London Knights assistant coach Dylan Hunter will tell you that everything changed for his team in the middle of December.
It’s not a coincidence, he’ll also tell you, that that’s when everything changed for Sam Dickinson, too.
From Dec. 14 to Jan. 20, the Knights won 14 straight games and took over first place in the OHL standings. Around that time, they also lost their two first-round picks, defenseman Oliver Bonk and forward Easton Cowan, to the Canadian world junior team. Another of their top prospects, Denver Barkey, also attended camp.
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In their absence, Dickinson, the team’s next first-round pick, soon to be taken at the top of the 2024 NHL Draft, took over. They hoped to play to above .500 without them. They went undefeated. Before their departure, Dickinson was already a 17-year-old defenseman who’d often play 25 minutes a night. Without them, he played 30-plus.
“He really started coming into his own, not just being a top four on our team or a top three. He was playing penalty kill No. 1, power play, No. 1 pair. And we went on a roll,” Hunter said in a recent interview with The Athletic. “That was kind of his coming out party.”
Ever since, the Knights haven’t looked back. Neither has Dickinson.
He has been a top prospect for some time now. A captain and alternate captain at two separate events for Hockey Canada. The fourth pick and first defenseman taken in the 2022 OHL draft. Voted to the OHL’s First All-Rookie Team.
And those who know him have stories like Hunter’s that explain how.
Paul Ruta first met Dickinson when he was 11 years old. It was the springtime and he was at a track meet with St. Mike’s, the all-boys private school where he teaches in Toronto, when he noticed this kid from Crescent School, another local private school, who looked athletic.
“Great run,” he said to the kid after a race.
“Do you work for St. Mike’s?” the kid responded, noticing the ‘M’ on his shirt. “My brother goes there.”
After striking up a conversation, Ruta realized that Dickinson’s brother was Jack, a student in his homeroom class at the time.
After sharing a laugh, Ruta asked Dickinson if his parents were at the event and he pointed at his dad, Steve — whom Ruta had met that fall — standing nearby.
That conversation with Dickinson led to a conversation with Steve, which led to Ruta learning that Dickinson played AAA hockey, and then another conversation with his mom, Megan, who wanted Dickinson to return to Crescent for Grade 7 (which is when St. Mike’s starts).
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After some convincing and a tour, Ruta, who ran the gym and coached the hockey team at St. Mike’s, managed to talk Dickinson, Megan and Steve into the idea.
That summer, before Dickinson enrolled, Ruta also invited him to train with him so that he could get accustomed to life at the school and meet some of the kids. That September, Dickinson was then in Ruta’s Grade 7 class.
His first impression in the classroom was that he was a fantastic kid and student.
“Not too many 12- to 13-year-old boys carried himself the way he did,” Ruta said. “He went about his business a little bit of a different way. There was a certain maturity about him that others didn’t have. He had very nice balance between the rigorous academic schedule at St. Mike’s as well as his highly competitive athletic schedule outside of the school. He was very focused and mature about his goals.”
In the years since, they have trained each summer together and he has learned that that first impression was the right one.
“There has been six years of continuous growth regardless of whether he’s here in the building or in London and always staying in touch,” Ruta said. “He’s pretty freaking disciplined. He has sacrificed his summer for the most part to put in a full-time job here basically. He’s motivated, he’s extremely passionate about what he wants to achieve in life, he’s committed, he’s disciplined.”
What stands out the most, though, Ruta says, is Dickinson’s competitiveness. Whether they’re in the gym, on the track, or playing badminton with their non-dominant hands during a fun conditioning day, his competitiveness is “unmatched,” according to Ruta.
“Sam doesn’t want to lose and when he does he gets frustrated and impatient with himself but also understands that at the end of the day, that’s room for growth and an opportunity to get better,” Ruta said.
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That nature has helped him build and add in the gym — and ultimately to his game on the ice. He was always tall (Dickinson is now listed at just under 6-foot-3 and 199 pounds) but he worked first to build his stability and flexibility. Then he started working at mastering different movement patterns.
When Dickinson would go to the cottage on weekends and Ruta would text him exercises he could do on a Saturday morning before he went out on the water, Ruta knew Dickinson would do them, whereas he’d have no idea if others Dickinson’s age were doing theirs. He knew because he’d communicate with him to make sure he understood what he needed to do, and then he’d follow up.
Justin Donati, his former head coach with the AAA Toronto Marlboros from peewee (U13) to minor midget (U16) calls Dickinson “probably the hardest-working player” he’s coached.
That work ethic helped him become the top prospect he is today — something he wasn’t always.
When Dickinson first started playing hockey, he was a goalie. Then he was a AA forward. He was still a forward when he moved up to the Marlies and was “one of the weaker kids on the team.”
Then, when they needed a defenseman and they asked him, he said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll play, no problem,” because that’s who he is, according to Donati. By the time Donati began coaching him, “he was a good defenseman in the league but he wasn’t the best yet.” Two seasons later, by the end of minor Bantam, “there (were) no questions asked (about) who the best defenseman in the age group was.”
Throughout, even when the team lost its entire U15 season to the pandemic, Donati said Dickinson was always a model teammate who set an example with his work ethic, drive and competitiveness.
There may be no better example of that than the work he has done with his skating coach Lauren Malott.
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NHL Central Scouting describes Dickinson as “a very good skating and puck-moving D-man.” Hunter calls him a “beautiful skater.” Dickinson himself says his two best attributes are his size and skating.
Said Dickinson: “There’s not a lot of guys my age, or even who play hockey, who can really put those two things together as well as I do and it helps me out defensively shutting down plays and getting the puck out, transitioning the puck up quick, and then in the offensive zone to create space and use my feet to create as well.”
But it hasn’t always been that way and he says it’s the one skill he has put the most time into.
“(The skating) was something he worked on throughout,” Donati said. “You see it with bigger players, especially when they’re kids, they’re not always the most agile or mobile just because they don’t have the strength to move the frame. But then he got stronger and stronger. And he was always a good skater, but the edge work and the footwork was continuing to improve and that’s probably why he has seen so much success at the OHL level.”
Ruta says that for as long as he has known Dickinson he has made his skating a focus, work that is still ongoing.
“His mobility’s still not great, to be honest with you,” Ruta said. “He can run straight from A to B quickly but his backpedal and reverse work was pretty terrible when I first met him and his lateral movement was OK. To be honest with you, there’s still room for growth there. It can still be a lot better.”
But it’s his attitude and approach, as much as his talent, that has carried him to where he is today, according to Donati.
In his four years of coaching him, he doesn’t think he ever saw him lose a repetition in a bag skate.
“You could see that he was definitely on the right path to be a future NHLer, especially in U16,” Donati said. “Did I think top-10 NHL? I mean, yeah, I always thought the sky’s the limit for Sam because he has the talent and this and that but I always thought what stood out about Sam was just his attitude and the way he approaches the game. … He’s going to play as long as he wants to play and he’s got the right attitude for it. Any team’s going to be happy to have a player or person like him.”
Take it all in.
Don’t focus on it too much.
Enjoy every moment.
On a Knights team that boasts 10 drafted NHL prospects, Dickinson’s heard it all when it comes to handling the attention and pressure of being a projected top NHL Draft pick.
Bonk, a 2023 first-round pick (No. 22) of the Philadelphia Flyers, hasn’t hesitated to remind his teammate not to let the noise around the draft get to him.
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“He knows that he’s going to go very high. … He’s just an offensive weapon. He can play defense too, which is kind of getting more rare. Now when you see an offensive D, usually they kind of sacrifice the defense. But with him, I feel like he’s always back, he’s always getting back to help his teammates,” Bonk said. “His offensive instincts, his passes, his shooting, his shot is unreal. Like, I wish I had that.”
For now, though, there’s one particular piece of advice Dickinson is honing in on as he helps his OHL regular-season champion Knights through what he hopes will be a deep playoff run.
Just make sure you’re going out there and playing hockey every day.
“It’s all about the team stuff for us right now, kind of fine-tuning everything,” Dickinson said.
That includes continuing to fine-tune his offensive game to round out into more of a complete player. The points have come this season — Dickinson finished with 52 assists and 70 points in a full 68-game regular season, which included an 11-game point streak that spanned the month of February — and his shot, as Bonk pointed out, has become a big asset for the Knights, but Dickinson believes he has another level to reach offensively.
As for the defensive side of his game, he says it’s among “the strongest there is,” something Hunter agrees with.
“For a guy (his size), not many guys like that come around,” Hunter said. “The offensive stuff is kind of more natural when you have guys come in. It’s natural ability of being able to stickhandle or skate. But the defensive side is more of a learning game and he does it really well. He can break up rushes, he knows how to play the game. He played against all the top lines, which is hard to do with a guy his age.”
The Knights, who entered the postseason on a seven-game win streak, swept the Flint Firebirds in the opening round of the OHL playoffs.
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Longtime Knights assistant general manager Rob Simpson says the entire organization thinks “very highly of (Dickinson).”
“For a young player, he’s got loads of talent,” said Simpson. “You combine that with his size and his powerful skating ability, he’s got a cannon of a shot, and he’s got a lot of tools there.”
Hunter, who’s been on the Knights bench for 12 years, has seen his share of high draft picks come through the program and is especially impressed with how Dickinson has handled the success on the ice as a highly touted 17-year-old.
“They want to win and they want to make the playoffs, but it’s (the draft) going to be on their minds,” he said. “You think every play and every shift and every game is going to affect where you’re going to get drafted. He just has that ability to kind of put that on the back burner.”
In the same way Donati believes his attitude helped get him to where he is today, Hunter believes Dickinson’s character is among his best traits — and one that will impress at the NHL level.
“He never has a bad day. He takes all the stress of a draft year in stride,” Hunter said. “I’ve coached enough guys over the years, high picks. It’s a pressure cooker. … They’ve got their agents and their parents and their friends. They’re watching the draft board. And usually it gets to them a little bit. But Dickie is mature beyond his years that way.”
Dickinson’s priority right now may not be whether he gets chosen in the first round, or the top 10, or the top five, but even so, he’s found it helpful to have plenty of teammates who’ve experienced the draft process as the summer date at the Sphere in Vegas approaches.
“Having guys that have gone through this process and guys going as high as Bonk and Cowan did, they’re really easy guys to talk to. They’re always there for your help,” Dickinson said. “And anybody that you can kind of go up to, they’re always looking out for you. And having those guys here has been really huge for my development.”
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And when the Knights’ postseason wraps up — ideally with a Memorial Cup in Saginaw, Mich. — and Dickinson’s focus turns to when he’ll hear his name called by an NHL club, Bonk says the fellow blueliner has nothing to worry about given all he’s accomplished so far.
“If that is not going to get him top five then I don’t know what will,” Bonk said.
With reporting in Ottawa, Ont., and Moncton, N.B.
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(Top photo: Natalie Shaver / OHL Images)