MONTREAL — Nick Suzuki doesn’t remember this, but his father will never forget it.
“Nick would’ve been 11 or so when he had a coach that gave the boys on his team a homework assignment to compare themselves to whichever NHLer they felt they most resembled as players. Nick looked at me and said, ‘I think I want to put Crosby,’ but it was almost intimidating to him to compare himself to Crosby,” said Rob Suzuki.
“I told him, ‘Crosby’s not an unreasonable comparison. You play a pretty good game along the boards, you don’t do a lot of glamorous, fancy things, but you put up points — goals and assists — and are pretty responsible defensively.’
“I think Nick was a bit too embarrassed to write down Crosby in the end, though I really do think he modelled a lot of his game after Crosby’s, and that’s why he’s become the type of player he is.”
The type of player Nick Suzuki is has put him on the team that Crosby will be captaining at the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in Milan. He’s one of the most complete players in the world — a leading Selke Trophy candidate who’s also currently the 12th-most productive player in the NHL and fifth-most productive Canadian player — and that’s just part of the reason he’ll be breathing the same rarified air as Crosby over the next two weeks.
The type of person Nick Suzuki is, which is perfectly encapsulated in his father’s anecdote, is the other part of it. He’s as quiet, cool and humble Canadiana as it gets, the type to never beat his own chest nor compare himself to the greatest player in the world.
As Suzuki’s mother, Amanda, put it: “He doesn’t go out there and say, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m a superstar, I’m smarter than everybody else,’ and he’s always been that way.”
Underneath all that is a person who’s always known how good he is and how good he could be.
That’s why, instead of just fantasizing about one day playing for the national team, Suzuki was visualizing it — even back when he was watching the player he modelled his game after score the golden goal at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
“As a kid, you kind of think you can do anything, but you also have to be picturing yourself in those situations,” Suzuki said in a recent interview with Sportsnet. “And now you have to believe that you can help the team and play with those legendary players who are going to be your teammates. I can definitely picture it, and I’m looking forward to living that.”
When we caught up with Suzuki’s parents via Zoom two weeks ago, they said they were elated to find out they’d be witnessing it after receiving a casual text from their son on the last morning of 2025 that read, “We’re going to Milan.”
“He would’ve called, but he wasn’t looking for applause,” said Rob. “He was just excited to share the experience with us.”
It is the most meaningful step to date in an athletic ascent that started 22 years ago, back when Suzuki was wowing his friends and their parents on the soccer field.
“He was playing with kids two or three years older than him, and he was playing with them no problem,” recalled Amanda.
“We brought cupcakes to a game, and someone’s mom asked how old he was,” added Rob. “We said, ‘Four,’ and then she goes, ‘The rest of the kids are turning seven.’”
“He just always excelled at sports,” Amanda said. “Whatever it was, he excelled at it.”
For Suzuki, hockey became the be-all, end-all starting in sixth grade, when he transferred from the Waldorf School in London, Ont., to a private hockey academy nearby called Blyth — a school also attended by NHLers Travis Konecny, Lawson Crouse, Jared McCann and fellow Team Canada member Mitch Marner. His parents were able to afford the tuition hike to send him there because his brother Ryan decided he wanted to transfer from Waldorf to a public school so he could be in classes with kids from the neighbourhood.
“Nick ended up there through Grade 8 and was gaining a foundation for working out, strength, conditioning and skills,” says Rob. “I wanted him to move on to other fun things after, but after his Grade 8 graduation, he said he wanted to continue through high school.
“There was only six kids in the class and they were all boys, and it was very pigeon-holed and too focused on one thing. I told him, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You’re going to be missing out on a lot of different things.’
“He said, ‘I’m sure this is what I want to do,’ and I was hoping he wouldn’t look back on it wondering why he’d spend all this time chasing this hockey dream if it didn’t end up materializing. But he said he wouldn’t, and his commitment proved it.”
Suzuki had good influences.
Rob and Amanda are salt-of-the-earth types. He’s now in his 30th year as a practising dentist and she’s in her 28th as a chartered professional accountant who’s edging closer to retirement from a career as a senior manager in charge of collections for the ministry of finance in the Ontario public sector. They work hard and lead by example, as their parents did before them.
On Amanda’s side, Maurice and Helen Bell immigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1964 because Maurice, a chemical engineer, was recruited by a Toronto-based company. Rob’s parents, Art (a materials scheduler for 3M) and Marlene (a nurse), were second-generation Canadians, with their grandparents touching down from Japan and Germany decades prior.
Rob said Nick’s quiet and confident-yet-proud nature was inherited from Amanda’s side of the family, and Amanda said his humility and athletic genes came from Rob. It’s safe to say the work ethic was passed down by everyone above.
Coupled with exceptional talent, it brought Suzuki success early in his hockey career, when he was in bantam with the triple-A London Junior Knights.
He scored 34 goals and 68 points in 31 games and was hoping to represent Team Ontario in the 2015 Canada Winter Games in between, but was surprisingly snubbed before another boy got injured and cleared the path for him.
What happened at the tournament could be foreshadowing for Milan, with Suzuki still unsure as to what his role may be with Team Canada.
“Nick was called two weeks before the games and told he was finally on the team, and then Drew Bannister had him on the fourth line,” Amanda recalls. “He was the coach, and he was also the assistant coach for Owen Sound at the time. Anyway, Nick started on that fourth line, but he played so well he and his linemates got bumped up throughout the tournament. And then he scored what ended up being the winning goal in the gold-medal game.”
That summer, Suzuki was taken 14th overall by Owen Sound in the OHL Draft, and so began his steady rise through Canadian junior hockey.
The ride to NHL stardom seemed just as smooth, and now he’s an Olympian.
“This was his destiny,” Amanda says, “and I think he knew it early on.”
Suzuki worked tirelessly to materialize it.
After being drafted 13th overall by the Vegas Golden Knights and getting traded to the Montreal Canadiens, he went back to junior and dominated, putting up 42 points over his final 24 playoff games to lead the Guelph Storm to an OHL championship.
Then Suzuki posted 41 points in his first NHL season and followed it up with another 41 in the pandemic-abridged, 56-game 2020-21 season.
In both years, the Canadiens went further in the post-season than anyone expected them to, and Suzuki proved what kind of big-game player he was to help them do it. He put up four goals and seven points in his first 10 playoff games before posting seven goals and 16 points through the Canadiens’ 22-game run that put them within three wins of capturing the Stanley Cup.
A year later, the Canadiens named Suzuki captain, and all he’s done since is exhibit the qualities of a player who belongs on Team Canada.
Still, the call didn’t come for him to represent the country at the 4 Nations Face-Off last February, and that left him both disappointed and motivated.
Suzuki then compiled 29 goals and 81 points and rounded out his profile as one of the most complete players in the world in the 65 games played between the end of that tournament and the naming of the Canadian Olympic team.
He was relieved and honoured to get the call, citing the chance to chase gold alongside Crosby as a vision on the verge of being realized.
“It’s going to be amazing experiencing that,” he said. “Every guy on the team looked up to Sid, and for him to still be playing at the level he’s at and being captain of Canada, it’s an honour to be a teammate of his.”
The thought of it is still surreal to his parents.
“I’d have never dreamt of that,” says Amanda. “We’re so proud of the fact that he made the team and is representing Canada. The thought of everybody across Canada watching my kid on the ice, along with Crosby, McDavid and MacKinnon and the greatest hockey players…”
“It means a lot,” says Rob.