“Who is Lars Eller?”
His 10-year-old daughter Sophia will sometimes pose that question to Alexa, simply because part of the response gets the family cracking up.
“Alexa says, ‘his nickname is the Tiger!’” Eller laughed.
It’s a nickname Eller earned years ago during his time in Washington, when the team invited life coach and speaker Tony Robbins to run a seminar for the group, which had a very energetic and up-tempo vibe. The forward had been sitting in the front row, and his close proximity to the stage resulted in Robbins calling him up.
“He wanted you to yell out your spirit animal, yell it out in front of everybody. I yell out, ‘TIGER!’” Eller said. “Everybody was just dying laughing. Ever since that day, that’s been my nickname.”
Delving deeper into the question of ‘who is Lars Eller,’ well, he’s a father to Sophia and 3-year-old son Alexander; husband to wife Julie; and of course, a veteran NHL forward and the first Danish player to win the Stanley Cup, doing so in 2018 when he scored the Capitals’ Cup-clinching goal.
Eller grew up in Rødovre, Denmark, a suburb of Copenhagen. He describes it as a normal middle-class town, saying the people there are blue-collar and hardworking, using his father as an example.
Olaf Eller made a name for himself as a coach after wrapping up his own playing career that featured stops in the Superisligaen, the highest-level league in Denmark. He oversaw a team there before taking over Denmark’s Under-20 men’s national team that competes in the World Junior Championship. Olaf handles all of that in while holding down his full-time job as a teacher.
With parents in different forms of education - his mother Margit ran a daycare in their home - it’s no surprise that Lars appears to have inherited a love for learning, as he is constantly reading. Eller has about four different books going at the same time: one he travels with, one he keeps in the locker room, one in his living room, and one in the upstairs of his home.
He mostly sticks to non-fiction, and his current tomes include a biography about a Danish soccer player, along with a book about the human body and biology. “It’s about the history of how we used to live versus how we live now,” Eller explained. “How our bodies have changed throughout the years… why we're getting sick and all these things in like a 10,000-foot view. That one's pretty good.”
While Denmark is a country not necessarily known for hockey, Lars’ entire family loves the sport. He has two older brothers who were already playing when he was born on May 8, 1989, so Lars tagged along with them and his father to the rink.
“I almost grew up there,” Lars said. “I think I started on skates when I was 2, the first time, and I fell in love with the game really early. Denmark doesn't have a great hockey tradition or culture, but in the town and the city where I was from, there was a strong hockey culture, especially within my family. So, hockey just came very natural to me.”
Lars’ younger brother Mads followed in their footsteps, and was actually teammates with Tristan Jarry for two seasons of junior hockey with the Edmonton Oil Kings of the Western Hockey League, winning the Memorial Cup together in 2015. Jarry helped Mads, now back in Denmark playing in the Superisligaen, adjust to playing and living in North America for the first time.
“I actually drove him to the rink every day, because his Danish license didn’t translate to Canada, and he technically wasn't allowed to get a car,” Jarry said. “So, I took him, because he lived a couple houses down from me. We were actually really close. We did anything and everything together.”
The family resemblance between Lars and Mads has been uncanny for Jarry, who said it’s like playing with the same person.
“Same characteristics, everything,” the netminder said. “They're both fast players, they both shoot the puck really well. They both have high hockey sense. You see where Mads got it from, just playing with Lars now. It’s definitely weird, to just go from playing with his younger brother to playing with the older one. It’s pretty cool.”
As for Lars’ own junior hockey experience, he moved to Sweden at age 16 to play for Frolünda, where he had a notable teammate of his own during that time. Eller and Erik Karlsson played together at both the junior and senior levels of the organization for two seasons.
Unlike Mads, Lars didn’t have a billet family, living in his own apartment during his days in Sweden. Lars had always liked helping his mom in the kitchen as a kid, so he enjoyed the process of figuring out how to make his own meals. Lars is partial to Italian-style cooking, saying lasagna is his specialty, and he also loves seafood. So, the oyster shucking part of the Nova Scotia scavenger hunt was particularly enjoyable for Eller.
“When I lived in Montreal, we would get a lot of oysters, and I always thought the best ones were from Nova Scotia when we would go out to restaurants in Montreal. So, I learned how to shuck them,” he said. “All the guys, it was like their first time, so it's hard. I must have ended up eating like, 15-20 of them. Raw with a little bit of red wine vinaigrette, it’s the best.”
It wasn’t until Eller was around 17 or 18 years old that he began seriously thinking about playing in the NHL someday, after realizing he could compete with some of the best kids in his age group in Sweden. “I said okay, if I'm just as good as the best players here, then maybe I have a have a chance to actually make it. That was kind of the start of it,” he said. “But until then, I just loved competing and loved playing the game.”
Eller eventually got drafted 13th overall by St. Louis in the 2007 NHL Draft, the highest selection for a Danish player in league history until his friend and countryman Mikkel Bødker was taken eighth overall the following year. He made history again in 2018 after helping the Capitals win their first championship in franchise history. On his day with the trophy, Eller took it to his town’s City Hall, and had a parade from there to his hometown rink.
“My goal was to share it with different parts of the community and as many people as I could, to kind of bring that dream back home and bring it up close to the kids,” Eller said. “We're a small country who doesn’t have a long and glorious hockey history like Sweden and Finland. But we've still been able to produce some pretty good players with some good careers over here. And my hope is that it'll inspire more kids to play hockey and fall in love with the game like I did, because I think it's the greatest sport there is.”
Eller is now in his 15th NHL season, having played parts of the last 14 with Colorado, Washington, Montreal and St. Louis, entering the year with 954 career games.
“Knock on wood, he’s almost played 1,000 games in the NHL,” Jarry said. “Just playing against him for that long, he's always been a good penalty killer, he's always had a good shot. He's passionate. He’s early at the rink every day working out, he's taking care of himself. I think that just translated to the career that he’s put together.”
