Moore says unconventional journey to Bruins 'couldn’t have worked out better'

When William Moore thinks about his future, about his approaching enrollment at Boston College and where he might focus his energies, he dismisses music right away.

How could he even consider majoring in music, in performance, in piano?

“I’m still undecided on that,” Moore said, when asked what he intends on studying. “We’ll see. Probably won’t be piano direction because I feel like I’d kind of just be cheating the system. I’d rather do something that I’d actually learn.”

Which is not to say there’s nothing left for Moore to learn on the piano. Lately, given that he’s feeling “classical music-ed out,” he’s turned away from the type of music that throughout his life was filled with pressure, the type of music on which he was tested and judged, and toward pop music, toward movie scores.

“I learned 'Interstellar,'” he said, of the 2014 movie for which Hans Zimmer was nominated for the Oscar for best original score. “That’s a fun one.”

Moore, the second-round pick (No. 51) in the 2025 NHL Draft by the Bruins, has twin passions, the piano lessons that he began, startingly, at age two, and which led him to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York at age 10 after winning the Little Mozarts International Competition with his rendition of Chopin’s “Polonaise in G Minor,” and the sport he discovered on his own and could not live without.

Now Moore, an 18-year-old center, can see the next stretch of his life arrayed in front of him, starting with his enrollment at BC in the fall, and eventually leading to a spot on the Bruins, an NHL job that he has long coveted.

Of course, none of this was ever meant to happen.

“It’s surreal to think about it like that,” Moore said. “One extra month of my mom not being pregnant and I end up on the other side of the world playing a completely different sport. So I’m glad everything worked out like it did. I’m in a good spot right now. I’m very happy where I am. It couldn’t have worked out better.”

* * * *

When Moore was born, he was showered with soccer jerseys, maybe three or four uniforms, at least one a complete blue-green-and-yellow Brazilian kit. That, of course, was the sport he was destined to play, given that his mother Vanusa was from Brazil.

They put him into soccer at the local community center, an arena that was attached to a hockey rink. But instead of diving wholeheartedly into the sport, Moore kept running away. It happened so many times that Vanusa joined the coaching staff, as an assistant, so she could focus on tracking down her son and returning him to his rightful place.

“He would run away and would go and watch the other people play hockey,” Vanusa said. “We were not very familiar with it. It was very hilarious because we didn’t have the vocabulary – he was little, probably around three or so – and he would say, ‘I want to play that.’ And it’s like, ‘No, honey, let’s go back to soccer.’ It happened every single time.”

Moore wanted no part of the sport. He wanted no part of skiing, either, the sport his father grew up with. Finally, they gave in. It was hockey for him, a sport he was unlikely to have even tried had the family not found its way to the Greater Toronto Area.

And that happened by a quirk of fate, when Vanusa Moore found out she was pregnant while the family was on a one-year work assignment in Canada.

“I thought I had a problem with Tim Horton’s, like I couldn’t smell Tim Horton’s, I was always sick,” she said. “I told the doctor maybe I have an allergy.”

She did not have an allergy.

Moving while pregnant – and very sick – or moving with a baby seemed too daunting to even attempt and, so, they stayed. Mississauga was an area that reminded them of Switzerland, of Geneva, where they had previously been, and it started to feel like home.

For Moore, so did hockey. At six, he found his way to a coach, Chris Stevenson, who nurtured him and his passion, even as his family learned along with him.

“I’m not huge on kids playing up, but seeing the talent that he had, it was a no-brainer for me,” Stevenson said. “And then meeting him, even at six years old, he’s looking you in the eye, he's shaking your hand. … He’s literally the most coachable kid I’ve ever met in my life. The more you pushed him, the more you got out of him.”

Stevenson recalled a moment when Moore was 12 years old, when he was talking the players through one of his systems and Moore stopped him, saying, “Coach, that’s not usually what you tell us.”

“In that moment, you could realize how much he paid attention and how much his attention to detail was on point, because 90 percent of the other kids just nod their heads, like oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, sounds good,” Stevenson said. “Where he was really like, are you sure that’s what you want? And that really opened my eyes on how much he was listening. Those are the kids you want to coach.”

He was competitive, too, a player who went back and forth with Michael Misa, the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft by the San Jose Sharks, as the best on the team for years and years, a player who when it was predicted before the draft that he could potentially go in the first round, did not celebrate his position, instead becoming laser focused on how he could be better than those listed ahead of him.

“That’s who he is,” Stevenson said. “That’s kind of the thing where he got drafted, I think that’s probably the best thing. Because when you get him motivated and angry, he just constantly pushes to be better.”

* * * *

Moore is not necessarily a sure thing. He has significantly more filling out to do, and he has to refine his game, which is what he intends to do at Boston College, alongside five more Bruins prospects, including James Hagens.

He is not the no-brainer that Misa is. But maybe he is not that far off, with all the attributes that scouts look for: the competitiveness, the creativity, the ability to play with the puck and drive offense, and, certainly, the smarts.

“He’s got a lot of physical maturing to still do and I think the college environment will lend to him to be able to do that with their strength program,” Bruins general manager Don Sweeney said. “It’ll be a nice test for him, the skill, the hockey sense, the skating ability, they’re right on track for him to jump in that lineup and compete for ice time.”

When the Bruins sit down with prospects before draft day, they have them fill out a questionnaire, asking about hidden talents, about outside interests. There are a range of answers, from the players who have picked up a guitar just to noodle around, to the players who have truly studied, who have real talent.

It was clear Moore was the latter.

“This one, he really plays piano and he’s damn good at it,” Sweeney said.

It was early on that Moore had been drawn to the piano his family kept in their home, starting on a keyboard and rapidly progressing. It was not easy to find a teacher willing to take on a pupil quite so young, at just two years old, but the family was persistent.

“We noticed that we put any notes on the piano and he would just go there, he could barely reach and he would play [them] back,” Vanusa Moore said. “So we thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is so cool.’ Piano came naturally to him.”

He added violin at four.

“I just love the sounds, honestly,” Moore said. “I feel like they’re just heard differently in my ear, especially in just like everyday music. I appreciate everything in production, how long that stuff takes to make and how difficult it is to do.

“So yeah, I just love having an ear for it. It just keeps me going every day.”

It was different than hockey.

“I felt like I was always a natural with it, rather than hockey where I had to like practice hard, work hard, all that stuff, where piano kind of came naturally, didn’t have to practice that much as a kid,” Moore said. “I was always told I never practiced enough, like my parents would get upset because I’d value hockey over it.”

Moore took lessons up until he was 16, until he left for the United States National Team Development Program, his dual citizenship allowing him to participate. It was at that point that it didn’t quite make sense anymore.

As he put it, “They don’t cover that.”

* * * *

There is one more element to Moore’s story, and it’s one that he quickly dismisses.

He was a baby and, so, he doesn’t like to think of the serious infection he had as a kid as any sort of adversity, any sort of trial, though his mother’s description of the discovery of his hearing loss, the diagnosis of the infection, the time at SickKids Hospital in Toronto indicates it wasn’t so simple.

It was pointed out by a teacher at school, one who had noticed that when she was talking to him from behind, he wouldn’t respond. She suggested they get him checked. When they did, the doctors noted “huge lymph nodes,” according to Vanusa Moore.

“We didn’t know what it was,” she continued. “SickKids only takes the most serious cases that they don’t know what it is, right? So you’re worried about cancer and losing him and everything. He was four years old, he was seen by the top of ear, nose, and throat infections and he said, 'He has a huge infection, that’s why the lymph nodes are so engorged and the infection is very close to his brain and he doesn’t hear.'”

Doctors believed that the infection was growing as Moore grew, getting worse and worse and beginning to impact his hearing. He had adapted, learned ways to mold himself and his lack of understanding to the environment around him.

He needed surgery.

“He worked 10 times harder to process that sound,” Vanusa Moore said. After the procedure, though, “He could hear, and it was like a different life. … Flushing a toilet was horrible for him. It really scared him for a while.”

It got easier, though, and the visits to SickKids became fewer. He got to focus more on his music and his hockey, got to a place where now, at 18, he can wave off any hint of adversity faced and overcome. That’s not how he thinks of it.

Instead, Moore is looking ahead, to his next step, his next stop, off to Boston College, where he hopes that he can prove himself on the ice.

“I’m a big body but I provide a highly dynamic offensive game, I think I have high IQ,” Moore said. “My main strength is playing my game and making my linemates better. So very creative, very good puck skills and just bring an element of offense to the team.”

Moore is reveling in where he has gotten, in what he has become, in the ways that that tiny kid in tiny shin pads and jersey knew that he was destined not for the pitch but for the ice. He knew. And while hockey never came as naturally to him as piano did, he made himself into what his parents never anticipated, never could have predicted: a player on the verge of the NHL.

“If you give [that] guy an opportunity he’ll take it,” Stevenson said. “I think his ceiling is endless.”