CRANBERRY, Pa. — Liam and Markus Ruck are normally attached at the hip, but that changed on Monday.<\/p>\n
In their first day of development camp with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the 18-year-old twin brothers were split between two practice groups. Liam, selected in the first round (No. 22) of the 2026\u00a0NHL Draft, went first; Markus, a second-round pick (No. 39), joined the next session.<\/p>\n
The forwards have gone no longer than four days apart since\u00a0Markus was born eight minutes ahead of Liam on Feb. 21, 2008, in Osoyoos, British Columbia.<\/p>\n
Monday probably didn\u2019t represent a long-term shift that Liam would prefer to avoid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt definitely could, but I hope not,\u201d Liam said. \u201cI think we\u2019re both pretty competitive guys, and we compete with each other every day. I think knowing that, we\u2019re going to kind of go on the same trajectory and hopefully come in at the same time. But we\u2019ll see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
They\u2019ll stay apart before facing each other in a tournament to conclude camp on Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s for sure important to learn to play apart from each other,\u201d\u00a0Markus said. \u201cIn case of an injury or we\u2019re not on the same team, for whatever reason, it\u2019s very important to play apart.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s good for us. I think we play better together when we\u2019re working off one another. But it\u2019s for sure important to play without each other too.\u201d<\/p>\n
In most ways, Liam and\u00a0Markus are identical; they share interests, and their demeanor is similar. As babies, they were nearly impossible to tell apart, leading their parents to use color-coded bracelets or to paint their toenails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CRANBERRY, Pa. — Liam and Markus Ruck are normally attached at the hip, but that changed on Monday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":734913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-734912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/734913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}