Reaching career milestone, Stars' Hamhuis more confident than ever

If there is a poster boy for understated in the National Hockey League, it might be Dan Hamhuis.
It has been so from the moment we met with him in Florida in the days before the Nashville Predators made him the 12th-overall pick in the 2001 draft.
It was so for the first almost 500 games of his NHL career in Nashville and it has been so for the last 500 in Vancouver and now, in Dallas.
Quiet. Humble. Reserved.

But let's make one thing very clear as we ponder Hamhuis and the milestone that will be his 1,000th NHL game on Tuesday night against the Los Angeles Kings: Never mistake any of those qualities for being passive or retiring or dispassionate.
In fact, one of the most enlightening parts of reporting this story is the passion that people have for Dan Hamhuis and his game. And perhaps more critical, the passion that Hamhuis himself has for this game and the passion he has for his future in it.
You hardly get a question out when Nashville general manager David Poile is reciting the numbers -- almost 500 games in a Predators uniform (483, to be exact -- an average of 80.5 games per year for the young defenseman), the first-ever defenseman picked by the Predators in the first round.
In many ways Hamhuis was the template for what would follow for one of the NHL's success stories in terms of drafting and developing homegrown stars.
Even now, from Poile, the only GM in the Predators' history, there is a wistfulness when he talked about Hamhuis.
When Hamhuis became an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2010 season, the Predators were in transition. There had been talk of relocation, a potential purchase by Canadian businessman Jim Balsillie.
"I wish we'd never lost him," Poile said. "I don't think he wanted to go anywhere. We didn't want him to go anywhere. But it was at the wrong time in our franchise when we just didn't have the money to pay him the contract that he deserved."
In a perfect world, or rather in Poile's version of a perfect world, not only does Hamhuis stay in Nashville, he's still there today.
"I think if all things would have been equal, he'd probably still be a Predator today and that would have been great for us because not only would he have been an extremely good player, but the person and the character he is -- the role model that he is -- for anybody that you bring into the organization, you couldn't ask for a better role model than Dan," Poile said.
Hamhuis is a roots guy. Probably not a surprise to anyone who has spent any time with him. He loved Nashville. It suited him. From the small British Columbia town of Smithers, Hamhuis played his junior hockey in Prince George. He met his future wife while in high school and the couple would go on to have three daughters.

"We were all really excited about being drafted by Nashville and we just thought it would be such a great fit and just the person I was and where the organization was," Hamhuis said. "I've been really fortunate over the 14 years to play in three unbelievable organizations."
On the ice, he became one of the NHL's steadiest defensemen, while off it, Hamhuis and his wife dove into causes in the Nashville area.
But it wasn't necessarily an NHL experienced that had a profound effect on the kind of player and indeed person that Hamhuis would become, but rather during the 2004-05 lockout when he, along with other emerging young NHL stars, played a season in the American Hockey League after his rookie NHL season.
His coach in Milwaukee was Claude Noel.
Even though Hamhuis was not yet 22, Noel included Hamhuis in the team's leadership group in Milwaukee. He sat young prospect Ryan Suter next to Hamhuis in the locker room because he felt Suter could learn from Hamhuis.
"He has some really good core values," Noel said. "You could see what he was. He had really good values. All the things you look for in an individual. All the character values."
He lists them: Respect of his peers and for the game, trust of coaches.
"He just had all the things you're looking for," Noel said.
At the end of that season, Hamhuis finished second to Niklas Kronwall as the top defenseman in the AHL, and Noel recalls meeting with Poile and telling him he would never trade Dan Hamhuis.
Hamhuis, the father of girls ages 5, 7 and 9, recalls meeting with Noel in coffee shops with members of the team's leadership group. Noel would photocopies handouts of leadership stories or ideas and how they might applied to hockey.
"Still to this day, it's one of the coolest things that I always look back on that," Hamhuis said. "I think it really gave me a lot of confidence in myself going forward to speak out in the dressing room and he really taught me.
"He met with me one-on-one a bunch of times and just kind of said, 'You see the game well, you need to share that in the room with the guys, what you say, it matters.' And I was always a quiet, shy guy and that really gave me a lot of confidence in myself to start probably growing as a leader."
So, here's the deal.
Anytime a player gets to 1,000 games in the NHL, it's time to pause, offer appreciation and praise. But it's another thing to do so while not just getting older and staying healthy, but also having your game and your role evolve.
"I tell you what," Dallas head coach Ken Hitchcock said, "a thousand games as a defending player is awesome because it is a hard game if you're a defending defenseman or you're a 200-foot player."
And Dan Hamhuis is that.
"He plays heavy minutes every night," Hitchcock said of Hamhuis and the milestone. "That's awesome because, first of all, you have to stay relatively healthy, and second, you've got to be a really competitive guy.
"And he's a very underrated from a compete standpoint."
And here's another thing: Some guys as they get to 1,000 games, their roles diminish. They become smaller, if you will. No shame in that. None.
But Hamhuis has, in some ways, reversed the space/time continuum this season.
And so a career that looked a year ago to be on the wane, is now vital and he has become vitally important to what the Dallas Stars hope to accomplish this season.
"Obviously, the team didn't perform that well," Hamhuis said of last season, his first in Dallas after spending six often-emotional years in Vancouver with the Canucks.
"It was kind of an off year for a lot of guys, individually. The team didn't perform well, so that makes it harder again. I wasn't good enough. I needed to be a better player," Hamhuis admitted. "I don't feel that I worked well with the coaching staff, and I don't think they got the best out of me the way things were handled. Conversations and communication, there was certainly a lack of it. And when it came, I felt it came the wrong way. So it was certainly a tough year."

But Hamhuis tried to take what was a difficult year, especially through the first half, to challenge himself, to use the adversity to be better.
"It always makes you look a little deeper inside and it makes your roots grow a little stronger and your base stronger again, and I feel like you come back stronger out of those things," he said. "That was what I wanted to take out of last year. I felt my second half was much better. But certainly a lot of lessons learned and motivation for this year."
One of the first people that Hamhuis called when he signed with Dallas in the summer of 2016 was his old Hockey Canada pal, Jason Spezza. The two have known each other since they were teens and were drafted in the same draft class, Spezza going No. 2 overall in 2001.
They both have houses full of girls (Spezza and his wife have four girls) and they both enjoy a good, spirited conversation.
Spezza describes Hamhuis as an integral part of the team's leadership group.
"Oh, he's a big cog on our team. He's pretty opinionated, too, though he comes off quiet and he's very diplomatic," Spezza said. "He respects the game and the process of it, but he's a guy that has a strong opinion of what's going on and I think that helps. I enjoy going to dinner with him because I like talking about different things. We have good banter back and forth; we have a lot in common."
"But in the dressing room, he's been around. He's not a guy that just comes and punches in the clock and leaves," Spezza added. "He pays attention to everything that's going on, and by doing that, I think his experience has really shown because he watches all situations that all his teams have been through.
"Just an elite mind for the game."
Hitchcock didn't know that much about Dan Hamhuis vis-a-vis last season. He knew Dan Hamhuis from being a part of an Olympic gold medal hockey team in Sochi in 2014 and Hitchcock knew that was the kind of player he wanted on his team when he agreed to come back to Dallas to coach the Stars last summer.
"When I talked to him when I got hired, he said he had a really poor start to the year. He couldn't find a niche. He couldn't find a role -- first time in his life," Hitchcock said. "And he was really discouraged by not being able to find a role on the hockey club. So when we defined the role right away and said, 'This is what you are,' what I'm seeing is the player that I normally saw before. This is, to me, who he is.
"This is the way he plays. He plays way bigger than his size. He's way more competitive than people give him credit for and he's really smart. He's got a great stick. He's learned to play against a lot of top players. He's able to shut down top players night in and night out because he's got such great vision defensively. But this is the guy."
Hamhuis and Hitchcock met for a long chat the day Hitchcock was announced as the new head coach in Dallas. The two talked about Hamhuis's role and how Hitchcock was going to rely on him to play hard minutes against good players.
Hamhuis was, to put it mildly, excited.
"I think it fits well with kind of how my career's gone over the years," he said. "I think it was in my third year in the NHL, (then-Nashville coach) Barry Trotz told me that that was going to be my role that year was to play against other teams' top lines and it was exciting -- it was an exciting challenge at that time, too. I was playing against guys that I was watching on TV as a kid -- Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman -- and what a cool challenge. My job was to shut these guys down. It was really, fun.
"And another role I've kind of had through my career is that I've always played or played a lot of minutes with young defensemen and guys that are new to the group. It's been fun helping guys through that. This year, it's been the combination of both back in that shutdown role and playing with Greg (Pateryn), who's been around, but not a lot of NHL game experience. And I feel like we've worked really well. It's a role that I like. I've never been a spotlight guy. I probably shy away from it, if anything."
It is difficult to overstate how important Hamhuis has been to the evolution of this Stars team over the course of the season. With veteran minute-munch Marc Methot limited to one game since Nov. 6, Hamhuis and defense partner Pateryn have evolved into the team's de-facto shutdown pair. They regularly lead the team in ice time, they invariably lead the team in shorthanded ice time, and they have earned the respect of their peers in the room and beyond.
"What you see is what you get with Dan," said Pateryn, who began this season having played in just 94 NHL games. "It's impressive to be coming up on 1,000 games. I mean, that's an incredible accomplishment and it's well-deserved, and I think a lot of it goes back to his routine and his professionalism about the game. He takes care of his body on and off the ice. He has a routine before the game that he does consistently and I think that's what keeps him going every night and keeps his consistency on the ice."
Hitchcock recently cited the play of Pateryn and Hamhuis as an example of the leadership that has come from unexpected sources as the season has progressed.
"Hamhuis and Pateryn, in anybody's wildest dreams, never thought that that would be a shutdown pair, and it's worked for us," Hitchcock said.
None of this is much of a surprise to Vern Fiddler, who played with Hamhuis in those early days in Nashville and now provides occasional analysis for Stars games in Dallas for FOX Sports following his retirement at the end of last season.
"He's one of those guys who really settles things down back there. He never makes the big mistake. He's very steady," said Fiddler.
"He's quiet in the sense that he's not running around talking about this or talking about why they're not doing this. He just minds his own business as far as that, and he's one of those guys who will step up when the team needs him the most. Those are the guys that are the best leaders because they're not necessarily always talking, but when they do talk, it seems like everybody's ears and eyes are on them.
"He's always been like that."

Noel is a professional scout for New Jersey and his travels have him watching Dallas games on a regular basis. He sees no decline in Hamhuis's game, even as he approaches the 1,000-game milestone.
"I watch him play and he just stabilizes the back end," Noel said. "He's not wearing down. He's still a good skater. He still does a lot of things well."
While 1,000 games is a mark worthy of celebration, it is also understandable that it comes with some reflection, too.
"Your mindset changes through the years," Hamhuis said. "At first, you're just so excited to be there and you can't believe you're going to play 80 games in that first year and you're eyes-wide-open. And then after that you kind of -- I don't know, you kind of get used to it. It almost gets a little bit comfortable and I think you have to be aware of complacency in the league and then it kinds of comes around back again where when you're older, you start to appreciate different things. I love the leadership part of it and you really start to want to make a contribution there and kind of mentor and leave. I don't want to say 'leave a legacy,' but that's one thing I want to do. Every organization I've played for, I want to leave it better than when I came in."
"As you get older, you've every night you've got to prove yourself again," he added. "Because young guys are trendy and old guys aren't. And you've got to prove that you're still valuable every night and I've enjoyed that challenge. I think it's brought the best out of me this year.
Hamhuis turned 35 in December. His contract is coming to an end at the end of the season.
If there were questions about how much longer he wanted to play and what he wanted the end of his career to look like, a year ago, they have been more than answered with his play and the team's success this season.
But that begets more questions. Like, what now?
Hamhuis laughs and says he's not even going to trot out the old, "I'm just focusing on hockey' cliché" because, of course, he wonders on some level, and at some times, what lies ahead. He's the father of three young girls. Of course he thinks about the future.
"Because I'd love to keep playing, but there's a lot of things that effect the decision," he explained. "Family decision is big in whatever I do. It not only affects me and my hockey career, but we've got three kids full-time in school, and a wife that's been incredible over the years in terms of her flexibility and support for me because it effects them, too.
"In a perfect world, I'd love to be back in Dallas because we really love the organization. I love the direction the team's going. I love the guys on the team. And from a family standpoint, we love where we live in Dallas -- we love our neighborhood. We're making a lot of friends outside of hockey again and the kids are thriving in the school system in Dallas. So, ideally, we'd love to come back here. But we'll see where things are at the end of the year. If that's not the case, then we go down the free agency road again."
The one thing that is seemingly without question, though. It's that Hamhuis has reasserted himself as a bona-fide NHL defender, and whether it's in Dallas or somewhere else, it won't be surprising if 1,000 games isn't a signal of an ending, but merely another signpost along the way.
"After this year," Hamhuis said, "I feel confident that I still have good hockey left in me."
This story was not subject to approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club. You can follow Scott on Twitter @OvertimeScottB.