From Vegas to Pittsburgh

For a while, there was a debate in the Zucker household over whether they should get a dog. But that debate came to an end a couple weeks ago, when Jason brought home a Golden doodle puppy who was given the name 'Sir Winston Furchill,' or Winston for short.

"The kids have always really, really wanted one," Zucker said. "And I think for me, I wanted to be able to be home to train the dog and really be a part of that, because I enjoy that side of it."
It would have been difficult during the season, and even during the summer, too, with all of the kids' activities. So Zucker figured that there would never be a better time to do it, since they all have to be home anyway right now.
"He's a great little pup," Zucker said. "He's been very cute and fun to have. We're still in the training process, but he's doing really well. The kids love him and we're having some fun."
Instagram from @carly.zucker: Welcome to the family, sweet pup. Just an FYI, I was not consulted about this decision, but I love him 🤍 @jason\_zucker16. Taking suggestions for names!
Fun, but chaotic, as Jason and his wife Carly have their hands full chasing their two youngest - Hendrix, 2, and Stella, 1 - around the house while Sophia, 10, has been keeping herself occupied with school. But Jason wouldn't have it any other way.
"It's great to have time with Carly and the kids, away from hockey for a while," he said. "I cherish these moments."
Especially since Zucker always knew that he wanted to be a dad, coming from a big family where he is one of five kids. He has two older brothers, Evan and Adam; a younger brother, Cameron, and a younger sister, Kimmie.
While Zucker was born in Newport Beach, Calif., his parents, Scott and Natalie, moved the family to Las Vegas when he was two months old. He grew up in a small house about 20 minutes from the famous Las Vegas Strip - not in a hotel, contrary to popular belief.
"I've been asked too many times to count which hotel I live in," Zucker said with a laugh. "I think people think that it's just the Strip and nothing else. It's actually an awesome city, there's a ton to do there. It's a very normal city outside of the Strip and that's something a lot of people don't realize."
Growing up, Zucker and his siblings loved action sports, with Scott buying dirt bikes and four-wheelers for the family (Jason estimates he rode his first one at age 10). They would rent a cabin for about a week every summer in a town called Duck Creek, Utah, where they would take those dirt bikes and ride them around.
But of course, Zucker's first love when it came to sports was hockey. He started playing roller hockey, which was big in Las Vegas, when he was just two-and-a-half years old, following Evan and Adam into the sport.
With Natalie being a former competitive figure skater and dancer, Jason said they love to chirp Scott about who passed down the athletic talents. "We always give my dad a hard time that we got our athletic talents from our mom," he said with a grin.
At the time, Scott was in residential and commercial construction, and some of his projects included building roller hockey rinks. When Jason was in kindergarten, Scott would pick him up after school and bring him to the site he was working on.
"He'd bring me to the roller rink and one half of it was done before the other, so I would sit there and I would skate all day while he was building," Jason said. "Then when he was done with work, I would get in the car and we would go home."

Jason also started playing ice hockey when he was 7 years old. The summer before his first year of PeeWee hockey, when he was 11 years old, he was playing in the annual Brick Tournament in Edmonton when a team from Los Angeles asked if he would be interested in playing for them.
He was, so for the next two years, Jason commuted from Las Vegas to Los Angeles on the weekends, doing all of his schoolwork online like Sophia is doing now. The team rearranged its schedule to accommodate Jason, whose parents would take him to the airport on Thursday nights.
"My parents would have to walk me to the gate," Zucker explained. "I was what they called an unaccompanied minor. They'd bring me to the gate and the flight attendants had to sign a paper that I was good to get on the plane and do all that."
It was a short 40-minute flight, and once he landed, Zucker would go to a different teammate's house each weekend.
"It was fun because it was sleepovers, right? You got to sleep over at a friend's house two nights a week," he said. "They would go to school in the mornings and most of the families that I would stay with, either the mom or the dad would work from home or wasn't working or something of that sort. So, when the kids would go to school, I would just hop on my computer and do my work downstairs or wherever it was."
Zucker said he's always been responsible, even as a kid, so he was able to handle the situation pretty well.
"Obviously, I got homesick at times and missed my family and all of those things," Zucker said. "But I grew up a lot. For me, I was always pretty responsible as a kid. I'm not going to say I was perfect by any means. But that was definitely another time where I had to grow up quick and start doing a lot of it on my own."
It was an eye-opening experience not only from the off-ice aspect, but the on-ice aspect as well.
"I was a defenseman at the time, actually, believe it or not. And I was the worst player on the team," Zucker chuckled. "So, I was the best player in Vegas and I went there and I was the worst player on the team."
Jason returned to Las Vegas to play his Bantam years when he was 13 and 14 years old. But soon enough, it was time to leave home again. He moved to Plymouth, Mich. when he was 15 years old to play for the Compuware Midget Minor AAA team, living with teammate Jared Knight and his family.
After two years with that program, Zucker joined the U.S. National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he was teammates with Bryan Rust. He was also teammates with Stephen Johns, who is from Wampum, Pa. The two of them lived together with a billet family during that time.
"I actually went with Stephen to Wampum when we played in Ann Arbor," Zucker said. "We drove down, it was like four, five hours or so. I didn't realize how close it was to Pittsburgh."
At that point, Zucker was used to moving around. What he wasn't used to was the snow. He says Las Vegas gets colder than people realize, with temperatures sometimes dropping into the 20s and 30s at night. But they rarely ever get any snow, and if they do, it's "super light." So Zucker was actually thrilled about getting the chance to experience some real Midwestern snowfalls.
"The first blizzard we had we got like six feet of snow, literally couldn't get out the front door," Zucker said. "So, Stephen and I jumped out of the second floor into the snow to shovel the driveway and everything for our billet family, so it was great. It was fun."

Heading into his freshman year at the University of Denver, Zucker was drafted in the second round (59th overall) by the Minnesota Wild. He became the first Nevada born-and-trained player to be selected in the NHL Draft, and it made all of the constant moving around so worth it.
"I knew that I wanted to be a hockey player and that was just what we had to do," Zucker said. "There weren't a whole lot of questions or concerns about it. It's just what we have to do to be there and to have a chance to make it, you know? There's no guarantee, of course, that we're going to make it by any means. But we're going to give ourselves a chance and that was what it was all about."
After two seasons in the NCAA, Zucker turned pro in 2011 and went on to spend some wonderful years in the Minnesota Wild organization. On the ice, he developed into a top-six forward who brings speed, an overall two-way game and an ability to shoot the puck.
Off the ice, he developed into a husband and father of three amazing kids who is active in the community, winning the King Clancy Trophy in 2019, which is given annually to the NHL player who best exemplifies leadership qualities on and off the ice and who has made a significant humanitarian contribution to his community.
That experience was made even more special because the NHL Awards are held in his hometown. In fact, when Zucker was a teenager, a family friend said that the league was looking for local kids to help out and invited him to attend.
"So I carried the Vezina Trophy," Zucker said. "Ryan Miller won it that year. My dad said that's the only trophy you'll never win. So that's the only one he'd let me touch (laughs)."
He and Carly first met during the 2013-14 season, when his Denver teammates were now seniors and had advanced to the NCAA West regional final, which was taking place in St. Paul, Minnesota. Zucker had recently undergone surgery, so he was at home while his Wild teammates were on the road.
He took the Pioneers to a bar in downtown Minneapolis, where they had a big couch set up for their group. That's when Carly, who was there for a friend's bachelorette party, walked over with an armful of coats.
"She's like 'Hey, can I set these on your couch?' And I kind of looked at her and was like, 'Well, as long as you guys come hang out with us, then yeah, you can put them on our couch,'" Zucker recalled with a laugh.
With that, Carly's group joined Jason's and they all got to talking. At one point, one of Jason's friends told Carly that he played for the Wild.
"The funniest part is they're on TV at the moment," Zucker laughed. "So, she sees that and is like, 'They're lying. This is the funniest part that they think this is going to help them get girls.' She ended up finding out later, of course. But that was kind of the funny part."
From there, they started dating - and coincidentally enough, they bonded over a shared love for action sports.
"Carly was a sideline reporter for snowcross racing, so when we first met we immediately connected through that," Zucker said. "Actually, the first summer Carly and I started dating was the last time that we went to Duck Creek. I brought Carly with so she got to experience it."
It wasn't until around six months into their relationship that Jason first met Sophia.
"I give Carly a ton of credit," Jason said. "She and I dated for roughly six months before I ever met Sophia. And it was, in my opinion, a very valuable six months for Carly and I just to be able to build our relationship together and realize how important that side of it was, and not just be introducing Sophia to this guy that she just met, frankly. I give her a lot of credit for that and I think it was something that for me, it made it all that much better when Sophia and I did get to meet and kind of started spending some time together."
Minnesota's first road trip of the 2014-15 season was the annual West Coast swing, where they stayed at a resort in Newport Beach - where Jason still has family - called Pelican Hill.
'Then that summer, I was planning to propose to Carly and I was like, 'This place was unbelievable, so we should go there,'" he said. "It's Newport Beach, so it's nice weather and everything will be great. Then this story is absurd, but there was a photo that Carly had seen long, long ago of this wedding venue. So, I proposed to her there and we actually saw a wedding happening that night, so we were like, 'We should just get a brochure and just check it out.'
"Well, that photo was the first photo that she had seen that she had tagged on Pinterest like 10 years ago. And so it was crazy that happened that way. We decided that day we were going to get married there. So, we did it to the day, one year later, at Pelican Hill."
Instagram from @carly.zucker: ONE YEAR 🥂 Happy Anniversary, @jason\_zucker16! You've changed our lives and I'm so proud to be on this journey with you. But let's be honest, @charliecoyle\_3 tossing these flower petals really steals the show 🤣
Their wedding, which Sophia was a part of, is one of their favorite memories together - along with the days that Hendrix and Stella were born, of course. Jason said Sophia loves being a big sister to her baby siblings.
"She takes a lot of pride in that," he said. "She's great playing with them and all those things. It's great because we're already seeing the sibling rivalries of sorts happening pretty quick."
The couple has become beloved throughout the hockey world for how open they are about their relationship in interviews and on social media, with Jason crediting Carly on helping him find the balance between being smart about what he says but also not reverting into boring clichés.
During a recent Q&A the couple did on Carly's Instagram, they were asked for relationship advice - and Jason jokingly responded, "Drink more wine." And Carly said with a laugh, "That was going to be mine!"
Those kinds of interactions are what make their relationship so special to them.
"We just try to have fun with things and try not to take life too seriously all the time," Jason said. "In a world where everything gets taken out of proportion in so many ways, we try to just have fun with it and enjoy life the best we can, because we're very blessed to have three healthy kids, great families on both sides and careers that we can look forward to and those things."
They also do what they can to give back. After Jason met a young patient named Tucker Helstrom during one of the Wild's annual holiday visits to the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital, he and Carly became incredibly close with him and his family.
After Tucker passed away from osteosarcoma the following summer, Jason and Carly decided they wanted to help his legacy live on and build a legacy of their own as well. They built the Zucker Family Suite and Broadcast Studio, which is a special place within the hospital where kids and their families can go to watch Wild games, record their own TV shows and escape from their rooms, even if it's only for a short time.
They started the #Give16 fundraising campaign to help raise money for it, which includes a hat and T-shirt campaign currently going on at UNRL.Co (more information about the Zucker's initiatives can be found there).
Jason and Carly are hoping to find a way to branch the #Give16 campaign into Pittsburgh, where they have found a house that they love and plan to move into once it's time. Right now, when they're not chasing around the kids and the puppy around their home in Minnesota - or setting up wine tastings after they both got super into wine following a trip to Napa Valley last summer - Jason and Carly usually have just enough energy to watch some TV.
They also recently finished the Netflix show Ozark, which they loved. Jason plans on eventually binge-watching ESPN's Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, as he's always been fascinated by what makes the all-time great athletes tick. It's one of the reasons he majored in psychology at college, the other reason being that he has OCD.
"When I was younger I was just all over the place," he said. "Part of it was my OCD and part of it was that I was so superstitious it became such a negative. So, it was basically A) trying to figure out and help myself, but then also B) why are Michael Jordan, Kobe (Bryant), Lebron (James), (Wayne) Gretzky, (Sidney) Crosby all so good at what they do?
"I'm not going to put Crosby in this because I think he's very different, but guys like Kobe and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, everyone thinks they're (jerks). And it's crazy their mentality sometimes, how they go about their business. And so it's always fascinating to me how that works and how they are as people and what makes them tick and perform as athletes."
Now that he's teammates with Crosby, Zucker said he gets asked all the time what the Penguins captain is like.
"What I tell everybody is I'm very surprised at how good of a person he is," he said. "I don't mean that like he should be a (jerk), but I mean it like it's incredible how nice he is. It's very, very cool and refreshing to see somebody of his level and his magnitude be as nice as he is. It just made the trade that much better."
In just 15 games with Pittsburgh, Zucker recorded six goals and 12 points playing on Crosby's wing. And he's looking forward to building on that in the future. In the meantime, he's watching video to familiarize himself with the Penguins' systems and staying in shape.
"I'm training like (the season will resume)," he said. "We're hopeful that it is. We're really hoping that we can continue playing and win the Stanley Cup this year."