old, and by his own dad’s admission, he wasn’t very good.

“He could barely skate,” said Robb Stauber, a former NHL goalie with the Kings and Sabres. 

As many future goalies do in youth hockey, Jaxson began as a skater. One fateful day, he was playing defense.

“He was the last man back in his defensive zone and the puck was long gone,” Robb said. “I mean, the whole play was going the other way and it wasn’t even close.”

Still, when Jaxson hit the top of the circles, he took a glance over his shoulder to make sure that nobody and nothing was behind him. There wasn’t, and there was no chance that anybody or anything was. It was almost as if the reflex was embedded in his DNA.

“I thought, ‘Oh, shit!'” Robb said. “He’s got that mindset already.

“Anybody with half a brain doesn’t want their kid to be a goalie. You have different hopes and dreams for your kids and that wouldn’t make the top 1,000 because you want them to have a better chance at success, but when I saw that, I knew what was happening. Within a year or two of playing, he gravitated towards becoming a goalie.”

Ever since that limiting choice — there is only one net to man while there are numerous forward and defensive spots on a team — Stauber has been climbing a steep ladder to realize his dream; one rung at a time.

“I definitely took the road less traveled but I think any time you go through some adversity and you come out the other side, that’s helpful,” he said. “That’s just experience, right?

“You can look back on that situation and take valuable lessons from it. Then when you find yourself in a similar situation, you can lean on that past experience and see what maybe helped you to be successful, or maybe what didn’t help you and make better, more informed decisions.”

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Stauber has made a lot of good decisions in the past five months. He signed a one-year, two-way contract with the Utah Hockey Club on July 5. In seven games with the AHL’s Tucson Roadrunners, he posted a 5-2 record with a 2.29 goals against average and a .930 save percentage (fifth best in the AHL). And when Utah starter Connor Ingram went down with an upper-body injury on Nov. 18 that has sidelined him indefinitely, Stauber earned a call-up over Tucson starter Matt Villalta.

Stauber had to wait 10 days to see his first NHL action, but when he did, he stopped all 29 shots he faced against the Vegas Golden Knights to post his first career shutout. In seven career NHL games with the Blackhawks and UHC, he is 6-1 with a 2.41 goals against average and a .923 save percentage.

“At the end of the day, winning games is what matters and he’s done it here in the American League, too,” Roadrunners goalie coach Jeff Hill. “If you look even further back in his pro career, he finished the season with 13 straight wins in Rockford last year. To me, he seems to be a winner.”

Despite that success, Rockford played him sparingly down the stretch after he returned from a successful stint with the Blackhawks. The Blackhawks also chose not to re-sign him.

That’s when Stauber’s agent, Ben Hankinson, went to work, putting the word out to multiple clubs including Utah. Tucson GM John Ferguson Jr. needed a second goalie so he made a bunch of calls to gain insight on Stauber. One of those calls was to Providence College coach Nate Leaman, who built a lengthy coaching résumé even before he arrived in Ferguson’s home state of Rhode Island, having coached at Harvard, Union and on five different occasions for USA Hockey in the World Junior Championship, the last as the head coach of the gold-medal winning team in 2021.

“The number one thing that I said to John was, ‘He’s a legit NHL prospect,'” said Leaman, who led Providence to the 2015 NCAA title. “There’s more to Jaxson than just an American League starter. I’ve been around enough goalies to know the level required and understand potential.

“Jaxson is a student of the game. He always loved watching video, and he loved working on his game. The big thing with Staubs is that he just needed the opportunity. When he has gotten that opportunity, he has been successful.”

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Opportunities were scarce as Stauber came up through the Minnesota youth ranks. Robb said he only made one A team, he got cut by multiple Bantam teams, and by the time he reached high school, he was viewed as little more than a JV goalie.

“I was pretty disappointed but I remember sitting down with my dad and we had a conversation where he basically said, ‘You can sit here and feel bad for yourself or you can make the most of it,” Jaxson said. 

On a recommendation from current New Jersey Devils goalie coach Dave Rogalski, a Minnesota native, the Staubers explored out-of-state options and settled on a tryout with Victory Honda in Plymouth, Michigan. The first tryout didn’t go so well, but Stauber was lights out in the second one, earning a spot.

Stauber then played two seasons for the USHL’s Sioux Falls Stampede, leading the team to the 2019 Clark Cup, before an opportunity arose at Minnesota State. Unfortunately for Stauber, he was playing behind eventual Hobey Baker winner Dryden McKay in Mankato and that was going to be the case for three years so he went back to Sioux Falls for one more year despite the protests of Minnesota State coaching staff.

After that season, goalie Michael Lackey graduated from Providence so Leaman recruited Stauber hard, finally landing him for a two-year stint.

“He had a really good career in Sioux Falls, won the championship and every box was checked for us,” Leaman said. “He had the size, he was good technically, athletically, he was pretty good, and he had a pedigree of both good statistics and winning.

“I remember watching his father play so we knew they were a hockey family. There’s a lot of times when you recruit kids from hockey families where it’s a really good situation because they know the game. They’ve grown up hearing their dads talk about the game, or they have been around someone that knows the game. I knew he was going to be a goalie that knew the game and could understand the big picture.”

Leaman wanted Stauber to return for a third year. He told him he could be the best goalie in Hockey East if he did.

“With the number of goalies that have made it to the NHL from Hockey East, if you’re a top-two goalie in our league, that really says something,” Leaman said.

But Stauber chose an opportunity with the Blackhawks farm team in Rockford, despite the fact that Chicago had drafted Drew Commesso in the second round in 2020; a situation that often gives prospects an edge in competition.

“Nate gave me the numbers of some of the successful goalies that had just started to come into the NHL like Jake Oettinger, Joseph Woll and  Jeremy Swayman — guys that had played three-plus years of college and gotten to that 100-game mark. He had felt that was super important, but I was in a little bit of a different situation because I was older than those guys when I came into college and I wasn’t a draft pick.

“I think I could have benefited from playing another 35 to 40 games in college, but it was just a matter of the opportunity with Chicago seeming like it was going to be really good. Sometimes you’ve just got to take that opportunity when it presents itself.”

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Stauber is expected to start on Sunday in Philadelphia when Utah faces the Flyers on the back end of this weekend’s back-to-back set. He’s excited for the opportunity to follow up his shutout, but he’s not getting too far ahead of himself.

“I think it’s important to keep in perspective that I’ve played one game,” he said, laughing. “It was a good game, obviously, but it’s one game in the grand scheme of things. It’s not going to make or break your career.

“For me, it’s just about taking the information from that game, seeing what I did well, what brought me success — not only physically, but mentally, like what my mindset was going into the game and throughout the game — and then looking at things that I could have done better. I’ve never played a perfect game in my life and I never will, but there’s always an opportunity to apply what you learned to the next practice and the next game.”

That, said Hill, is where Stauber shines.

“He’s a very technical, cerebral person and goalie, and he had all that stuff in order when he arrived in training camp,” Hill said. “We addressed a couple things that we saw, his posture being one of them. It was something in his stance that he had been working on all year when he was in Rockford and we made a tweak to find a happy medium with what he was already doing. 

“But when you look at his game, he has a foundation of great positioning. Working within that, can we develop a little bit more pace to his game, arriving a little bit earlier so he has even more time to use that positioning to his advantage? It’s push-offs more than anything. His reads are already very good. He doesn’t chase plays at all. He never finds himself out of position. It’s just a matter of building that fast twitch to add pace.”

Ingram’s timeline for return is not certain, but when he does return, Stauber will almost certainly head back to Tucson for more development. At 25, Hill noted that Stauber is still at the front end of a goalie’s prime years between 28 and 32. And when he recalled Stauber, GM Bill Armstrong noted that Stauber has already had some success in a limited look at the NHL level.

“This was not a wing-and-a-prayer situation,” Armstrong said.

Stauber is just grateful to be in a good situation with genuine opportunity. So is the guy who never wanted him to be a goalie.

“You’ve got to get to a spot where there’s opportunity,” Robb Stauber said. “You can be good, but if you are not given an opportunity, you’re going to die on the vine and then it’s going to be an uphill battle to revive your career.

“The good thing about Jaxson is that he actually believes in simplifying. We had a lot of father-son talks about it, but that’s the way he lives, not worrying about things he can’t control. That has allowed him — despite not having a huge track record, and starting late and always being behind the curve —to have faith in the process and the journey.”

Top photo of Jaxson Stauber via Getty Images

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