As Shai Buium paces in the back of a Marriott Hotel, watching the NHL Draft bleed into the late hours, one thing will be certain. He will at least look the part of an 18-year-old about to get drafted on hockey’s biggest stage.
Buium will be sitting Friday night in a large meeting room in Detroit with his family and other of the U.S. junior national hockey team, all of whom will be watching to find out when, not if, their name is called. His 213-pound figure will stand out even among the game’s best collection of youth talent. His University of Denver commitment, the preeminent hockey school in the country, will speak for itself.
He will have the pedigree and size that is a prerequisite among hockey’s brightest, young stars.
But the story behind what is sure to be a celebration this weekend — Buium is projected to be a late-first or second-round pick — is the knowledge that this moment was never supposed to happen.
Buium is the son of two Israeli immigrants who never played hockey. He is from San Diego, a city that rarely produces top talent in the sport. He was discovered by chance and has been overshadowed on nearly every team he has played on by those who were supposed to be NHL prospects.
Yet this weekend he will solidify himself as the future of one franchise at the game’s highest level.
“It is what makes the story so great,” Ben Umhoefer, one of Buium’s coaches, said. “It is a lot of luck and chance. Maybe luck isn’t the right word for it. But it is not probable at all.”
Finding the sport
Ben Buium re the look on his mother’s face when 6-year-old Shai first asked to play hockey.
“Confusion, I think,” Ben, Shai’s oldest brother by two years, said of his mother’s reaction.
“I think I said no as soon as he said it,” Miri, Shai’s mother, said.
Part of the reason the Buiums were against the sport, at first blush, was the and violence. They had seen Shai’s cousin play a couple times — that was where Shai first found the sport on a weekend visit — and didn’t like it.
But a larger factor was that hockey wasn’t a birthright sport in the Buium family as it is for many elite hockey prospects.
Miri was a professional basketball player in Israel. Iulian, Shai’s father, was in the Israeli military and immigrated to California to carve out a living. He eventually ran his own heating and cooling company in San Diego, AC Sure Plan, but sports weren’t really his thing.
“They didn’t know anything about hockey,” Jeff Turcotte, a coach of the San Diego Oilers peewee team, said.
So, when they finally acquiesced to Shai’s demands to play hockey, nobody knew what to do next. They didn’t know how to skate. Rink time in San Diego was tough to come by. The financial strain of the sport on a family navigating America for the first time was difficult.
And that is where Craig Sterling, a rink operator and another coach for the Oilers, came into play. He would open the rink for Buium when there was free ice time after hours. He would allow Buium to come to weekend skating sessions, even if his age group wasn’t going.
“I don’t know why I did it, honestly,” Sterling said. “It wasn’t that I thought he would go to the NHL. I didn’t even think he would be that good. He couldn’t skate. Everyone liked to be around him because he smiled so much, maybe that’s it.”
A discovery by ‘chance’
San Diego isn’t a place where many of the game’s best players come from. The elite level of youth hockey in California is centered in Los Angeles and Anaheim.
For a long time, that didn’t really matter to Buium. He was content with stealing ice sessions with Sterling and practicing with his brother, who adopted the sport with him.
“The thing is, there were only one or two players who came out of San Diego at the time that were that good,” Sterling said. “You needed to go to the bigger cities if you want to be discovered.”
Around the age of 11, Buium asked his parents to go on a trip to Los Angeles to play against the L.A. Junior Kings, widely considered to be one of the best young teams in the country. Three of the of that team are in the NHL Draft process this season. Two more are prospects in 2022.
Buium wanted to go mostly because his Oilers team was going. Getting discovered wasn’t a goal.
That day, the Kings happened to be coached by a parent of one of the players, James Gasseau, a former NHL Draft pick (Buffalo in 1984). Buium didn’t score. By his estimation, he didn’t play particularly well. However, Gasseau saw the size and potential.
“I went up to his mother and asked if he wanted to the team,” Gasseau said. “And to their credit they ed and made the … drive four or five times a week from San Diego to Los Angeles to play.
“It all happened by chance. I wasn’t there to see Shai. I was coaching the team and happened to see this other kid on the other team that was big and had a chance.”
That team became Buium’s bedrock. He traveled nationally and the group won a handful of junior national championships. College coaches came to see the group. NHL scouts traveled to see some of the players.
By the time he got to high school, Buium was nationally ranked and competing in the top levels of the sport. For high school, he committed to Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota, a top prep school. As a senior last December, he left school to train with the Sioux City Musketeers, a junior NHL team that has a track record for developing draft picks.
“I mean you don’t really hear of many players coming out of San Diego,” Umhoefer, a coach at Shattuck, said. “His time with the L.A. Junior Kings put him on the map.”
‘Who is that?’
There is a thin line that separates first-round draft picks in the NHL. It is the difference between being on top teams, which is enough to give you exposure to the league’s scouts, and being the best player on those teams.
Some NHL players never were the best players on their youth teams. But first-rounders tend to be, according to coaches.
For Buium, the shift happened in his junior year of high school. When he got to Shattuck, his freshman year was wiped away by an ankle injury. His sophomore year he played on the U16 team, not the full prep team.
By his junior year, because of a glut of NHL talent in the prep team ahead of him, he played on the U16 team again.
But in that junior year, Buium grew to 6-foot-3. He took over games and scored goals. The team was good and people began to notice.
“Scouts in the NHL started to call me and basically ask, ‘Who is that?’” Umhoefer said. “Scouts don’t normally look at U16 teams. They are usually focused on the prep team, but Shai was good.”
By the time Buium made the prep team, he was already in those circles of being a top draft pick. And he has mostly stayed there since.
Buium is projected to go anywhere from the late first round or mid-second round. Some have the New Jersey Devils taking him on defense. Others think it could be the Detroit Red Wings.
Regardless of what happens, Buium will go the University of Denver in the fall and play a college season. The way the NHL works, the team that drafts Buium will keep his rights as he goes to school. When the NHL club thinks Buium is developed enough in college to play professionally, it will call him up to the minors. It could be in two years. It could be in three.
But in a journey all about the unlikely, Buium can wait a little longer.
“It is truly something I never thought would happen. I’ve always dreamed of it,” Buium said.
