BRANTFORD, Ont. — Shortly after noon on the first Friday in October, Spencer Hyman is seated in his office inside the TD Civic Centre, going over his team’s roster in the OHL’s registry.
He’s four months into his new job as general manager of the Brantford Bulldogs, and a few months more than that into his role as their vice president.
He doesn’t define it that way, though.
“I don’t think we can call it a job,” he says. “It’s a dream. That’s the word. There’s the expression ‘You pinch yourself’ but I talk to my brother on the phone and we’re just talking about our team and players and we just kind of pause and we’re like ‘We’ve been talking about this for so long and we’re here, we’re doing it.’”
In January, his older brother, Edmonton Oilers star Zach, purchased the Bulldogs with their father, Stuart, a Toronto real estate agent who has owned several junior hockey teams and was previously the chairman of the OJHL’s board of governors. Zach is now the Bulldogs’ president and governor, and Stuart is the organization’s CEO.
When a reporter across Spencer’s desk uses the word nepotism, he nods, open to discussing it.
“I’ve dealt with it my whole life. My dad has always been a prominent figure in hockey. My brother has dealt with it his whole life. I think at the end of the day, results are the only thing that matter as it relates to the public opinion,” he says. “But for me, the biggest thing that matters is giving these kids an opportunity and helping them attain their dreams and move onto the next level, and that’s something that I’ve been a part of now my whole life in junior hockey. To me, the (nepotism talk) is not a big deal.”
He also argues he has put in the time.
“What people don’t realize is that I’ve worked at the Tier 2 level now for 11 years (prior to taking over as Bulldogs GM, he held a similar role with the Jr. A Markham Royals under the family’s ownership),” he says. “I’ve had other opportunities at (the OHL level). But I always knew that to move up, it would be something that I’d want to do with my dad and brother.”
But he gets it, and doesn’t try to steer the conversation away from the influence of his dad and older brother.
Spencer calls Zach’s support huge. Though Zach’s focus is on chasing the Stanley Cup — and, at the moment, nursing a hand injury — the two brothers talk “every day” and Spencer says Zach is the final decision maker on all moves. When he has a night off and his kids have been tucked in, Zach watches OHL games “because he loves it” and wants to know what’s going on. Last year, after they bought the team, he’d watch back Bulldogs games on the Oilers’ plane.
Oilers star Zach Hyman and his family purchased the Bulldogs in January 2025. (Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Spencer says his dad is the one who taught him how to run a hockey team. Now 61, Stuart is winding down his career in real estate and has taken on more of a come-and-go supportive role with the Bulldogs.
It’s Spencer who is running the day-to-day of the team, staffing, scouting and making trade calls. And his team has begun the 2025-26 season as OHL favorites.
On that front, Spencer is quick to credit the foundation laid by the team’s previous owner, Michael Andlauer, and its previous GMs, Steve Staios and Matt Turek. Turek stayed on as GM from the Hymans’ purchase through until May, when Andlauer and Staios, now at the helm of the NHL’s Senators, hired him as GM of their AHL affiliate, the Belleville Senators.
But he and his brother have also begun to put their own imprint on the organization. When he took over in May, Spencer promoted longtime Bulldogs staffer Justin Ismael to assistant GM and named Mike Galati, his longtime head coach and GM in Markham (and a former scout with the London Knights), as the team’s director of hockey operations and scouting. He has also brought in Gary Roberts as director of player development (on a whiteboard outside his office, there’s a gym schedule and a phone number for Sylvie with Roberts’ team so that the players have a direct line to them).
On the ice, the Bulldogs have nine drafted NHL prospects and two top 2026 prospects. Hyman acquired four of those drafted players, trading for Sam McCue (Maple Leafs) and successfully recruiting Czech star Adam Benak (Wild) through the Import Draft, watching back all of his games last year. He drafted and recruited Benak’s countryman, Vladimir Dravecky, one of those top 2026 prospects, away from the SHL’s Rogle, too. And though it was Turek who acquired Boston University commit Caleb Malhotra’s rights, Bulldogs staff also give credit to Spencer for recruiting him. He has also traded for two-time OHL champion Ryder Boulton, signed Michigan commit Cooper Dennis and made moves to acquire more draft capital (the Bulldogs have eight second-round picks ahead of the trade deadline).
The Hymans also secured the TD naming rights for the Civic Centre and did some work on the addition built by Andlauer when he moved the team from Hamilton to Brantford in 2023, adding a player lounge area in the offseason while the team and city pursue a new arena.
In the midst of it all, The Athletic traveled to Brantford to spend a weekend behind the scenes with the Bulldogs, pulling back the curtain on the organization as it chases an OHL title and puts down roots in a new community — all while trying to develop players, school and house them, navigate a new relationship between junior and college hockey, and, first, win Friday and Saturday contests versus the visiting Peterborough Petes and Windsor Spitfires.
Bulldogs GM Spencer Hyman sitting at his desk in his office. (Scott Wheeler / The Athletic)
Friday, Oct. 3, 9:20 a.m.: As you step into the TD Civic Centre, you walk past signage for “The Madhouse on Market Street.”
Inside, Bulldogs equipment manager Chris Cook (also the equipment manager for Team Canada at the last four World Juniors) is already milling about as the players arrive.
The players who will dress against the Petes for their fourth game of the season are getting their gear on. “The stereo does not go in the shower area!” reads a new note on the whiteboard in the dressing room, next to printouts of the team’s faceoff plays and neutral zone structure. Across the hall, some of the extras get a light workout in with strength coach Luke Van Moerkle, while others get massages. “I have a question,” asks one player, stopping athletic therapist Thomas Byrne. “I have an answer,” Byrne replies before knowing what it is.
One player in the lounge — 7-footer Alexander Karmanov — can’t be mistaken, his legs stretching out from the couch and onto the floor.
By 9:30, the players are already on the ice for their 9:45 morning skate, which will be followed by a 10:45 development session led by director of skills development Laura Fortino with the injured players and scratches. During the skate, Andreas Karlsson, a former assistant coach with the Bulldogs who was hired by the Oilers in a player development role in 2024, pops in to share hugs with the staff on his way through town.
On the way inside the Brantford Bulldogs’ locker room. (Scott Wheeler / The Athletic)
After a quick video session and lunch following the skate (the players are fed breakfast and lunch), the billet dad of Czech imports Benak and Adam Jiricek pulls up to pick them up.
Jiricek has just returned from camp with the St. Louis Blues, who drafted him 16th in the 2024 NHL Draft. He played two preseason games, and the reviews were “fantastic,” according to Bulldogs head coach Jay McKee.
This is his second season in Brantford, but it feels like his first. Jiricek, a 6-foot-3 right-shot D, has dealt with a combination of knee injuries and concussions over the last couple of years. After blowing out his knee at the 2024 World Juniors, he was late to join the Bulldogs last season. After the 2025 World Juniors (where he helped the Czechs to a bronze), a second knee-on-knee collision, and a third injury later in the year, he was limited to 27 games, registering 12 points while wearing a brace on and off.
“With the setbacks, it was tough,” Jiricek says, lingering in the video room (which, during the week, also serves as a classroom staffed with two teachers from the Brantford Collegiate Institute). “It was hard physically and mentally. It was just every day working out and rehab on repeat. It wasn’t the season I expected. But I had a summer without any issues, so I hope it will stay like that and I’m going to play a full season this year and build my game and play better.”
He finally feels like himself again now, and after watching his first training camp with the Blues while injured last year, he’s proud of how he played this year. He’s also now 187 pounds, up 20 from his draft weight.
“He looks bigger,” McKee said. “He’s stronger. On the ice, he looks very confident. I think he had a very good chance at sticking around longer (in St. Louis) had it not been for his previous injuries.”
He’s really happy in Brantford, too, and insists it’s “one of the best places to get to the NHL in junior.” And he has appreciated being surrounded by the Bulldogs with fellow Czechs — Senators prospect Tomas Hamara last year, and Benak and Dravecky (who also live next door to their billet house) this year. (He has known Benak since he was 12, playing with him in Plzen and with different national teams.)
When the puck drops on his first game back later that night, he’ll be on the Bulldogs’ first pair and top power play. With 4:49 left in the first period, shortly after a TV timeout video board announcement welcoming him back, he’ll work a give-and-go with captain and Kraken top-10 pick Jake O’Brien and pound a one-timer for his first goal of the season. He’ll nearly score again, jumping into the slot on his very next shift.
“He looked completely different on the ice,” McKee says after the game is over. “He was good last year, but he just never really got things going. He was all over the ice.”
Friday, Oct. 3, 3:45 p.m.: As the players begin to return to the rink ahead of puck drop and the coaches and management swap track suits for real ones, Brian Burke is let in the back door, his suit already on.
“Hi, I’m Brian Burke,” he says, introducing himself to staff as if they don’t already know who he is.
Burke has become a mentor for Spencer Hyman and will join him in his small management box perched above center ice for the game.
“He’s the man. The man,” Hyman says of “Burkie.”
Before puck drop, they sit in Hyman’s office, and he asks Burke for advice on some of the things he’s juggling.
Hyman, who will turn 32 in November, says he isn’t trying to be the young guy who wants to reinvent the wheel. He says he has taken from Mark and Dale Hunter in London for how he plans to use his junior teams, keeping some of his top prospects close with the local Jr. B Brantford Titans (Karmanov will make his debut with the Titans later after skating in a Bulldogs development session that morning) and using the Jr. A Royals for opportunities for his team’s later-round picks.
When he talks about his vision for the team’s culture, he says “people are the most important” and talks about a player-coach like associate coach Vince Laise as an integral piece. Laise actually played for Stuart in Tier 2 in Georgetown two decades ago, and when the Hymans bought the Bulldogs, they all reminisced about it being full circle with “Vinny” because Spencer and Zach used to look up to him.
“You have to have good kids. You have to have coaches that care about the person and not just the player. And that’s our family’s philosophy. It’s always the person first,” Spencer says.
When he talks about his vision for the team on the ice, he says that championship teams have to “be able to play the style any team wants to play.”
“If they want to play a skill game? OK. If they want to play a tough game? OK. If they want to play a dump and chase game, if they want to play a structured game, if they want to play stupid, no problem, we’ll play however, but we’re going to dictate the pace and the terms,” he says.
The Boulton addition helped them accomplish that, giving them one of the league’s most feared competitors.
After a chat with McKee pregame about whether to respond to the lineup card the Petes have submitted, starting their fourth line and a defenceman who fought Boulton in their previous meeting, McKee has decided not to respond with Boulton’s line.
Still, it’s Boulton who sets the tone. “F— yes. F— YES!” he’ll shout in the pitch black tunnel, running down the line to the front before the Bulldogs are introduced that night.
Friday, Oct. 3, 5:30 p.m.: Bulldogs team dentist Dr. Lee Ferrao is making the rounds with little blue plastic cases when he tosses one in the lap of Montreal Canadiens prospect Owen Protz.
“Thank you very much, sir,” Protz says.
“Let me know if you need it trimmed or anything,” Dr. Ferrao answers.
It has been an “eventful” year for Protz by his own admission, and that has included a couple of trips to the dentist. “I haven’t been on a lucky streak with my teeth,” he says, and with his mom coming down for the game, he knows that “she wouldn’t be too happy not seeing it (the mouthguard) in.”
That eventful year has also included his second training camp with the Canadiens, some time with the AHL’s Laval Rocket and his first invite to a Hockey Canada camp at this summer’s World Junior Summer Showcase.
The 6-foot-2, 207-pound defenseman is riding high right now. He says he felt the best he ever has at Habs camp. “I think I played great,” he says. “It has been a fun summer of hockey.”
The World Junior team wasn’t on his radar “at all.”
Laise was surprised by Protz’s invite “from a perceptions standpoint.” But he describes Protz as a no-complaints, carry-the-lunch-pail player, and says that player type is “the skill guy today” because it’s now so hard to find.
“That person is needed so bad in our game. And you can pass people if you just have that mentality,” Laise said. “He’s very humble, it’s not showtime, it’s just Protz, and that goes a long way with teams.”
Owen Protz was drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in the fourth round of the 2024 NHL Draft. (Brantford Bulldogs)
McKee says Protz was raw but eager when they acquired him, and describes him as “a beast in the weight room” and “very physical.” After losing to the Ottawa 67’s in the 2024 OHL playoffs and getting back “really early in the morning,” McKee remembers finding Protz alone in the weight room “lifting 550 pounds” a few hours later.
“His potential is very high to be an NHL hockey player, and it’s going to be a simplifying the game type, moving pucks quick and playing strong defensively,” McKee said. “I think he can have a long and successful career doing that. He’s a motivated kid who is driven to improve, and we’re excited about his future.”
The game against Peterborough will be his second of the season. He had an assist and was plus-4 in his first game back. This is his third season with the Bulldogs, who acquired him from Sudbury, and he says they changed the trajectory of his career.
“There’s no other team I’d rather play on. Coming from Sudbury, I wasn’t as developed as I thought I’d be. But coming here, the confidence that (McKee) has in me has given me confidence in myself, and it has really helped me take my game to the next level,” he says. “Jay’s always been the one to push me to be a pro player kind of like how he was back in the day. … Somebody that you know is not going to make mistakes, will put a body on the line, hit anyone, block shots, but really somebody that you can just trust and know ‘We’re not going to have goals scored against us today.’”
The Habs have taken a keen interest, too, with development leads Rob Ramage and Francis Bouillon, who also both played like him, making frequent visits.
Protz’s focus is on a Memorial Cup right now, though.
Because he can feel it. They all can. Practices are different this year, he has noticed. So has five-year Bulldog Lucas Moore, who says he has seen skills sessions go from three or four guys to the whole team out there an hour before practice. Laise, who won an OHL championship in 2018 with the Bulldogs, sees the ingredients too — in the players’ attitude and in how far along they are as a team so early in the season.
“I think everybody on the team — coaching staff, management, players — knows that this year is going to be a special one,” Protz says.
Saturday, Oct. 4, 12:30 p.m.: McKee is back at the rink finishing prep for the visiting Windsor Spitfires. It’s a little more than 12 hours after he left it following the Bulldogs’ 6-3 Friday night win over the Petes, and though his team is now off to a 3-0-1 start, he knows this matchup, against a rested Spitfires team that has begun the year as their co-favorite for the league title, is a measuring stick game.
At the moment, though, he’s choked up talking about how he and his wife, Samantha, came to name their son Audax.
They were on a trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro shortly after losing a couple of pregnancies, and after McKee had been let go as head coach of the Kitchener Rangers. Avid climbers and RVers, they’d made the decision on a whim because there are only certain times of the year to summit Kilimanjaro.
At the time, McKee already had three kids from a previous marriage, and they had agreed — and were desperate — to have one together. The day before starting their ascent, their tour guide had taken them to visit the local Maasai people, and the tribe insisted on sending them off with a travel dance, pulling Samantha into it and signing to her. When the dance was over, McKee asked them what they were singing about, and they answered “childbearing.”
“Wow,” McKee says as he tells the story, his voice quivering. “It gets me.”
On the seventh day of their climb, they stumbled across a rock in the face of the mountain with the name Audax etched into it. Passing it, Samantha said, “If we have a boy, maybe we should use that.”
A few weeks after finishing the climb, they found out they were pregnant. Nine months to the day after they summited, Audax was born (they reached the summit on Feb. 29 and he was born Oct. 29).
When Jay and Samantha returned from Kilimanjaro, they stumbled across this photo, with the etched “AUDAX” visible in the background. (Courtesy of Jay McKee)
Four years later, Audax is a staple around TD Civic Centre. He even has his own nameplate outside the coaches’ office. “TRAIN ENGINEER,” his title reads.
“Daddy!” he squeals when he arrives at the rink. While the team goes through a development session at one end of the rink, he and his half-brother Xander skate with their dad at the other end.
When McKee, like the Hymans, talks about building a family with the Bulldogs, that’s the place it comes from.
McKee, 48, now with gray creeping into his ginger beard, played more than 800 games in the NHL and jumped right into coaching after his retirement in 2010. He’s in his fifth season behind the Bulldogs bench and led them to an OHL title in his first year as their head coach back in Hamilton in 2022. This summer, he was a finalist for the Flyers’ head coaching vacancy before they hired Rick Tocchet, sitting down for a formal three-hour interview with GM Danny Briere and president Keith Jones that he felt went “very well.”
“I think I’ve got an NHL coach coaching in the OHL,” Spencer Hyman says. “He’s that good. I hope I can keep him as long as I can, but I know he’s close.”
McKee thinks he’s close, too, and while he has not completely ruled out becoming an assistant in the NHL, he signed a three-year extension with the Bulldogs because he’d rather continue developing as a head coach than as an assistant.
“My goal is to become an NHL head coach. I think that everybody should set their goals as high as possible. I know that’s a very tough position to earn (but) I’m willing to work as long and as hard as it takes to achieve that, no different than when I was a player,” he says.
If they win this year, Hyman guesses it’ll be McKee’s last before getting an NHL job. But on a day-to-day basis, McKee doesn’t actually talk about winning with the team — and certainly hasn’t mentioned a Memorial Cup. His focus is on motivating them and keeping their focus in the right place. Laise says nothing about McKee is faked, either.
“You want to do good for him because you sense that he wants to do good for you,” Laise said.
In his team, McKee sees a makeup that is fast and dynamic on the ice, with the right people around them off it.
Having worked for both Andlauer and the Hymans now, he says their passion is “very similar.”
He describes Spencer as a hard worker who knows he’s a young GM in the league and has been “very receptive and open to saying ‘I don’t know everything and I want to learn from everybody.’” He talks to Zach regularly, and his door is always open to Spencer, including during games, something he started with Staios.
“I like that. That just builds a trust and a connection with the group. And I think more than anything, the year we won, I learned it takes a village,” McKee says. “It takes everybody, from your owner, your GM, your coach, through your training staff, equipment managers — everyone just being really well-connected. And we had that, and the Hyman group has continued that.”
Though he won’t talk about it with the players, McKee is motivated to do for Brantford what they did for Hamilton in 2022, too.
The vibe in Brantford, where 3,300 pack the small arena to its glass and there’s a waiting list of 750 more for ticket packages, is “on a whole different level” than it was in Hamilton, where they’d draw 5,000-plus in an NHL-sized arena and it could feel empty, according to McKee.
To open the weekend, they still packed in up against the last of summer weather (27 degrees Celsius) and Game 1 of the ALDS between the Blue Jays and the Yankees.
When the puck drops against the Spitfires, they’ll chant “Who Let The Dogs Out” and erupt when Benak ties the game 3-3 late in the third. Though the Spitfires will prevail in a shootout, the Bulldogs pick up three of a possible four points from the weekend. Through nine games, they remain unbeaten in regulation and are atop the OHL’s Eastern Conference.