DiPietro’s hard road to Bruins net inspired by late mom

BOSTON -- The idea of a shutout started to creep in, late in the third period. Michael DiPietro had fought so long and so hard to even get to this point, to gain a foothold in an NHL that had seemed constantly just out of reach, but now, with his first NHL win in the books, his first NHL shutout seemed possible.

Then, the puck clanged off the crossbar.

There it was, he thought. His mom was giving him a helping hand.

As DiPietro said later, “Definitely a good, friendly bounce there, and it wasn’t just by happenstance.”

Back home, in Amherstburg, Ontario, the idea was much the same. Assunta Fenty-DiPietro, Michael’s stepmom, was going through her usual game routine -- “basically 9,000 heart attacks,” as his dad, Vic, put it -- when she connected those same dots.

“She’s like, ‘That’s Rebecca, I know it,’ she says. ‘Not tonight!’” Vic DiPietro said. “She was jumping three feet in the air and the whole nine yards.”

It wasn’t until that morning, Oct. 22, that DiPietro had put it all together. He arrived at TD Garden, knowing that he was getting the start that evening against the Nashville Predators, his third of the season. But it was only when he saw the purple signs at the arena, the hats, that it clicked.

It was Hockey Fights Cancer night.

Rebecca DiPietro was first diagnosed with breast cancer before her 30th birthday, after she found a lump in her breast. She died on Nov. 2, 2004, at 39 years old. Michael was 5.

Which was why it meant so much to him when he realized what the game between the Bruins and Predators signified, why there was so much purple in the arena, why it might not just be an average game. 

“Just kind of think it was the perfect storm,” said DiPietro, who had earned his first NHL win six days earlier, on Oct. 16, eight seasons after his NHL debut, on Feb. 11, 2019, for the Vancouver Canucks. “I’m a big faith guy, believe in God, so I think everything happens for a reason. Very blessed to have that happen. At the end of the day, it’s a win for the team, but I think to me and my family it’s a whole lot more than that, it’s a culmination of a long journey.”

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When asked about that journey, DiPietro needs just a single word.

“Hell,” he said.

It’s a succinct choice for a player described as remaining relentlessly positive, relentlessly upbeat, even as the NHL career he had so long worked for and so long anticipated kept remaining out of reach.

He had made his debut at 19 years old for the Canucks, after being taken No. 64 in the 2017 NHL Draft, 47 picks ahead of Bruins starter Jeremy Swayman. DiPietro would make only single appearances in 2019-20 and 2021-22 before being traded to the Bruins on Oct, 27, 2022.

It was after the trade that DiPietro set out on the drive back home, a three-day undertaking that quickly turned from onerous to frightening when the 12-hour trek from Vancouver to Bozeman, Montana, included becoming stranded on two mountains, adding an extra 14 hours to the drive. That was followed by a trip to the Spengler Cup in Davos, Switzerland, where the airline lost all his luggage, all his equipment, meaning he couldn’t participate.

It all felt like too much.

“It was very, very scary a few times and, so when I said I was really close to quitting hockey, I was very, very close,” DiPietro said. “It just seemed like the cards were stacked against me. … It was a lot of adversity in such a short window. And then your career’s going the wrong way.”

It was somewhere in this time period that Vic DiPietro picked up the phone and called his son’s agent, Rob Smith, who had spent almost 28 years as a police officer before retiring in 2010 and becoming an agent. He asked him to call his son.

DiPietro had some questions about becoming a cop.  

“I reached out to Mikey and it was his decision what he was going to do, but I could tell when I first started to talk to him that he was going to grind it out,” Smith recalled, of DiPietro, who signed with him in 2013. “His call to me was, what do you think, OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), Windsor Police, what would be the best route to go type of thing?

“We discussed it a little bit, but I really never had the feeling that he was going to bail.”

DiPietro, though, said he was “seriously contemplating” retirement. He was tired of the slog, of the chances he wasn’t getting, of how far away his dreams were starting to seem.

But giving up was not part of how he was raised.

“My dad never lets me quit anything,” he said, as he reminded him of his contract, his obligations, of the chance to go out and have fun, to perhaps find the joy amidst the grind, even as he struggled with other players in his draft class finding success, winning the Stanley Cup, as he remained in neutral.

Then, he went to Maine.

“I fell in love with the game again down in Maine,” he said, of the Maine Mariners of the East Coast Hockey League, where he spent the 2022-23 season.

DiPietro would spend the next three seasons after that in the American Hockey League with Providence, earning the Aldege “Baz” Bastien Memorial Award the past two seasons, joining Dustin Wolf (2022, 2023) as the only two goalies to win it in consecutive years, and winning the AHL player of the year award in 2026. He signed a two-year deal with the Bruins on June 30, 2025, after getting significant interest from other NHL teams, preferring to remain with Boston, though he is now in the final year of his contract.

“I think those moments, they test your real resiliency,” DiPietro said. “Ever since I got to Providence it’s kind of being where my feet are, being appreciative of it, because it was a long road to get here, and a lot of ups and downs.”

Knowing that DiPietro was unlikely to survive waivers this fall, and knowing that he had earned a chance, the Bruins cleared room for him on July 1, trading Joonas Korpisalo to the New York Rangers. It all but guaranteed the goalie the spot behind Swayman on the NHL roster.

Not that DiPietro was convinced.

“Never once did I think that, ‘OK, that’s my job, right?’” he said. “It meant a lot to me to get the opportunity to actually fight for a spot when you come to camp, but I knew it was a job to earn and that’s kind of my mindset going into it. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, I’m already on the team.’ We were in the hotel until right after Game 3. Let’s just wait to move in and then the team tells you to move in and you’re like, ‘OK, you kind of take a deep breath.”’
 
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That was what led him to be in the crease on Oct. 22, as his worlds collided, as his experience with cancer met the night on the Bruins calendar dedicated to supporting, fundraising and acknowledging those touched by the disease.

For DiPietro, that has been his whole life.

Rebecca had been diagnosed with breast cancer at 29 and battled as it spread, having Michael about halfway through her journey.

“She fought, she lasted nine years with cancers coming and going,” Vic DiPietro said. “And the miracle is she had Michael in between her cancers.”

He got her for five years.

“You’ve got this starry-eyed kid looking at you,” Vic DiPietro said. “I tell the story, because Rebecca was here and she passed away in our home because she wanted to be home, and there’s days where literally you go in the bedroom and I’m with her and then, shut the door, and you’ve got to be the class clown because you’ve got this little kid looking at you, like, hey, what’s going on?”

He tried his best to keep his son grounded, to ensure he got to be a kid. But, he acknowledged, he certainly did have to grow up quicker than he would have hoped.

“When you lose a parent that young you rely on your family to tell you a lot about her, but I definitely have a few memories of my mom,” DiPietro said. “I just want to make sure I do everything I can the right way and just be appreciative of every day because she passed away (at 39). It puts life in perspective.”

Asked what he wanted people to know about his mom, he said, “Just that she was loving.”

“If you knew Rebecca, honestly, her beauty -- when she walked in a room, she lit up a room, just that presence,” Vic DiPietro said. “And her inside was more spectacular than her physical appearance. She was a firecracker. And I know if she was here to share this with me right now, she’d be on fire for her son. I know that for a fact.”

It was important, to him, to Vic, not to let the loss define either of them. It was something that had happened to him, to them, it was far from the whole picture.

“Unfortunately, he’s been a very mature individual at a very, very young age,” Vic DiPietro said. “I wasn’t going to let him use his mom’s death as an excuse. … I didn’t want to screw up his life and I didn’t want him to use it as an excuse. So we just took it day by day, goods and bads and we worked through it.”

DiPietro took it to heart.

He knows that he is not the only one impacted by cancer in the Bruins dressing room, in the NHL, in TD Garden. He knows how wide the disease’s reach still is.

“I think it’s really important to bring awareness and obviously a lot of fundraising to it,” he said. “Cancer definitely has affected everybody in this room in one way or another and it’s a terrible disease, but the NHL in general does such a good job of doing outreach programs and it’s just an inspiration.

“It really means a lot to me to be a very, very small part of it.”

He can do that because he is here, now, finally settled into a spot in the NHL. Eight years after that debut, DiPietro is part of a goalie tandem that has the Bruins sitting atop the Atlantic Division standings, and that phone call to his agent seems like it happened so long ago.

It might have taken him longer than average, but DiPietro is not old, certainly not by goalie standards. He laughs when it’s posited that he could still have a 15-year NHL career ahead of him.

“And like I told him, if he ever wants to be a cop, he can still be a cop,” Smith said. “He can be a 40-year-old rookie in the Windsor Police Department or something someday if he wants to, but now I think his career looks pretty bright.”