Q&A | Lyon talks smalltown upbringing, journey to Buffalo

Alex Lyon is one of the most interesting people in hockey.

Unlike many goalies or professional athletes, Lyon doesn’t believe in superstition. He’s not active on social media. He’s solely focused on one thing, which he calls a year-round job: stopping pucks.

Lyon has played in nearly every corner of the country, carrying his thoughtful and charismatic personality with him as he plays for the fifth different team in his NHL career in Buffalo.

A native of Baudette, Minnesota, and the “State of Hockey,” Lyon – like many Minnesota natives – grew up watching the old Western College Hockey Association. Despite winning Minnesota Senior Goalie of the Year at Lake of the Woods High School, he wasn’t recruited to any local schools and instead continued his family legacy of going to Yale.

Lyon is no stranger to being the underdog; it’s become a key dynamic of his mentality. Following his three-year career at Yale, he signed as an undrafted free agent with Philadelphia in 2016-17. From there, he spent seven years moving between the AHL and NHL before finally earning a full-time role the past two seasons with Detroit.

• Tickets for Wednesday's home game against the Red Wings

He’s taken on a workhorse role early in his Sabres tenure, having started the first six games of the season. He’s posted a .924 save percentage on an NHL-high 198 shots faced and earned his fifth career shutout against Florida on Saturday.

Sabres.com spoke with “The Lion King” following practice on Friday to talk about his time growing up in small town Minnesota, his AHL championship pedigree, and one of the longest hockey games ever played.

Sabres.com: You’ve been with five different NHL organizations. What’ve you learned about how to adjust to a new team quickly?

Lyon: “I think what you learn is it's not worth worrying about things that just don't matter. Being able to control what you can control. At the end of the day, I keep a job if I can keep the puck out of the net and I can win games. So that's always where my focus remains.”

Sabres.com: You were a fourth-generation Yale student, what does it mean to you to continue that family legacy?

Lyon: “I'm actually quite a bit of a contrarian by personality so I didn't really want to go there. I talked to them pretty early on in the process. This is all 15 years ago now but I was the kid who was like, ‘Oh, my dad went there, there's no way I want to go.’ For sure happy now, but I don't think that my family is the type of family where we live and breathe Yale Bulldogs. It's not the kind of person I am, that's not the kind of person my dad is. It's cool for sure. Obviously you're proud of going to that kind of institute.”

Sabres.com: You’re a Baudette, Minnesota kid, won Minnesota Senior Goalie of the Year. Was there pressure to go to one of the schools in Minnesota or even North Dakota?

Lyon: “I would have loved to, for sure, but I wasn't recruited there. I grew up every weekend watching the Gophers [University of Minnesota], North Dakota, Duluth. I liked them all. Actually, when I was there it was WCHA – so Wisconsin, Denver. Colorado College was really good at that time. Those are schools that I love, but I just wasn't very highly recruited to be quite honest with you and so academics swayed me into [Yale].”

Sabres.com: You’re one of two NHL players to come from Baudette. There were just over 20 male students in your graduating class at Lake of the Woods. How do you honor your hometown?

Lyon: “Like anybody in your 20s, you kind of stray away from it and maybe explore different avenues of life. But, the older I get, the more I find myself wanting to find those roots. When you're from a small town, it's just a different way of life. Especially Northern Minnesota, we were so isolated, and it's just what’s normal to me, and I try to embody that blue-collar mentality especially and try to bring that to any team that I play on.”

Sabres.com: You also played football and baseball in high school, which position did you play that most correlates to goaltending?

Lyon: “I would say golf probably is the most similar, just because it's so individualistic. Goalie is largely an individual sport wrapped in a team sport; it's like being a pitcher or quarterback that way, but the mental side is so important.

“But I will say playing football especially taught me how to play sports with emotion. Football is a very emotional game. I think it really helped me to be to use emotion and enjoy playing with emotion and getting excited. I like that aspect. I like playing with emotion and passion. I think it’s really important.”

Sabres.com: You grew up on an island (on the Lake of the Woods in Minnesota) going to a one-room school with your sister until age 7. What was that experience like?

Lyon: “The story actually stretches further every time somebody writes about it.”

Sabres.com: What is the right story?

Lyon: “Well, my sister went there for a period of time. We left the island when I was six or seven, and I don't really remember living on the island, but we lived on the island where there's a resort. My parents manage a resort and you see stories – I'll tell the story, and then all of a sudden, I'll read the article, and they'll be like, ‘They rowed [to school] in a splintery, wooden rowboat.’ That's not what happened. We had electricity and normal human living conditions. I don't really even remember that experience.

“My sister would probably remember it more. She's five years older than me, but certainly a cool story to have, a unique way to grow up. I remember my parents were always doing stuff around the resort. I remember that part of my life a little bit, but we moved back to the mainland and lived a largely pretty normal existence, à la small town, as normal as I can.”

Sabres.com: You played in the longest AHL game in history in the 2018 Calder Cup playoffs with Lehigh Valley and stopped 94 of 95 shots over 146 minutes and 48 seconds. How would you describe what it was like playing in a game that long?

Lyon: “It’s grueling, honestly. It’s brutal. That was actually the second night of a back-to-back, so that made it significantly more tough. But it's cool. Afterwards physically, mentally, you're pretty worn out, but we also won the game so I always think about that game, and I always think about the other guys. I know Alex Nedeljkovic pretty well now, he was the other goalie, he played amazing. There’s some funny stories from that game. There are some I can't say on the record, but yeah, a crazy experience.”

Sabres.com: You won the Calder Cup with the Chicago Wolves in 2022 and played in nearly every playoff game in that run. What’d you learn about what it takes to win a championship?

Lyon: “Winning a championship is very difficult, no matter what league or if it’s youth or whatever. It taught me a lot about the right way (to play) and the next year, I was with the Panthers, and I was lucky enough to kind of ride the wave there to the final. Those two years really just taught me a lot about championship habits, championship mentality, confidence, belief.

“I would say that those two teams, the single most common thing that they had was just belief. When I was there with Chicago, our team was really good. We won I think 50 games that year, and we were pretty dominant. We kind of had that in the back of our mind for a long time.

“Florida was different because we had just snuck in and it’s just amazing to me to see the big dogs on that team now. Obviously they've gone back-to-back, and in retrospect it looks way different, but at the time, we were just living in the moment and enjoying ourselves but they're also grinding as well.”

Sabres.com: You’ve been in the same shoes as Colten Ellis as a young goalie trying to make a name for yourself in the NHL. How can you use your experience to teach him about what it takes to take that next step?

Lyon: “Goalie is really hard just in general. It’s like golf, it’s frustrating. I don’t know if you play guitar but guitar is the same way. You fail a lot more than you succeed. I never view myself as somebody who’s mentoring a young guy. I learn a lot of things from him, and I hope that he can learn things from me as well. Goalie is just evolving so much all the time that once you think that you know the way, that's usually when bad things happen.

“You're always on the razor's edge of anxiety and confidence. In terms of coming up through the minors and grinding through that, it's just about mental toughness. And for every one guy that can get through that situation, there's 500 that don't get through that. That's what I hope I can impart, it's just about bringing good habits every day, and grinding and being a great teammate. If you continue to put good in, you'll get good out.”

Sabres.com: As an undersized goalie comparatively to the league average, how do you tailor your game to play bigger?

Lyon: “For sure, have to always be cognizant of trying to present bigger and play bigger. It’s just math at the end of the day, a bigger body takes up more space. As a small guy, you always have to find ways to overcome and adapt and try to watch other guys. But it's also about belief, honestly at the end of the day, and having that confidence that you're going to stop every puck and that you're going to try to win games and be competitive. That's really what it comes down to.”

Sabres.com: You were given the (player of the game) sword after Wednesday’s game, how excited were you to channel your inner Jack Sparrow?

Lyon: “Game days, things for me get a little weird and I get a little bit wired. I looked like a crazy person in that picture. It was nice, honestly. Just relief when you go 0-3 to start and last year in Detroit, we went 0-2-1 or something like that. It's stressful. It really is stressful. And the whole season is stressful, but especially that first few games. I was just relieved and happy for the guys. I mean, the guys have really been grinding, and they put everything they had into that game. So, just really happy for the boys.”

Sabres.com: Sticking with movies, what’s the story behind the “Lion King” nickname?

Lyon: “That's just my name, honestly. That's just happened organically. I really had nothing to do with that. It goes all the way back to when I was in Omaha in junior and at some point every arena starts playing the lion roar when I make a save. It's just the natural life cycle of things, it always has been.”

Sabres.com: Goalies are unique, what superstitions do you have?

Lyon: “I’m anti-superstitious. I think a lot of goalies go through this life cycle, but you get to a point where superstitions take over your life and the more you play goalie, it's not like the superstitions become less. You just add and add and add and add.

“At least for me, I got to a point where it was almost crippling mentally and so I was just like, ‘You just can't live that way.’ You really can't. And if you're gonna play professional goalie for 15 years, you can't live in that (mindset) for 15 years. I made a conscious effort at some point to just get that out of my system. If you have great habits, the most important thing for a goalie is it's a daily, 365-day-a-year grind and I learned that from the guys that I played with: Bob [Sergei Bobrovsky] Cam Talbot, Brian Elliot. They're just diligent workers, hard, great work ethic, diligent workers. And it's really the characteristics of the best goalies I’ve been around.”