The path to the NHL usually goes something like this. Be raised in a hockey-mad country like Canada, Sweden or Russia. Start skating at age 4 or 5. Play hockey all winter, on frozen ponds or backyard rinks or in one of the many arenas in your home town. Live, breathe, eat ice hockey.
David Levin is taking a different path. His path is quite unique.
Born and raised in Zoran, Israel, Levin’s home was more than four hours away from the closest ice rink. His first passion was inline hockey. He spent hours crafting skills like stick-handling, inline skating, passing and, maybe most importantly, seeing the rink and knowing where his teammates and opposing players were on the court.
Those skills ignited a fire in Levin that eventually led to him moving to Canada to live with his aunt and uncle at the age of 12. From there, he worked on his ice skating. And last August in Calgary, Levin was one of 63 forwards at Hockey Canada’s under-17 development camp.
Pretty incredible stuff.
“I started playing inline hockey when I was 4 years old, started skating and rollerblading,” Levin says. “I always had a dream to move to Canada to play the best hockey and also to make the NHL... that’s my dream. It was tough on my parents. I really wanted to move to Canada but they originally told me I was too young when I asked them. So I waited another two years and they told me that I could move here and now I’m here.”
Levin left his parents – father Pavel and mother Lena – along with brother Mike in Israel and moved to Toronto in the summer of 2012. He was 12 at the time.
Levin says his dad, a former professional football player in Latvia, loved hockey and watched NHL games on TV. David was seven or eight years old when he watched a game with his father and started asking about the NHL.
When Levin moved to the Toronto area, he worked extremely hard on his skating, the skill that was most lacking in his game. In fact, Levin says he didn’t really know how to change direction or stop on skates until age 12. But, with hard work and hitting the ice each and every day, the skating improved and, soon after, scouts took notice.
“It was a pretty cool story because they saved a school spot for me (at Hill Academy in Vaughn, Ontario) and I went for tryouts there,” says Levin. “A Bantam AA coach saw me and, after the practice, he came and asked me if I wanted to join his team. I said ‘yes, for sure’. He asked me to go to practice the next day. I went there and, after the practice, a Bantam AAA coach saw me and he came to me and took me on his team.”
Until then Levin played a couple of seasons with the Don Mills Flyers program, the home of recent NHL draft picks including Max Domi and Darnell Nurse (both of whom helped Canada win gold at the 2015 IIHF World Junior Championship). In 2014/15, Levin played with the Flyers’ minor midget AAA team, scoring 39 goals and adding 41 assists – for 80 points – in 55 games.
His success on the ice led him to becoming the first overall pick by the Sudbury Wolves at the 2015 OHL priority selection draft.
Just imagine: a 15-year-old kid from Israel, with a Latvian father and Russian mother, a kid who didn’t skate a lot until the age of 12, taken first overall in a top junior league in Canada.
“It feels amazing. It felt pretty cool,” says Levin. “Kids from Canada are playing every day and touching their sticks every day so, when I went ahead of them, it felt pretty amazing. I worked very hard the past few years. Every day I was going to the gym and working really hard and this is what happens when you work hard.”
That hard work continued at the under-17 development camp. Levin, who scored two goals and added an assist in three games with Team Blue, was one of 111 players at the camp. Hockey Canada’s scouts have been monitoring all players through the start of their seasons and in October Levin was one of the 66 players selected to compete on three Canadian teams at the 2015 World Under-17 Hockey Challenge.
That tournament was held last autumn in British Columbia and the three Canadian teams were joined by the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. Levin had one assist in five games.
The under-17 program is one of the first opportunities for Canada’s future stars to wear the Maple Leaf at international competition. Many players who compete at the under-17 tournament go on to represent Canada at the U18 and U20 Worlds.
With the U17 camps over, Levin’s focus is on Sudbury. He’s still just 16 but his hard work paid off as he made the roster of the OHL team. He scored nine goals and had 29 points as he hit the ice in 44 games against 17, 18, 19, and 20-year-olds.
Despite being one of the youngest on his team, he’s already fourth in points per game (0.66) behind players like Russia’s Dmitri Sokolov and Mikkel Aagaard, who have already competed at the U18 Worlds and World Juniors respectively.
CHRIS JUREWICZ |
