Undrafted and Undeterred

Back in spring of 2013, new Kraken center Yanni Gourde was having doubts about making to the NHL. He certainly wasn't dreaming about winning back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Tampa Bay Lightning less than a decade later.
Undrafted and just one season removed from a star turn with Victoriaville in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (37 goals, 87 assists in 68 games; league MVP), Gourde was sent down from the American Hockey League's Worcester (MA) Sharks to the San Francisco Bulls of the ECHL.

The 5-foot-9 Gourde, evaluated as undersized by scouts, didn't simply play out the final eight games of the San Francisco demotion. He scored four and added six assists for 10 points, embracing his new teammates and even the fact that Bulls players had to navigate a 35-step staircase to get to their locker room between periods.
Yet Gourde left the West Coast for his native Quebec province with those doubts.
"Did I think I was going to make it out of the ECHL and AHL?" said Gourde on a recent Zoom call with reporters. "Probably not ... to play hockey a long time, that was my goal."
One option for talented North American professional hockey players is to play in Europe. Gourde certainly would have received offers if he chose that direction.
Then Nick Bootland called. The long-time head coach and director of hockey operations for the ECHL Kalamazoo (MI) Wings, phoned to recruit Gourde to play for him.
The conversation was heartfelt on both sides. Bootland had played for Roy Sommer, the winningest coach in AHL history, when Sommer was still behind the bench for the Cleveland Barons in the early 2000s. Sommer loved the way Gourde played all-out every shift, his hard-to-play against style.
"We like to call ourselves a four-letter league," said Bootland Saturday afternoon by phone. "We're not the NHL or AHL. At this level, the connection between the coach and player is what it's all about. If playing with us in Kalamazoo doesn't feel like a fit, no hard feelings. It has to be genuine."

Bootland remembers Gourde's energy coming hard over the phone line, a precursor to the centerman who would soon be dashing to score, set up goals and pester opposing players for Kalamazoo.
"I definitely felt we had something there during the call," said Bootland. "We were a salary-cap league at the time and it was the most money we have ever offered a second-year [professional] player."
On his end, Gourde got off then phone, telling Joe Smith of The Athletic that he and his wife and high-school sweetheart, Marie-Andrée, had a "heart to heart," deciding to give hockey "one last shot." If playing for Bootland didn't work, Gourde was thinking he might return to civil engineering studies he had started and get a better-paying job to support the couple's hope to start a family.
"You have to start supporting your family at some point," Gourde told The Athletic.
Gourde proved out Bootland's hunch and the K-Wings coach's trust in Sommer's scouting report. He scored 15 goals and added 19 assists for 34 points in 30 games.
Sommer called to ask Gourde to come back to the AHL and Worcester, where Gourde's playmaking continued with four goals and 20 assists in 25 game. No drop-off moving from four letters to three.
"We saw every day how hard Yanni worked to be successful," said Bootland. "He had a different drive than other players ... If we did a weights workout he did more. If we moved to a dynamic workout, he did more.
"We saw him become a man, a true professional. He was a lot smaller then, but he worked on that every day too."
Tampa Bay's scouting and front office group noticed. Though Gourde was playing for San Jose's AHL affiliate, he was free to sign with any NHL team. AHL teams typically have a number of players on "two-way contracts" (NHL at one salary and AHL at a lower amount), then fill out their rosters by signing players to an AHL-only contract.

Tampa Bay offered Gourde a standard three-year NHL contract with the two-way option. His finished the 2013-14 season with the Syracuse Crunch and played three-plus seasons for Tampa Bay's AHL affiliate, notching 67 goals and 90 assists in 215 before getting called up for good, playing 20 NHL games to finish the 2016-17 season.
When he joined the recent Zoom call, Gourde allowed that he decided it would be NHL or bust with Syracuse. He resisted the temptation to play in Europe as Tampa Bay's strong roster made it hard to get the NHL promotion. His productive play would likely have been rewarded earlier with teams less deep at the center position.
"I just wanted to get better every single day," he said about continuing his growth and development in Syracuse. "That was my mindset. There were definitely setbacks and times harder than others."
Gourde is thrilled with this next chapter of his NHL life. He pretty didn't stop smiling the entire media call as evidence. He won't start the season in uniform as he is recovering from left shoulder surgery to repair a torn labrum. Fans can expect him back on the ice in late 2021.
He said he was honored to be picked by the Kraken, the team's choice among a talented group of ex-TBL teammates who play as forwards: Ondrej Palat, Alex Killorn, Tyler Johnson and Mathieu Joseph.
"It's pretty nice to know that the team wants you that bad when there's a lot of people that are very talented that were left unprotected," Gourde said. "I was fortunate enough to get picked and get drafted and I'm super excited ... It's going to be a great challenge."
Gourde has studied the Seattle roster and thinks his new teammates will be up to task of delivering "playoff hockey all season."
"I think we're going to be a very hard-working group, and when you look at a hard-working group, there's a lot of potential," Gourde said. "That's the first step to success.
"If you work hard, you're definitely putting yourself in a good position, and we might be one of the teams that play playoff hockey during the (regular) season, just hard to play against during the season. Hopefully it leads us to playing in the playoffs and then we'll see what happens."