For Max Plante’s entire life, all he has known is winning hockey.
He was 5 when his father, Derek — a former NHL player — served as an assistant coach on Minnesota Duluth’s 2011 national championship run. His grandfather Bruce was a Minnesota high school hockey institution, coaching Hermantown High for 28 seasons, with a staggering eight straight trips to the state championship game. Then Plante got to Hermantown as a player and won a state title of his own in 2022.
You need to know all of that mainly to understand just how grating last season was to Plante — a 2024 second-round pick of the Red Wings — when his own freshman year at Duluth ended with a 9-13-2 record.
“He said to me a number of times, ‘That was my first losing season in hockey. I didn’t like it,’” Minnesota Duluth coach Scott Sandelin said recently.
A year later, he’s showing just how much.
Through the first half of this college hockey season, Plante leads the NCAA in points with 30 in 20 games. His 16 goals rank third, behind only Michigan’s Will Horcoff and Maine’s Justin Poirier. As a team, Duluth ended the first half ranked No. 5 in the nation at 14-6. And Sandelin is clear about Plante’s impact on getting there.
“That’s pretty easy,” Sandelin said. “I mean, he’s been our best player.”
Granted, Plante was among Duluth’s best players last season too, coming back from an early-season injury to finish with 28 points in 23 games as a freshman.
This season, though, he has taken it to the next level, particularly in the goal-scoring department, where he is already close to doubling the nine he scored last season. He’s a legitimate Hobey Baker candidate halfway through the season and might even be the favorite at this point.
“My teammates have been making nice plays to me,” Plante said. “I’ve never really scored this (many) goals in my career this far, and I mean, hopefully I can keep it going. I still feel like there’s been more chances for me to score, even. But yeah, I think everything’s clicking. I’m trying to move my feet, just to get myself into games, and I think that’s been helping a lot. Worked very hard this offseason just because I didn’t want to let what happened last year to our team happen again.”
The point totals are one thing, and certainly the Red Wings will be excited by them. Detroit has long needed some of its picks outside the first round to pop, and Plante has a chance to follow Emmitt Finnie in doing just that. His vision and creativity give him a chance to bring some needed secondary offense to the Red Wings.
But what makes Plante an intriguing prospect really stems from the latter part of his answer, about his response to a disappointing team season last year, even when things were going well for him statistically.
Plante’s competitiveness and motor elevate his profile from a typical small playmaker to one who could fit into more roles because of his active stick, willingness to play in the middle of the ice offensively and ability to take on defensive situations as well. Even while Plante and his brother Zam are the engine of Duluth’s offensive attack, they’re also on the top penalty kill.
“I just think it’s trying not to let little details slip,” Plante said. “I mean, you watch Macklin Celebrini play — he’s a superstar player, but he’s also, like, doing all the little things. He just competes. And I think that’s kind of what hockey’s all about. It’s not really just about scoring all the goals; it’s about just every shift, just trying to do what you can.”
“So much of it is just his will and determination to get to pucks,” Sandelin added. “His stick is really good too. That line keeps pucks alive a lot. They just — they hunt pucks, and they’re good with their sticks, and they disrupt plays, and they extend offensive-zone shifts and tracking. It’s just in their blood.”
Take that all together, and it could give Plante some versatility in his future role. Whereas some scorers have to be used in certain situations to be successful, Plante’s doggedness and smarts give him a reasonable chance to contribute as a playmaker on a checking line, too.
That’s in the future, though. Before that, Plante has more immediate goals ahead, both with Duluth and later this month at the World Juniors.
Max Plante has already seen success at the World Juniors, earning gold with Team USA in 2025. (Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
Last year, Plante was part of the United States team that won U20 gold in Ottawa, marking the nation’s first-ever back-to-back wins at the tournament. Now, it’ll go for the gold in a third straight year, and it’ll do it in Plante’s home state of Minnesota.
“It’s a dream,” Plante said. “I mean, very excited obviously — last year with winning it and knowing what it feels like, and now I get to be the older guy on the team and hopefully do what I can to help the team win.”
At last year’s tournament, Plante was more of a bottom-six piece, chipping in 3 points in six games. This year, as a returner (and the nation’s leading scorer), he should play a more prominent role — another test as he looks to translate his dominant first half against the best of his age group worldwide.
To the extent there are questions about Plante, most stem from his size (5 feet 11), though Sandelin thinks the forward has “deceiving speed.” Still, most smaller offensive forwards in the NHL rely on their skating as a way to gain separation from bigger defenders, and while the World Juniors will arguably feature less size than college hockey, the pace and high stakes of the tournament should test Plante in that department nonetheless.
It’ll also be interesting to see how Team USA uses him in relation to his old U.S. NTDP cohort, including James Hagens and Cole Eiserman. When they were all in Plymouth, Hagens and Eiserman were the more featured offensive players. But with Plante now outscoring both in college, does anything shift?
And then there’s the team as a whole, which, despite having won the last two tournaments, will enter this year’s version as an underdog compared to a loaded Canadian team. But while Plante is certainly aware of that perception, he also pushed back on it.
“A lot of talk about ‘maybe U.S. isn’t as good this year,’ but I don’t know where that comes from,” he said. “I feel like our age group internationally has been great. … I mean, we lost to Canada in U18 worlds, (but) I mean, I thought we were the better team that game, and the history’s there. Like, we pretty much won every tournament we played in, so I don’t know where that comes from. But yeah, I think we’re excited. We have a lot of confidence as a group, and we’re hungry.”
For a player who has known only winning for so much of his life, that answer shouldn’t be surprising. It’s the same kind of mentality that helped position Plante for the breakout season he’s having at Duluth, and it’s the same mindset the Red Wings hope can someday lead him to Detroit.
“He’s wearing a letter for us for a reason,” Sandelin said. “It’s not because he’s our best player. It’s just the example he sets every day in practice, and then he carries that over into the game, and that’s what you want good leaders to do.”