Aston-Reese, Rust and Dumoulin finish 2nd in charity Esports tournament

The trio of Brian Dumoulin, Bryan Rust and Zach Aston-Reese finished in second place in the NHLPA Open featuring Fortnite, a charity Esports tournament, on Monday - earning a $50,000 prize that will be distributed to charities of their choice.

"I wasn't expecting second place," Dumoulin said with a laugh. "We just wanted to give it a good effort. We felt like we had a team that could go deep but we weren't sure, we weren't counting our chickens before they were hatched. But we put up a good showing there. It was pretty fun."

Aston-Reese served as captain for Team Pittsburgh, one of 28 trios of professional hockey players that competed in the charity tournament (click here for the full list of teams). Team St. Louis finished in first place.

"I think we were all surprised by how competitive the games were," said Zach Hyman, a forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs who created the tournament along with Colorado's J.T. Compher. "Guys clearly play a lot and clearly play competitively in the arenas. It was fun to watch."

Hyman served as host along with Bil Carter, an Esports and gaming commentator, and Nick Eh 30, a Twitch streamer from Nova Scotia.

"I've been quarantined up with Bryan Rust and we do our workouts in the morning, and we usually throw Nick on the big screen and watch his streams while we're working out," Aston Reese said. "We're pretty big fans."

And there were some pretty big names competing in the tournament, including Nathan MacKinnon, David Pastrnak, Mitch Marner, Sebastien Aho, Thomas Chabot, William Karlsson, Clayton Keller, Travis Konecny, Connor Hellebuyck and Cale Makar.

The tournament was streamed on the ESPN Esports Twitch channel to 3,449,927 total views. There were four total games of Fortnite, with Team Pittsburgh finishing in the top-five in each of the first three games to put them in third place heading into the final match.

Team Winnipeg, who had been in first place, went down early, which opened the door for the "steady" and "sneaky" Team Pittsburgh to move up. During the last game, Hyman kept talking about how they weren't talking about the Penguins trio enough, saying they could make a push for first. And they did, after winning the final game.

"The Pittsburgh boys just played so consistent the whole time," Hyman said. "They were a force and they actually ended up jumping Winnipeg. That was crazy, I didn't see that one coming for sure going into Game 4. Good for them. Those guys can really play and I think it's pretty obvious they play together a bunch because oftentimes you saw all three of them alive in the endgame."

Aston-Reese said their strategy was to make sure they always had good paths to follow as the maps got smaller and smaller because of the storm circles.

"I know the point is to kill other people, but we were just trying to get good rotations and attack from there," Aston-Reese said. "It ended up working out pretty well for us in the last game. That was awesome."