Deryk Engelland's Road Back To Vegas - Part One

It's rare that a hockey player has their career come full circle the way Deryk Engelland's has.
You can look at the players who went out on top with a Stanley Cup like Ray Bourque or had a stamp of sentimentality like Wayne Gretzky's farewell to the league, but so few enter the latter part of their career like Engelland has.

The week of the 2017 expansion draft, Engelland's agent called and told him that the NHL's newest franchise, the Vegas Golden Knights, had expressed interest in selecting him and that he'd call back with more information. Deryk and his wife, Melissa, paced around the house for two days thinking about the possibility of Engelland's professional hockey journey returning to where it had begun with the Las Vegas Wranglers in 2003.
It was another two days before the phone rang again.
"Finally, Tuesday night he calls me and says: 'Here's the deal, will you take it or not?' I said '100%, I'll sign whatever it is. I want to play there,'" Engelland said. "So, we agreed upon the deal and we had to print out the contract that night, sign it, and get it back to them."
"Obviously, we were pretty excited, so we opened a bottle of wine. We had some wine while we were trying to get our dang printer to work and it wasn't working. We couldn't for the life of us figure out how to get this thing to work. Melissa's friend came over and she ran to Walmart for us, bought a second printer, brought that back, we hooked that up, and we still couldn't figure it out. So, we're scrambling and they're texting us to hurry up because they need the contract. I'm trying to tell my agent that we can't get this printer to work. They told me they'd need me at the team's offices at 6:30 a.m. the next morning because they had to submit it by 7 a.m. I got there at 6:30, we printed it, I signed the contract, and then I met George McPhee and that was that."
What followed that hectic contract signing was a season that no one in the hockey world could have predicted.
"That's the most memorable year of my career for sure," Engelland said. "Not only with the success the team had, but also with everything that happened with October 1. I just remember us coming together as a community, as a team, my speech, and the guys. Going all the way to the Final was surreal. We defied all the odds even though people said things like 'These guys are just everyone else's scraps' and things like that. We gelled together right away, and we just ran with it. We had a lot of fun as a team and we had a close group. We ran with it that year and it made for the most memorable season I've ever had."
The NHL had become a central focus in Las Vegas for the first time and fans went crazy for their first major hometown team. As fans flocked to T-Mobile Arena to cheer on the Golden Knights, Engelland was reminded of his start in professional hockey.
After finishing his junior hockey career in 2003, Engelland signed his first professional contract with the Calgary Flames organization who assigned him to the ECHL's newest team: the Las Vegas Wranglers.
The assignment to the ECHL wasn't a downer for Engelland. At the time, it was just the next step for a kid from western Canada trying to find his place in the world.
"It wasn't discouraging being in the ECHL," said Engelland. "I had gone from finishing my junior career and thinking that I'd better get a job and figure my life out. I was still playing hockey, so I was pretty happy about that. Had that not happened, I probably would have had some sort of trade or became a firefighter."
The move to Las Vegas placed Engelland into an environment he'd never experienced. He was living with teammates in an apartment complex on West Flamingo Road as he adjusted to life in a big city in the U.S. The Wranglers were enjoying high attendance rates and were capturing the attention of hockey fans in southern Nevada. The team skated through saloon doors to take the ice at the Orleans Arena and were playing their way to an impressive 43-22-7 record in their first year in Vegas.
As he became accustomed to his new surroundings, Engelland's life changed after a game when his future wife caught his eye.
"I met Melissa at McMullen's after a game," said Engelland. "They had a pretty good set up for us there after games where we could get anything on the menu for about $5 per guy. She happened to be there one night, and I started talking to her. Then she came to a game and we were supposed to go out that night after the game, but she didn't come out. I had gotten into a fight on the ice that night and she thought I was a little bit crazy. I had to call her and explain myself that that was part of my job, so she ended up coming out. Shortly after I met her, I got called up, so we spent a lot of time talking on the phone. Now here we are 17 years later."
Engelland spent the bulk of that year with the Wranglers as his relationship with Melissa began to take shape. He played 35 games for the Wranglers learning from head coach Glen Gulutzan that season and another 26 with Lowell in the AHL.
Come the 2004-05 season, he stayed in Las Vegas for the whole year racking up 21 points (5G, 16A) in 72 games to go along with 138 penalty minutes. He'd become comfortable living in the Valley but, at the end of the season, he decided not to re-sign in the Calgary organization and moved on to sign a two-way contract with the AHL's Hershey Bears. He admitted that it was hard to leave Las Vegas, but he and Melissa made the move east as his career continued.
The Engellands continued to spend their summers in Las Vegas and called the city home during the offseasons. They became ingrained in the community and, when fate brought them back to southern Nevada full-time in 2017, the Engelland family stepped up to give back to the city they call home by introducing the Engelland's Vegas Born Heroes Foundation. Through the foundation, Deryk and Melissa continue to honor community members and charities who dedicate their time and energy to making the city a better place.
"We didn't know exactly what we wanted to do at the time, but once October 1 happened, that made us want to honor the people that were impacted at our games and we wanted to meet those people and have an experience for them," said Engelland. "After that first year, we still wanted to honor those people but expand it to honor people who go above and beyond in the Las Vegas community. We've spent the last two seasons honoring those people and it's been a lot of fun. My wife is definitely the brains behind it all and I couldn't have done it without her. We've met a lot of great people and worked with a lot of great charities. People are doing amazing things that maybe don't get the recognition that they should. We're just trying to show them a little bit more so they can keep doing what they do for people."
Long before he called Las Vegas home, the seeds of a long hockey career were planted north of the border.
"As a kid, I can remember that every second I wanted to be playing," Engelland said. "If it wasn't on the ice, it was rounding up the neighborhood kids and playing street hockey or, when it was cold enough, going out on a pond or a backyard rink."
He was born in Edmonton in 1982 but spent the majority of his childhood in British Columbia. His ties to his hometown remained through his passion for following the Edmonton Oilers. The team rattled off five Stanley Cup championships from 1984 to 1990 with a roster that featured names like Gretzky, Messier, Kurri and Coffey. Year after year, Engelland rooted for the Oilers with the exception of the 1988-89 campaign - but he had a good reason.
"I cheered for them as far back as I can remember except for the one year," said Engelland. "In 1989, I made a bet with my grandpa for $5 that Calgary was going to win the Cup, and I actually won that bet. That's probably the only time I rooted against the Oilers back in the day."
Inspired by the triumphs of the Oilers and Flames, Engelland's own hockey journey began to take shape at the local rinks. Each day became a step to take and, with the help of his parents, Engelland kept putting one foot in front of the other.
"When you grow up playing hockey every single day you dream that you can make it as a hockey player," Engelland said. "Your parents do anything and everything they can to help you live out your dream whether it was getting up early to drive you to the rink or driving to tournaments on the weekends."
As a 15-year-old bantam player in Sicamous, B.C., Engelland began to receive attention from teams in the Western Hockey League. Letters from a handful of clubs resulted in a rookie camp invitation for Engelland to try out for the Kamloops Blazers. When he was cut from that team, he returned to Sicamous to play Junior-B hockey for the Sicamous Eagles.
Unsure of where hockey would take him from that point, Engelland caught the eyes of scouts with his physical play during that season in Sicamous and was invited to join the Moose Jaw Warriors of the WHL. After practicing with the team and appearing in his first two games of top-tier junior hockey action, Engelland made the 1,163-kilometer journey back to Sicamous to finish the 11th grade and spend the summer compiling credits for his senior year of high school.
When the summer of 1999 came to an end, Engelland was back in Moose Jaw preparing for his first full season with the Warriors. The average day in Moose Jaw that first year consisted of getting to school in the morning, spending the day finishing his 12th grade classes, leaving for the rink at 2:45 p.m. and taking the ice at 3:45 p.m. for team practice. That daily rhythm was paired with a 72-game schedule that took Engelland and the Warriors all over Manitoba, British Columbia and the Northwest United States. Hours on the bus were spent talking with teammates, finishing schoolwork and firing up the portable DVD player as the team covered ground going from city to city.
Though he's years removed from those days, Engelland said the relationships formed on a junior hockey team last a lifetime.
"I remember almost everyone from those teams having been there for four years," Engelland said. "I came up with Brian Sutherby, Nathan Paestch, Kyle Brodziak, Tomas Fleischmann, guys like that. I remember every one of them. You form a tight bond because you're 16-20 years old in a new town so guys on the team become your family. You get really close with them and, when I see them now, we catch up on old things even though that was about 20 years ago. You don't see as many guys as much anymore but when you do, you remember the good old times."
Moose Jaw was bounced from the WHL playoffs and Engelland was starting to think about his offseason workouts when he heard there was interest in his game from a handful of NHL teams heading into the 2000 draft.
"I hadn't really started working out or training in the summer at all, and I got a call a few weeks before the draft in Calgary that a few teams wanted to do some fitness testing with me and do some interviews," Engelland said. "I scrambled for about 10 days and went up there and did awful on the testing. Luckily, someone saw some potential in me, and I ended up getting drafted in the sixth round to New Jersey."
His name was called 194th overall by the Devils and he attended the team's rookie camp and training camp in the fall. New Jersey had just won its second Stanley Cup in franchise history and was returning another competitive team.
"It was a complete eye-opener going to my first camp," said Engelland. "I was lining up next to Scott Stevens and guys like that. I got drafted in 2000 and they had won the Stanley Cup that year. I still remember not really hitting Scott Stevens but maybe rubbing him out a little bit and, back then, that was a no-no. I remember him just cross-checking me in the back as hard as he could. I got up and he said in not-so-nice words 'Don't ever touch me again.' I remember that plain as day and that was my first wake-up call going to an NHL camp. I definitely listened to him, that's for sure."
The intimidation from the team's captain was a learning experience for the 18-year-old Engelland who returned to Moose Jaw to continue his junior career. He remained with the Warriors through the 2002-03 season but when the year came to a close, he decided to sign a contract with the Calgary Flames rather than joining the Devils' system. Training camp in Calgary resulted in a send down to the Lowell Lock Monsters of the AHL and, when the team decided he didn't fit in the AHL right away, Engelland was sent to join the Las Vegas Wranglers to start his professional career.
Click here for Part Two.