During a practice earlier this season, USA Hockey National Team Development Program head coach Nick Fohr noticed Cole Eiserman, his star player, visibly frustrated.
He could see it all over his face, as he often can with the team’s leading scorer. So he skated over to pull him aside.
“Cole, what’s wrong?” he asked.
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“Ah, it’s just a hard day,” Eiserman said. “I’m just frustrated.”
“OK, well, what did we do today?” Fohr followed up.
“Well, everything was play away from the puck,” Eiserman answered.
“Correct. Cole, that’s hard for you,” Fohr explained. “For a lot of your teammates, it’s easy for them. When we do the other stuff, when we do line rushes and all the offensive stuff, you like those days, those days are easy for you aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Eiserman said, understanding where his coach was going.
“Those days are hard for your teammates because they’re not as good at scoring as you are. This is just a weakness of yours. And it’s going to be hard. And it’s OK to be frustrated with it a little bit, but understand that this is just something that we’re working on. You’re going to continue to make mistakes but that’s how you learn,” Fohr finished.
“Yeah, just woof. It was hard today,” Eiserman answered.
In Fohr’s two years coaching Eiserman, they’ve had more than one conversation like that. That’s not the only practice that has been architected that way, either. Fohr says that “in some cases they’ve been designed to help Cole, frankly.”
Such is the dichotomy of Cole Eiserman, the ultra-talented goal-scorer and projected as a top pick in the 2024 NHL Draft.
A year ago, he scored the most goals in a single season in the history of the NTDP. This year, he’s chasing down Cole Caufield’s U18 team scoring record. He was once viewed as the frontrunner for No 2 or No. 3 in his class. Now criticisms of his game — of bad habits, inconsistency, a perceived lack of roundedness — are common from NHL scouts, with some viewing him as more of a top-10 candidate than a top-five one. Eiserman, in fact, went 20th to the Islanders.
At the fall Five Nations tournament earlier this season, he registered 40 shots in four games (an unheard of 10 per game, including 18 against the Swedes). After the tournament, some scouts were put off by his play. “I am souring on Eiserman by the day,” texted one scout a couple of weeks later.
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But according to those who really know Cole Eiserman — including Fohr, who’s ready to lead the charge — he’s also often misunderstood and miscast.
Cole Eiserman the kid, and Cole Eiserman the player, are both more than meets the eye.
Fohr starts any conversation about Eiserman with this: “First and foremost, Cole Eiserman’s the best scorer in the draft. I don’t think it’s a question. And I love Macklin Celebrini. He’s the only other one in my opinion that’s close, but Cole’s just better. He just scores in different ways.”
He thinks it’s important that everyone starts there, too.
When NHL scouts have called him and used words like “selfish” or “me, me, me” to describe or ask about Eiserman, he has told them that while he can definitely see why some of them view Eiserman that way, they’ve got him wrong.
“When you are with Cole on a daily basis, when you learn what makes him tick. When you learn how his brain works, when you’re just around him and you see him interact with his teammates, it’s not about Cole Eiserman,” he’ll tell them. “That’s not who he is and it’s not selfishness. It’s him using his assets to the best of his ability and for the betterment of the team. He wants his teammates to have success, he wants to make plays to them.”
In fact, Fohr said that he feels Eiserman tries to make too many plays for his linemates. There have even been times, in games and in practices, where has had grabbed him and said, “Cole, you’re in the prime scoring area, you need to shoot these pucks.”
“I don’t want it to look selfish to everybody else,” Eiserman has responded.
“I don’t care, you can score from here! Score. You need to shoot the puck more, not less,” Fohr has told him plainly.
The same goes for that frustration that he can wear. That, Fohr has told NHL teams, is about Eiserman’s standard for himself.
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“You see some of the outbursts. You can see him smack a water bottle when he comes back to the bench if something didn’t go right. But again, those are inwardly focussed things. Those are Cole making a mistake; it’s not at his teammates,” Fohr said. “Me and him have had talks about just body language and what that sends out to people and that we have to be careful with some of those things and his response to me is, ‘Well, what do they want me to be, a robot? I’m not a robot and I have emotions.’ And I’m like, ‘I get that. Cole, you and I are good with this, I’ve got no problem with it. But these are the questions that we have to answer when people call after watching you. And these are the questions that you’re going to have to answer when you sit down with NHL GMs ahead of the draft.'”
Over time, Fohr has grown to respect and appreciate those qualities in Eiserman. He thinks the NHL club that takes him will, too.
“He’s emotional, and he’s competitive. And I love him. His teammates love him. And that doesn’t mean everything’s sunshine and rainbows all the time. There’s been times where there’s some hard conversations had amongst him and his teammates, where they get after each other a little bit, but it’s done in front of each other and it’s done so that the next time they’re out there they make the right play again,” Fohr said. “And that’s really what drives him. And that’s the best perspective that I can give on him.”
He also tries to remind people of his age (his August 29 birthday is just weeks away from eligibility for the 2025 draft) and of the microscope he has been under not just in his two years at the program but before that, playing on a talked-about Shattuck St. Mary’s team that featured both him and Celebrini.
“They’re kids. Sometimes people forget that. And the benefit of playing for the NTDP is, you’re on the most visible team in the world in your draft year. We get watched and evaluated more than any other team in the world. And honestly, too much so at times,” Fohr said. “When scouts go watch some kid play out in the Prairies of Canada, they watch that kid 10 times. They’re watching Cole play 40. You’re going to find something over 40 games that makes you think ‘Huh, should we do this or not?’”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for Eiserman to grow.
Fohr is constantly working with him on his play away from the puck.
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“He is a driven scorer. He eats, breathes, lives scoring. That’s all he wants to do,” Fohr said. “And he understands that there’s more to the game than that. But he has always been able to get by on just scoring regardless. And in fact, he still does that here. But as he starts to look bigger picture and to the NHL level, he understands that he’s going to have to be better in those areas away from the puck. And he’s working on it.”
On a recent phone call during a bus trip from Boston University to Providence for a game, his future head coach, BU’s Jay Pandolfo, talked about Eiserman in a similar light.
Eiserman was a player who, when Pandolfo got the Terriers job, everyone in the area already knew because he was a local kid. He was one of Pandolfo’s first targets. Initially, they didn’t get him and he committed to the University of Minnesota. Then, “all of a sudden we got lucky and he switched it.”
Since, he has spent a lot of time getting to know him and his game through watching him live and on tape, meetings, and calls. He has also spoken with Celebrini, who is currently at BU, about him.
“(Celebrini) can’t say enough about Cole not only as a player but as a person,” Pandolfo said. “He thinks very highly of him.”
Pandolfo has even coached against him now. In an exhibition game between BU the NTDP’s U18 team, Pandolfo said Eiserman played “one of the best, complete games I’ve seen him play just in all areas.”
“He’s very capable of playing a complete game,” Pandolfo said. “Of the guys his age, he has always been able to score. It’s actually incredible. Like he can just score. But he’s got a lot more to his game as well, and we’re looking forward to helping him develop.”
Though there’s always going to be some give and take, Pandolfo thinks every team should want Eiserman on theirs.
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“No question it’s a balancing act for sure. The time I’ve spent with him and talking to other people, he loves the game and we love that,” Pandolfo said. “We have some players here now that just have a passion for the game and they come to the rink every day wanting to get better, and that’s what we see in him.”
Owen Campbell, who has trained Eiserman at Edge Performance System (a Boston-area gym owned by former New England Patriots trainer Brian McDonough) since after his freshman year at Shattuck insists Eiserman is “definitely not a me, me, me guy.”
He knows him as a respectful, fun-loving kid who dials it in whenever it’s time to work.
“He’ll do whatever you tell him to do as long as it’s going to make him better,” Campbell said. “I love Cole. He’s like a younger brother to me at this point.”
Last summer, Campbell elevated Eiserman into their pro group — which includes Charlie Coyle, Kevin Hayes, Matty Beniers, Henry Thrun, Ryan Donato and John Farinacci — earlier than he typically would because he felt he was mature enough for it both physically and mentally.
Said Campbell: “From my experience with other guys who are going through the draft process, physically Cole (a left-shot winger who is listed at 6-feet and 195 pounds) is definitely at the top of his age group. He’s definitely a man now. He’s one of the strongest kids that we have. He’s definitely physically prepared for the next level. But it’s not just the strength. It’s the mental fortitude that he has now. The ability to look himself in the mirror at the end of a workout and know that he put his heart into everything.”
The NHLers welcomed him, and taught him, but also held him accountable and tested him. By summer’s end, they also loved him.
“The biggest thing with (Eiserman) is, he just loves the process,” Campbell said. “He loves showing up and putting the work in and that’s why he’s in the position that he is at a young age.”
Shortly after a November morning skate, Eiserman was standing outside the dressing room at USA Hockey Arena with the blade of his shooting room stick in his hands and pressed up against his face.
It’s a P92 blade and a 77 flex shaft, but the flex comes down to 72 with his extension.
“I basically live in that place,” he said of the shooting room. “If I’m not at practice or in school, I’m always in there messing around and doing different things to work on my shot.”
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He’s able to live there because while some of his teammates live 20 to 30 minutes away, his billet family lives just two minutes from the rink.
He has found a home away from home with his billet family, Karen and John and “two awesome little billet brothers,” Nick and JP, who both play AA and AAA hockey locally, and whose games he often attends when they’re not going to war in mini-sticks.
“They love hockey as much as I do so it’s a good dynamic,” he said of his two billet brothers. “One of them is a little younger so he cries a lot when we play but he gets over it.”
It’s the reverse of the environment he grew up in as the youngest of five Eiserman boys — or, as he’ll correct you, the second-youngest by three minutes to his fraternal twin brother Caden and older brothers Billy, Shane and Chris.
Though he says he and Caden are “totally different,” all five boys played hockey and it was always on in the family home in Newburyport, Mass. His dad, Bill, a recently retired state trooper, played at UMass Lowell. His brother, Shane, played at the NTDP in 2012-13 and went on to play pro hockey. Billy played pro, too.
His shot was honed shooting black pucks at the drywall in their basement because he didn’t have a net and he didn’t like shooting the lighter blue pucks. He’d act like he was scoring, and then get excited to go do the real thing on the ice.
He patterned his shot after Auston Matthews’, like most young players now do. But he says it’s more than that, too.
“It’s not really the one drag. It’s more about whatever happens in the moment,” Eiserman said. “I can kind of get it off from everywhere and from different angles. I use the flex of the stick and the defender to deceive goalies.”
The competitive streak, and the chip on his shoulder that he admits he has, came from growing up competing on the backyard rink with his older brothers. When the backyard rink would melt, he’d play competitive baseball and football in the summers (he played AAU baseball until he left for Shattuck and was bummed to have to give it up). These days, baseball and basketball have been replaced by tennis and golf — when he’s not training at EPS or skating at Harvard with the skills specialists at Stride Envy.
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You can see the chip on his shoulder when you ask him about the view some scouts have of his game. He knows how it’s perceived but he’s also a little defensive.
“I think I have a pretty well-rounded game, it just gets overlooked because of how much I score. It’s almost one of those things where the scoring rates work against you,” Eiserman said. “Obviously the No. 1 thing I do is score, but I think I pass the puck very well and that’s a big part of my game. And my 200-foot game from last year has gotten really good. My coaches are saying that it’s definitely not a problem anymore and it’s perfect.”
There’s a layer behind every part of Eiserman.
His decision to switch his commitment from Minnesota to BU? To be closer to his dad, who was diagnosed with cancer, underwent surgery and is now in remission.
“It was all family. I’ve been away from home for so long. Being closer to home was really important to them, and it would mean a lot to me. It wasn’t a hockey decision at all,” Eiserman said. “But I’m definitely happier, after something happens like that, to be closer to home. It was hard. Obviously, it’s a big year for me but when something like that happens it gets your priorities straight. He’s my No. 1 person and he’s going to be able to come out to BU and watch me there. And he was coming out a lot before his surgery, and I always play better when he’s there, just playing for him and playing relaxed knowing that he’s going through something that’s a lot harder than I’ll ever go through.”
Before he becomes a Terrier, Eiserman is motivated to continue to prove himself, and to close his chapter at the national program with a second consecutive gold medal at U18 worlds. After that, he’s excited to live out his dream at the NHL Draft in Las Vegas alongside Celebrini, who he calls his “best friend, no matter what.”
“I talk to him every day and it’s one of those things where I love talking to him. My family kind of brings him in as another son,” he said. “It’s pretty surreal to be able to do it with him and see what he’s doing and being along with him.”
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As for that bit of defiance?
He owns it.
“It’s being me, playing a physical and hard game while also scoring as much as I can and setting up guys. I know I can shoot so it’s all about faking them out and passing it to get to that next level. But it’s also about playing winning hockey and being a guy who will block shots and finish hits. (I’m) just continuing to be me,” Eiserman said. “If I try being someone that I’m not, it’s just not going to benefit the team or the teams I’m going to be on in the future.”
With reporting in Plymouth, Mich.
(Photos by Rena Laverty / USA Hockey’s NTDP)
