FISHERS, Ind. — The Indy Fuel’s season opener doesn’t start for another 90 minutes, but outside the sparkling 11-month-old Fishers Event Center, the plaza is hopping. A five-man band is jamming out to Thin Lizzy as hundreds of hockey fans mill about on a 68-degree afternoon. The team store is packed, an employee letting people in only when others leave. A handful of middle-aged fans are doing shots out of plastic cups at the makeshift beer garden. The line for the shave-ice truck is snaking through the parking lot. The Fuel’s mascot, a winged dragon named Nitro, is posing for selfies with fans of all ages. There’s a table for a local art school that’s giving out pencils shaped like hockey sticks right next to a table that’s giving out branded bottle-openers, right next to an anthropomorphic ice cream cone shilling for a fast-food chain.
There’s a guy with a Fuel hard hat tricked out with a goal light on top. There are a few Connor Bedard jerseys — the Fuel are the Chicago Blackhawks’ ECHL affiliate, after all — and a few invading Fort Wayne Komets kits, but there are countless Fuel jerseys, in about a dozen different styles. One has palm trees on it. One has an Indy 500 checkered flag theme. There’s one in which Nitro appears to be breathing fire, and another where he seems to have fire for hair. There are red ones, white ones, black ones, cream-colored ones.
The beautiful rink will be packed and raucous, more than 6,500 strong for third-tier hockey. Clearly, the Fuel have something good going on in this leafy suburb northeast of Indianapolis.
So why?
Why sign a player who carries so much with him, who brings so much unwanted attention, who has spent the past two years fighting an uphill legal battle while getting bombarded with death threats and racist rants?
Why sign Matt Petgrave?
“Everyone wants to know why I signed him,” Fuel CEO Sean Hallett told The Athletic. “I’d like to ask everyone else a question: Why would I deny him? And nobody can really give a reason.”
Other than, of course, the heaviest of baggage that he brings.
“Well, that’s not a good reason,” Hallett said.
Petgrave has received anonymous death threats and racist messages since signing with the Indy Fuel last month. (Courtesy of Indy Fuel)
Petgrave was the last member of the Indy Fuel to hit the ice for warmups in Friday’s game. The last one off, too. He didn’t so much step out on the rink as hop, seeming to exhale deeply as skate met ice. After a few strides, he corralled a puck and picked a corner on his first warmup shot. Banked one in off the right post on his second. At one point, he went bar-down on Fuel goaltender Owen Flores, eliciting a chorus of “Ooooh!” from a handful of teammates, then spun around and dramatically holstered his stick with a twirl. He did some nifty high-speed stickhandling around the faceoff dot.
After tossing a puck over the glass to a tow-headed kid in his dad’s arms, Petgrave did a fly-by along the red line, inching close to enemy territory. Clearly, a member of the Fort Wayne Komets said something, because Petgrave’s head snapped back and he chirped something in response over his right shoulder.
Petgrave was laughing, a smile plastered on his face all the way to the net on the next rush.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about Petgrave’s first professional hockey game in nearly two years. He got a nice ovation during pregame introductions. He started on defense, on the left side. He wore an “A” on his sweater as an alternate captain.
“I was just at the ECHL meetings and talked to a lot of other people in our league who’ve had interactions with him in the past,” said Hallett, the only representative of the Fuel — including Petgrave, his coach Duncan Dalmao and his teammates — who was made available to The Athletic. “There seems to be one common denominator and that seems to be that he’s a good kid. Kid, he’s (33). He’s a good young man.”
He was just another 30-something minor-leaguer clinging to his hockey dream. And he was anything but.
Nearly two years ago, on Oct. 28, 2023, Petgrave — then with the Sheffield Steelers of the United Kingdom’s Elite Ice Hockey League — moved to deliver a check to a Nottingham Panthers player. He didn’t land the hit, and his left skate appeared to collide with the Nottingham player’s skate, sending him flailing across the ice. Petgrave’s skate caught Nottingham’s Adam Johnson — a Minnesota native who played 13 games with the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins — in the neck in what proved to be a fatal blow.
Johnson’s stunning and gruesome death rocked the hockey world. It also upended Petgrave’s life. He was arrested 17 days after the incident on suspicion of manslaughter. He was re-bailed many times. He received death threats, racist vitriol — Petgrave is Black — and resorted to crowdfunding to cover his legal costs. The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service decided this past April not to press charges.
Petgrave was free to resume his hockey career, and the Indy Fuel signed him to a one-year contract last month.
“I am thankful to the Fuel organization and the city of Indianapolis for allowing me the opportunity to continue my professional career in the sport I love,” Petgrave said in a released statement that day.
It wasn’t a decision the Fuel made lightly.
Typically in the ECHL, the head coach doubles as the general manager. And Dalmao, starting his fourth season as the Fuel’s head coach, has full authority to sign players to his team. He coached Petgrave in his first season as an assistant with the ECHL’s Brampton Beast in 2019-20, and felt the defenseman could bolster his blue line. He also, according to Hallett, thought it was important to surround himself with players who respected him to help build the culture of his team.
But Dalmao knew this wasn’t just any signing, and so he took it to Hallett and his father, team owner Jim Hallett, and president Larry McQueary. The “extenuating circumstances,” in Hallett’s words, certainly gave the team pause. Hallett said the team talked to several of Petgrave’s former teammates and coaches, all of whom vouched for his character.
“The overwhelming consensus was he’s a good kid, he made a mistake, and he wants to play hockey,” Hallett said. “At the end of the day, we thought he should be afforded that opportunity. I’m not (the) judge and jury, right? I know an accident happened. I know there’s mixed opinions on why it happened, or how it happened. But accidents do happen, and he needs to get back to work somewhere.”
Still, why take the risk? The Fuel are clearly not used to media inquiries, and were hesitant to have anyone speak to a reporter on the topic at all. This is a 33-year-old journeyman who’s had a handful of cups of coffee in the American Hockey League. He wasn’t drafted. He’s never sniffed the NHL. There must have been countless other defensemen whom Dalmao could have signed who didn’t come with any of the trouble, any of the attention.
But Dalmao was adamant there weren’t. And Hallett gave him the green light. (For clarification, the Blackhawks don’t decide who the Fuel sign and don’t sign; the affiliation is a loose one, as the NHL team can loan players to the Fuel, stash AHLers there, or call up players who are on two-way ECHL/AHL contracts. Petgrave is on a strictly ECHL contract.)
“I asked that exact question — there’s other people out there, why him?” Hallett said. “Coach vouched for him and said he was a young man of good character, and he did say that he was better than the average defenseman he could get for that position. And that’s all that was important to us at that point. We’re not micromanagers. We appreciate our coach giving us the final say, but we’re not going to tell our coach who we should be signing unless there’s a glaring reason. And no question there was a reason, but I could overcome it.”
The blowback was immediate. It’s a fringe portion of the hockey community that thinks what happened was anything but a freak accident, but that fringe can be awfully loud. And the Fuel heard it right away. Social media was a nightmare. Hallett said both he and Petgrave received anonymous death threats and racist messages. Hallett also said the team notified Fishers city officials of the threats, and called it “the most hostile experience I’ve had.” The Fuel were monitoring fan behavior more closely than usual on Friday night, and they’ll be carefully monitoring the team’s first few road games in Cincinnati, Toledo and Kalamazoo.
But there are no plans for beefed-up security, or special dispensation for Petgrave. Minor-league hockey finances don’t really allow for that kind of thing, Hallett said. And he put his faith in referees, league supervisors and “the rule of law” to keep the vitriol at bay. The team won’t take any unusual steps unless it proves necessary.
And that’s just it — almost all the blowback came from outside the Indianapolis area. Hallett said the response from the team’s community (and from the EIHL and Brampton) has been overwhelmingly positive. He said exactly one season-ticket holder canceled their package because of the signing. It was hardly even a topic at the recent ECHL meetings, with Hallett saying it only came up in casual conversation during a cocktail party the night before.
“Do we have concerns about it?” Hallett said. “Obviously, nobody ever likes negative attention, even if it’s minuscule. But when it comes down to the decision, when it comes down to his character? No, we have no qualms whatsoever.”
In his first game in a Fuel jersey, the preseason opener against the Halletts’ other ECHL team, the Bloomington Bison, Petgrave scored the first goal.
The Fuel lost 4-0 on Friday night. Petgrave was on the ice for the first Komets goal, a power-play tally in the first period, and another at even-strength in the second. He finished with two shots on goal. After the game, he offered his frustrated goalie a consoling pat on the chest, joined his teammates for a stick salute to the fans, then waited out a teammate praying at center ice so he could be the last one off. For the first time in nearly two years, he was just another hockey player on just another hockey team. He’ll never be anonymous, faceless, like he was for most of his career. Johnson’s death will forever be tied to him. “I was involved in a tragic accident that resulted in the passing of fellow ice hockey player Adam Johnson,” he wrote, two days shy of Christmas last year, in a CrowdJustice plea for financial support for his legal battle. It’s the only public statement he’s made on the incident.
Through the team, Petgrave made it clear he’s not eager to talk about what the last two years of his life have been like — the hatred, the threats, his own mental anguish. He just wanted a place to play hockey again.
And in central Indiana, of all places, he found it.
“On the Internet, three people can be louder than 3,000,” Hallett said. “But we’re hoping that common sense prevails, and people realize a guy has the right to move on with his career.”