DeBoer, Spott lean on each other through ‘family’ bond after tragedy

EDMONTON -- Pete DeBoer was crushed.

There he was, sitting in front of a Harvey’s hamburger joint in Kitchener, Ontario, on Sept. 1, 2002, just down from a local hospital. He’d hit rock bottom. His gut churned. He was a lost soul, looking for answers that weren’t there.

His wife, Sue, was a week away from having twins. Or so they thought. During a routine checkup, it was discovered that one of the unborn babies had died from complications. Doctors would need to perform emergency surgery if there was any chance for the second to be saved.

This was going to be one of the best times of the DeBoers' lives. Now it was one of the worst. He didn’t know how to handle it. Given the situation, who would?

“That was a low point for sure, in life,” the coach of the Dallas Stars told NHL.com in an emotional sit-down interview this week. “And now that you bring up the situation, I remember it like it was yesterday. My wife’s in the hospital. I’m sitting there. My family is in Windsor, four or five hours away.

“The despair … it’s overwhelming.”

If ever Pete DeBoer needed someone to lean on, to rely on, to help rescue him from this dark and lonely place, this was the time.

That person was Steve Spott. To this day, it still is.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Spott served as DeBoer’s assistant with Plymouth and Kitchener of the Ontario Hockey League, the San Jose Sharks, Vegas Golden Knights and, now, the Dallas Stars. Together, they have helped the Stars get to within six wins of the Stanley Cup, a quest that will continue when Dallas visits the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 of the Western Conference Final on Sunday (8 p.m. ET; TVAS, SN, TNT, truTV, MAX) trailing the best-of-7 series 3-2.

Though winning a Cup together would obviously be a fairy-tale ending, theirs is a story that runs far deeper than any hockey game or coach-assistant relationship. Whether the Stars go all the way or get eliminated by the Oilers, that will never change.

“We’re family, we’re brothers, we always will be,” Spott said. “When you go through a tragedy like that together, it brings a special bond and perspective. Neither one of us have brothers so we’ve been filling those roles for a long time.”

The two men have known each other since their teens. They cut their coaching teeth together in Plymouth and Kitchener, a partnership that resulted in a Memorial Cup title as champions of the Canadian Hockey League for the Rangers in 2003.

But it was the tragedy a year earlier that solidified a bond that’s remained unbreakable to this day.

It was Spott, after all, who came to DeBoer’s aid that horrible day almost 22 years ago. Indeed, it was Spott who found his friend sitting forlorn on the curb, in front of the burger restaurant, mourning.

“It was one of the worst days of all of our lives,” Spott recalled. “I remember just seeing him sitting there. All I knew is that I had to be there for him.”

He did exactly that.

“It’s hard to explain how much of a help he was,” DeBoer recalled, his voice cracking with emotion. “It’s a life-changing moment. And, as I’ve said before, he was a real rock.

“I was a young coach with a young family. It was so traumatic.”

At that time, DeBoer was coach and general manager of the Kitchener Rangers, while Spott was his assistant coach and assistant GM. Spott immediately assumed the bulk of the workload so his friend could deal with the more important family situation.

“Whatever he needed,” Spott said.

“It’s hard to see a silver lining in a situation like that.”

But in this case, there was one.

His name was Matt. He was the second of the twins. While the first baby had died, the doctors were able to save the other one.

More than two decades later, Matt DeBoer is living a healthy, productive life and just finished his sophomore season as a forward with Holy Cross, where he had 19 points (four goals, 15 assists) and was named to the 2023 Atlantic Hockey All-Academic Team.

“He’s our miracle,” Pete DeBoer said.

And, for Spott, his godson.

“We’re family, all of us,” Spott said. “My wife Lisa, his wife Sue, our kids, they’re best friends, they’ve grown up together, played sports together, gone to school together. We don’t have 9-5 jobs. They’ve been each other's support systems for all those periods of time when Pete and I have been away doing what we do.”

In the process, DeBoer and Spott always have each other's backs, dating to when they first met when they were 16. Spott had grown up in Toronto with future NHL player Adam Graves, who became DeBoer’s teammate with Windsor of the OHL in the late 1980s. Soon DeBoer and Spott began hanging out together.

They still do.

During their days working together with the Sharks from 2015-2019, they lived together along with goaltending coach Johan Hedberg in the San Jose area while their families resided back east. The duties were simple: DeBoer took care of the grill, Spott was on cleanup duty.

When DeBoer was hired to coach Vegas on Jan. 15, 2020, he was vacationing with his family in Florida and had no formal clothes with him to wear for his first game behind the Golden Knights bench against the Ottawa Senators in the Canadian capital. Once again, it was Spott to the rescue. DeBoer caught a flight from Florida to Toronto, where Spott picked him up and took him suit shopping before dropping him off back at the airport for his connecting flight to Ottawa.

Spott’s loyalty to his friend is unwavering, on the ice or off. When Bruce Boudreau was hired as coach of the Vancouver Canucks on Dec. 6, 2021, for example, DeBoer was aware that there was interest in bringing Spott there as an associate coach. And why not?

“He’s great at what he does,” DeBoer said. “He’s a great coach, a great teacher. If he looked elsewhere, he’d have a job in a day.”

Instead, the two friends remain aligned.

“Don’t get me wrong,” DeBoer said with a laugh. “We don’t always agree. Sometimes we fight like brothers. That’s part of it. It really is family. I mean, there’s genuine trust and love there and respect.”

How fitting.

“With us, our relationship transcends our jobs,” Spott said. “Having said that, one thing I do know and respect, when we get between these four walls, he’s the boss. There are lines, boundaries that he makes the calls on. But the one thing about him is that he’s never made me feel like an assistant coach. He’s always treated us, and I believe I can speak for the whole staff, like we do have some autonomy and we do have an opportunity to have a say. So, for us, I think it makes it easy for us to have a place to come to work every day.”

What would make all that work seem more worthwhile than ever would be to win the Stanley Cup together. That, Spott said, would be the ultimate. But neither is looking that far ahead. There is still too much work to be done. There are, after all, no certainties in hockey.

There is one certainty when it comes to the DeBoers and Spotts, however. At one point in the future, they will go to the cemetery together and visit the grave of the DeBoers’ unborn son. They have done it for years. And they will continue to do it.

It is, after all, the type of thing that families do.