LaGreca's Dream Comes True with his Beloved Devils | FEATURE

Don LaGreca didn’t grow up in a hockey family. He was from a sports-loving family, but hockey wasn’t quite on the radar. His father got him into every sport imaginable, but hockey was all his.

"Hockey was one of the last sports I got into ‘cause my dad wasn’t a fan," LeGreca, the new voice of the Devils broadcasts on MSG Networks said. "My dad got me into the Giants. My dad got me into the Mets. And he just was not a huge hockey fan. The Rangers were good. We’d watch games together."

But LaGreca didn't have any hockey team allegiances, that is, until he asked his father to go to one of those Rangers game.

"I desperately wanted to go, and I remember my dad saying to me, 'You know, there’s gonna be a team coming to New Jersey, maybe you’ll go,'” he recalled.

So LaGreca waited.

So meaningful and powerful was that game, even all these years later, he remembers the exact date.

“It was February 22^nd, 1987," he said without skipping a beat. It didn't matter, it appears, that the Devils lost the game 7-0 to the NY Islanders. "One of my best friends, John Stark, took me. He was a Devil fan. And from that day on, it just became almost an addiction for me."

LaGreca spins his camera around on the Zoom call, making sure you can see, hanging in his basement above all his sports memorabilia - and there's a lot of it! - are two jerseys: Scott Niedermayer's '27' and Ken Daneyko's '3', the man he'll team up with in the broadcasting booth.

He and Daneyko have been friends for years, but this brings things to a whole other level. Dano even invited him to his championship party in 2003. LaGreca got to drink out of the Stanley Cup.

"To be able to work with him as a colleague—I can’t wait to be able to work with him and learn from him," LaGreca beamed. "He’s 'Mr. Devil', right? He was there from the very beginning. He was there for all three Stanley Cups."

In 1989, LaGreca, as part of a Devils Fan Club function, got to sit at a dinner table with Devils broadcasters (he was originally supposed to sit with player Jim Korn - one of his favorites - but Korn couldn't make it).

It appears that a last-minute change altered LaGreca's life.

He sat down at Table A.

"I got to sit with the late Peter McNab, who was salt of the earth, great human being," he recalled. "Chris Moore, who was the radio voice, and Gary Thorne, who was the TV play-by-play guy. And I was thinking to myself, “I need to do this. I need to do play-by-play. I need to be around this team closer than just being a fan.

"I keep thinking about that story every time I’m pinching myself that I got this gig," he added. "I was 21 at the time, sitting at this table with these broadcasters, now becoming one of them for this team. Kind of a long-winded answer, but the Devils have been pumping through my blood for so long. I had to put it in hibernation for the time doing the Rangers, but I keep thinking about that. This thing’s old and wilted, but it’s a reminder of how long I’ve been a fan."

It is evident that the New Jersey Devils live deep in LaGreca's bones. Little could he have known that all these years later, from that dinner in 1989, he'd be preparing for his first season as part of the team.

Truly a dream come true.

"I’ve always said it’s the closest thing to being a player, honestly," he said. "I’ve never been good enough to be a professional athlete, but I have a sense of what it’s like by traveling on the charter, going to the hotel, riding the buses, going to the morning skate, going to practices. It’s really the closest thing to being a player because you’re going through—not the physical grind that players go through, where they’re working out and on the ice—but the mental and the preparation of just being a part of it.

"That’s what psyches me about it. Obviously, being the Devil broadcaster is exciting just ‘cause that’s the team I grew up following. But to be a part of a team -- you are a part of the team. You’re not on the outside like a reporter covering it. They cover it and they are part of the grind, but they’re not part of the team. It’s so surreal."

And he couldn't have picked a better time to join in, with this fast-paced, highly skilled Devils team.

"It feels like this is an exciting, fun team to watch and it feels like (the team is) about ready to pop," he said. "So to be a part of what could be this new era and maybe actually be the voice of that next generation of Devil fans makes me feel old. But it does get me really excited about the future with this team. It feels like the timing is perfect that they’re about to become something really big."

LaGreca is no newcomer to the broadcast booth, he's been in the broadcasting business a long time, a prominent voice on broadcast radio specifically since 2001. And in some ways, when you're on the outside looking in, you have to tuck your fandom away.

But for LaGreca and his new gig, he couldn't be more excited to finally let it out.

"I wanna do this right," LaGreca said of honoring his favorite NHL team now as it's official play-by-play man. "Being a fan of the team, you fight for hockey, right? But you fight as a Devil fan too. You’ve got two other teams in the market. And to represent New Jersey - now, with the Nets gone - it’s the only professional team that represents New Jersey. I wanna be able to honor those fans and do the best job for them.

"Hopefully, they’ll forgive me for my 20 years with the Rangers and I’ll be able to prove to them that I truly am not just saying it, but this is a team that I’ve loved since I was a kid."

You can watch an extended version of the 1-on-1 interview here: