Arber Xhekaj has come a long way since making the junior Kitchener Rangers eight years ago as a 17-year-old walk-on after he wasn’t selected at the OHL Priority Selection draft.
Xhekaj also wasn’t selected at the NHL Draft, but signed with the Canadiens as a free agent and has played 230 games in the NHL during the last four seasons.
The 25-year-old defenceman’s future with the Canadiens is uncertain because Xhekaj remains an unsigned restricted free agent less than two weeks before the start of training camp.
There might not be a regular spot on the Canadiens’ blue line for Xhekaj and a question I get a lot from fans for my weekly Habs Mailbag is why don’t they make the 6-foot-4, 240-pounder a forward?
That’s a lot easier said than done at the NHL level.
Xhekaj did play about 20 games as a forward during his first season in Kitchener and he played one game as a forward for the Canadiens last season. But Xhekaj’s junior coach has always seen him as a defenceman.
“We signed him as a walk-on, so at times he was a seventh D and I used him as a forward just to keep him active,” said Jay McKee, who coached Xhekaj for his first two seasons in Kitchener and also with the Hamilton Bulldogs when they won the OHL championship together in 2022. “But I think he’s a defenceman. I wanted to keep him in the games and play him and keep his timing up, so I used him up front a little bit.”
McKee was a head coach for the last nine seasons in the OHL before being hired in May as the first head coach of the Hamilton Hammers, the New York Islanders’ new AHL farm team. The 48-year-old also played 14 seasons in the NHL as a defenceman with the Buffalo Sabres, St. Louis Blues and Pittsburgh Penguins.
As a rookie, McKee had to play one game up front after one of the Sabres’ forwards became ill on a road trip to Tampa.
“As Ds, we don’t really know what we’re doing as forwards — we just go out and do it,” McKee said with a chuckle during a phone interview Thursday morning. “It’s not easy. We focus so much on our jobs as defencemen. You can have systems within a game, but so much of the game is reading and reacting and looking. … We know so much of what we need to do and we’ve had so many reps as a defenceman, so to jump up as a forward there’s different responsibilities. And unless you’re dialled right into those, it can be a challenge, for sure.”
Xhekaj played left wing for the Canadiens last season after Josh Anderson was sidelined with an illness for a game in Carolina on March 29. Xhekaj played six shifts, logging 5:11 of ice time, and had five hits in a 3-1 win over the Hurricanes. Xhekaj’s teammates gave him the wolf-head hat in the locker room as player of the game.
“I had a lot of energy and (teammates) were cheering me up and they were making me feel good,” Xhekaj told reporters in Carolina after that game. “I just thought I would play simple out there and chip pucks out, be physical and get to in front of the net when I could. This is a tough rink to play in and they were flying in the first period. I had a couple of difficult shifts, but I seemed to weather the storm there and just keep playing.”
McKee isn’t surprised that Xhekaj was able to make it to the NHL as a defenceman despite not getting drafted.
“He’s an incredibly hard worker,” his former coach said. “When we had him as a walk-on, we did some small-area games and stuff. For a big, strong guy, his hands really stood out. I thought he had great hands, he moved well and, obviously, had size. So we wanted to give him a shot. He just kind of grew on us. He’s got a great personality, he’s a great room guy.”
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McKee was thrilled when he was coaching in Hamilton during the 2021-22 OHL season and the Bulldogs were able to acquire Xhekaj in a trade with Kitchener. In 18 playoff games that season, Xhekaj had 6-10-16 totals and 50 penalty minutes as the Bulldogs won the league championship.
“When we traded for him, he munched a lot of penalty minutes (in Kitchener) and I told him: ‘I want you to play for us, not spend time in the penalty box,’ ” McKee recalled. “I didn’t even want him fighting because he was such a key player for us and such a good defender. He’s a big, strong kid. He has zero fear.
“He allows the guys around him like (Juraj) Slafkovsky and (Cole) Caufield to play their game (with the Canadiens) without fear and knowing he’s got their backs,” McKee added. “There’s a lot of value to what he brings to a team.”
McKee still keeps in touch with Xhekaj, mostly through text messages.
“I’m not his coach, but I’ll be a good friend of his for life,” McKee said. “Over the years, I loved him even more as a human being than anything else — even as a player.”
What’s McKee’s best advice for Xhekaj now?
“Play loose, be yourself,” McKee said. “He’s maturing and he has to learn the limits of what he can and can’t do to keep a regular spot.
“Arber is definitely a unicorn,” McKee added. “He brings a lot on the ice and off the ice as well as to the dressing room. Hopefully, it works out for him (with the Canadiens). And if it doesn’t, no doubt there will be (other) teams that are very interested.”
I grew up dreaming of being an NHL defenceman or an MLB pitcher, but that didn’t happen. Fortunately, I was able to find another path to work in sports and have been part of The Gazette sports department since the early 1980s, including a 12-year stint as sports editor before becoming sports columnist in 2015. It’s a great job and I’m a lucky guy.
scowan@postmedia.com