Jimmy Hayes is starting to find himself in Boston
The Dorchester native is happy to be home
Jimmy Hayes checks Pittsburgh’s Brian Dumoulin into the boards during a game on Dec. 16.
A stream of cameras and microphones flash in front of Jimmy Hayes. He’s still dressed in his practice gear and standing tall in his skates with a Boston Bruins winter hat giving him a few extra inches. He’s started sporting a new, red beard, which is still in the patchy phase. One question after another flies in at Hayes about playing for his hometown team, what this game means to him and “how does it feel to play at Fenway Park, The TD Garden and now Gillette Stadium?’’ As reporters get their quick cliche answers, “it’s exciting as the local kid,’’ they move on to their next prey in the bustling Bruins locker room and are quickly replaced by a new reporter interested in asking the same questions.
Hayes barely moves. His hands are folded in front of him like an altar boy, and his voice barely rises above a whisper. He’s the local kid and everyone is looking for a piece of him before the Bruins play their archrivals, the Montreal Canadiens, in this year’s NHL Winter Classic, played at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough.
Hayes first stepped foot on the ice just a few miles from the old Boston Garden. When he was four, his grandfather strapped a pair of skates on his feet and sent him onto the ice at the rink in Charlestown, down the road from the family home in Dorchester. While his father “never had a pair of skates’’ in his life, Jimmy took to the ice.
Hayes, his younger brother Kevin, who plays for the New York Rangers, and his friends would walk to the ball hockey rink up the street from their Dorchester neighborhood and play pickup games as often as they could, refining their stick-handling skills and shot. By the time Hayes was six, he was standing out on the ice, outshining his peers.
“He was smarter than most kids at that age. He saw it [the game] at a young age,’’ Jimmy’s father Kevin Hayes, a ticket broker in the city who took to the witness stand in the Whitey Bulgar trial, says. “He was like a sponge, you tell him once and it was alright.’’
Hayes worked his way up the youth hockey ladder in Boston and ended up playing for Brian Day at Noble and Greenough School in Dedham. As an 8th grader, Hayes barely missed making the varsity team. That summer, Hayes did what would become routine for him, committing to become the best player he could. It paid off.
“He was tall and thin and not strong enough [in 8th grade] and hadn’t grown into his body enough at that time,’’ Day says. “The difference between the 8th and 9th grade was immense.’’
Hayes became a top-six forward for Day’s team as a ninth grader and became an integral player for the team his sophomore year. After the season, Hayes decided to leave Nobles to go play and train with the U.S. National Team Development Program, where he played with future NHLers like James van Riemsdyk .
In 2008, Hayes and his family traveled to Ottawa for the NHL draft. The year before, Hayes was considered a top-ten prospect, so he was expecting to go early. They sat up in the bleachers as each pick went by. The first round and night of the draft ended. Nothing. Hayes was still on the board. Come day two, the Toronto Maple Leafs selected him with the 60th pick.
Hayes decided to punt the traditional route of playing in juniors. Instead, he committed to Boston College to play for legendary coach Jerry York. In 117 games, the forward scored 42 goals, added 39 assists and won the national championship with the Eagles in 2010.
After the 2011 college season, Hayes was ready to jump-start his professional career. By that time, he’d already been traded by the Maple Leafs to the Chicago Blackhawks, where he leapt into the line-up. Hayes made his NHL debut against the Detroit Red Wings on December 20, 2011 and scored his first professional goal four days later against the Edmonton Oilers. But Hayes didn’t become a regular for Chicago, a team loaded with talent and in the midst of winning three Stanley Cups in six years. He bounced back and forth between the Blackhawks’ AHL team, the Rockford Ice Hogs, and the Blackhawks before being traded to the Panthers during the 2013-14 season.
Florida is where Hayes found his game. He became a regular in the team’s lineup. By the end of his second season with the Panthers, he looked like a player with promise on a team in the midst of a rebuild. In his first full season in the NHL, Hayes scored 19 goals and added 16 assists in 72 games. At the end of the season, Hayes became a restricted free-agent and thought he was going to resign with the Panthers.
Jimmy Hayes and Montreal’s Lars Eller get into it at the Winter Classic.
Kevin Hayes first heard the report on the radio while driving. A quick sports flash update ticked on. It was the middle of baseball season and the Boston Red Sox were dwelling in the bottom of the American League East. The half-hour updates were mostly baseball related this time of year. Then he heard a hockey rumor.
“They said Elliotte Friedman was reporting that Jimmy Hayes was about a minute away from being acquired by the Boston Bruins,’’ Hayes says, recalling the moment when he heard that his 26-year-old son could possibly be returning home to play for the Bruins, the hometown team, from one of Canada’s preeminent hockey reporters.
Hayes picked up the phone and called his son’s agent hoping to find out what was going on. Jimmy’s agent hadn’t heard anything about a trade when someone beeped in on the call. Hayes hung up, left in suspension.
At the same time, Hayes was on Cape Cod prepping for the July 4th holiday. He and a few friends went down a couple days early to soak in the sun and enjoy the not yet overcrowded beaches. It was the first day of free agency and Hayes’ agent was in the midst of contract negotiations with the Panthers. Then the phone rang.
Jimmy’s agent called Kevin back: his son had been traded to the Bruins. At the same time, the Bruins’ newly-appointed general manager Don Sweeney called Jimmy to let him know the good news: he would be returning to Boston, where his career began and blossomed. Now they just needed to work out a deal to keep him in town. Hayes signed a three-year, $6.9 million contract with the Bruins.
The Bruins were also going through a rebuilding phase. The team that won the 2012 Stanley Cup had become hampered by lengthy contracts for mediocre and aging players and finished outside of the playoffs for the first time in eight years. They were in need of young talent to develop a new core of players. Hayes fit those marks.
“It’s a dream come true,’’ Hayes says about the move to Boston, letting his roots show by not giving up too much. “I’ve always dreamed of playing here and I dreamed of playing here once I got to the NHL. It just ended up coming sooner than I thought.’’
The move didn’t start off like a dream, though. The Bruins lost their first three games of the season and looked like a team adrift. The fourth game was a breakout, though, and Hayes was in the middle of everything good, scoring a goal 8:11 into the game and chipping in three assists in the team’s 6-2 defeat of the Colorado Avalanche.
Hayes’ play reflected the Bruins’ early season woes in a way. The team struggled to find its identity. Coach Claude Julien’s system and changes stifled some players who were still trying to work out all of their responsibilities on the ice. And, like plenty of his teammates, Hayes has found himself sitting up in the stands as a healthy scratch on a few occasions. He’s bounced around the lineup, being mixed and matched with different lines as Julien tries to find the right combinations to make this revamped, and frankly still a work in progress, team a championship contender again.
But things have slowly turned around for the Bruins. Through Tuesday, the Bruins have 44 points, tied for fourth place in the Eastern Conference. And, despite a disheartening 5-1 loss to Montreal in the Winter Classic, the Bruins remain just three points behind the Canadiens.
As for Hayes, he’s peaking at the right time — he scored a hat-trick in the Bruins’ 7-3 victory over the Ottawa Senators last week. The day before the Winter Classic, Hayes said he gave his father 22 tickets to distribute to family and friends. The next day, he assisted on the Bruins’ only goal of the game. There may be pressure on the local kid, but it’s hard to tell by his demeanor. He looks relaxed, ready to play another game for his hometown team, living out his dream.
36 images that will remind you how tough the ‘Big Bad Bruins’ were
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