Dave Feschuk: Phil Kessel has an answer for the ‘You can’t rely on Phil’ camp: the NHL’s ironman record

If the best ability is availability, Phil Kessel is about to become the Wayne Gretzky of NHL durability.

When he takes the ice in Monday’s game against the Maple Leafs as a member of the Vegas Golden Knights, the 35-year-old Kessel will tie Keith Yandle for the NHL record for consecutive games played. Yandle took hold of the record in January, when he passed Doug Jarvis’s mark of 964 consecutive games, which had stood for more than 35 years. But when Yandle was made a healthy scratch for a Philadelphia Flyers game in April, Kessel became the NHLer most likely to beat Yandle’s mark of 989 straight games.

So long as Kessel plays Monday and again Tuesday at San Jose, he will have played in a record 990 regular-season games in a row, not missing a start since he made his debut with the Maple Leafs in November of 2009.

Kessel, of course, has never been the picture of a bulletproof, chiseled-from-granite athlete. But then, nobody ever said the NHL’s all-time ironman needed abs of steel.

“When you look at him, you wouldn’t think he’d be that guy with the ironman streak,” Auston Matthews told reporters in Las Vegas on Sunday. “He’s had an incredible career.”

Gary Roberts, the former NHLer who has long been a trainer to NHL stars like Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos, once told a story about the time he suffered an injury working out alongside a group of pros. Among the group was Kessel, who had long earned a reputation as a reluctant attendee of off-ice training sessions.

Said Roberts: “I get hurt and Phil says to me, ‘See? That’s what happens when you train too hard.’ ”

Morgan Rielly, Kessel’s longtime teammate, said Kessel has more than occasionally played up his image as an out-of-shape schlub.

“A good example of that was when he took a picture with (the Stanley Cup) with all the hot dogs,” Rielly said. “He is self-aware.”

But Rielly said there’s no doubt that Kessel has done what’s necessarily to play the game he loves. Kessel overcame cancer around the time of his NHL debut with the Boston Bruins. And there’s no doubt he’s played through considerable pain en route to the precipice of becoming the first NHLer to play in 1,000 straight games.

“You’ve got to find what works for you, and Phil has done that,” Rielly told reporters recently. “He did work hard and he did put in the time. He’s an amazing athlete. He’s a strong guy. He loves the game … I think there always has been more to Phil than meets the eye.”

If there’s always some luck involved in dodging injuries, Kessel has made his own, too. He’s a genius at avoiding contact with anything that isn’t a puck. In the three seasons previous to this one, for instance, Kessel was among 257 NHL players who played at least 3,000 minutes. Only one of those players took fewer hits than the 77 Kessel absorbed, according to NaturalStatTrick.com. (That player, by the way, was Yandle, who took a league-low 41 hits over that span). Only one player delivered fewer than the 25 hits Kessel was credited with throwing (and that player would be Johnny Gaudreau).

“I’ll say this: Phil’s a guy that plays with his legs and his hockey IQ,” Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said recently. “So he’s not in harm’s way in certain areas that other guys might be. Yet he still has the puck a lot. So when you have the puck, you’re going to get hit. So obviously, he’s a guy that’s found his way around the ice that is aware of his surroundings.”

Kessel hasn’t taken a fighting major in most of a decade, since he took a right to the kisser from Vancouver’s Alex Burrows on “Hockey Night in Canada” in 2013. And if Jarvis’s streak saw him build a reputation as one of the premier defensive forwards in the sport, winning the Selke Trophy in 1984, Kessel has rarely been celebrated for his commitment to defensive details. As of Sunday, his career plus-minus of minus-148 ranked second-worst among NHLers since he entered the league in 2006.

Still, Kessel is undoubtedly one of the great shooters of his generation. Since Kessel debuted in the NHL, only Alex Ovechkin has put more shots on goal. Only six players have scored more goals. And Kessel has scored many when they matter. He led the Penguins in goals over two Cup runs in the springs of 2016 and 2017. His trademark wrist shot, delivered at full stride while leaning on his preferred noodle-flex stick, will go down as one of his era’s most potent weapons.

The streak, of course, included some truly abysmal stretches of hockey from Kessel in Toronto. It wasn’t long before Kessel was traded by the Leafs to Pittsburgh in the summer of 2015 that Toronto team president Brendan Shanahan lamented that the Leafs employed players who “give half efforts and … don’t appear to enjoy playing here,” a character profile that immediately brought to mind Kessel for anyone who had watched Toronto play that season.

“You can’t rely on Phil,” former Leafs coach Ron Wilson said in 2015. “Phil’s problem, and I think it’s pretty much how Phil’s been his whole career, is that he is two weeks on and two weeks off.”

It was around that time that Kessel appeared to begin to take his craft more seriously. He began training in the off-season with Roberts, who marvelled at the raw speed and power Kessel could exhibit despite his not-so-impressive physique.

“His power and strength — I would put him up against my No. 1 guy, which is Stamkos,” Roberts said at the time. “We did sled pulls one day. (Kessel) was in a group with McDavid and Stamkos. The first five sled pulls he beat everybody because he has so much power over 40 yards. But then the last five sled pulls, he was last.”

Which was to say: At the time, Roberts figured Kessel had some work to do improving his endurance. Now that he’s on the doorstep of the NHL’s ironman record, Kessel has certainly found what works for him.

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