How Zayne Parekh’s unique game made him a 2024 NHL Draft star — and why he’s leaning into it

SAGINAW, Mich. — As the 2024 NHL Draft season finishes with the final hockey on the prospect calendar — the Memorial Cup — and scouts show up to the Dow Event Center one last time, Zayne Parekh still has something to prove.

He’s heard all the criticism. Soft defensively. Loose posture. Lackadaisical look.

But he’s much more than that.

At 16, he was voted to the CHL’s All-Rookie Team and broke the OHL’s all-time under-17 goals record for a defenseman, scoring 21 times. At 17, he was named the OHL’s most outstanding defenseman and registered an unheard-of-for-a-defenseman 33 goals and 96 points in 66 games, 21 more than his nearest teammate.

How was he going to show them this time? The same way he always has. By leaning into — instead of away from — his unique game. And by producing.

In the Memorial Cup opener, he added another goal and three points to his totals in a 5-4 win over the WHL-champion Moose Jaw Warriors and was named player of the game. In the host Saginaw Spirit’s second game against the QMJHL-champion Drummondville Voltigeurs, he registered his fourth point in a 4-3 win. And on Wednesday night, in the round robin finale, he set up the game-tying 2-2 goal in the second period against the OHL-champion London Knights, taking a hit to make the play for his fifth point.

Through three games, he has now been on for eight of Saginaw’s 10 goals for at even-strength. The Spirit have outscored the opposition 8-2 at five-on-five with him on the ice.

That’s him. That’s “Z.”

Parekh feels he still has something to prove. (Eric Young / CHL)

Duncan Dalmao, Lindsay Hofford and Dawn Braid have each known “Z” for about as long as he has known hockey.

That’s how things work when you’re the youngest of three brothers. They worked with the eldest Parekh, Aydin, now a defenseman at Utica University. Then they worked with the middle brother, Isa, who is set to leave the BCHL’s Nanaimo Clippers and play at Bemidji State University. Eventually, Zayne started following them to the rink.

Dalmao, now the head coach of the ECHL’s Indy Fuel, jokes that he started doing summer skills work with Zayne when he started playing.

Hofford, a former head coach with the Knights and Lethbridge Hurricanes, and director of amateur scouting with the Knights and the NHL’s Coyotes and Maple Leafs, calls his relationship with the Parekhs a family one. They live in the same neighborhood in Nobleton, Ont., and he became friends with Zayne’s father, Azim. All three boys have skated with him through his Pro Hockey Development Group. He’s known Parekh since he was a toddler.

Braid, one of hockey’s preeminent skating coaches, guesses she has worked with Zayne since he was 10.

Among the first words they all use to describe Zayne is “misunderstood.”

They’ve all heard the same criticisms he has when scouts have reached out.

They all get it to a certain extent, too.

“You’ll watch him play and you’ll be like, ‘Man, does this guy even care right now?’” Dalmao said, chuckling. “There’s times where I get on him about it. Like ‘Hey, Z, your body language,’ and he kind of just looks at you like he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and that’s because he’s kind of just standing there because he’s kind of just watching everything happen. And then all of a sudden you snap your fingers and he’s in the place he needs to be and he’s making something happen.”

Dalmao says ever since Parekh was a little kid, he needed to be stimulated by what they were doing. Whereas some players go through the motions even when they’re not interested in something, Parekh won’t do that, according to Dalmao. Instead, he’ll simply say, “This does not interest me.”

“He’s a creative guy, especially on the ice,” Dalmao said. “He certainly sees things a little bit different at times. But that was something that we wanted to nurture.”

Dalmao calls Parekh “an incredibly smart kid” and says Azim, his mom, Mona, and Aydin are all the same way. Hofford calls Azim “a brilliant man” and one of the smartest people he’s ever known. Azim was born in India and immigrated to Oshawa and then to Nobleton via England on his own in the early 1970s, raising enough funds to bring his family of seven over. He’s now a dentist with practices all over Canada.

Mona’s parents both left South Korea for Germany in 1966 and then settled in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., in 1967. She’s now an interior designer. Last year, when Parekh scored his 21st goal and broke the record, he coincidentally did it in the Soo on his 17th birthday. Mona was supposed to be at the game, but her flight from Toronto had difficulties.

“They worked for everything they have. I mean, both of my parents, their parents didn’t have much. And they’ve pushed me so much. I’m so grateful for them,” Parekh told The Athletic this year.

Parekh has grown up with his grandparents on his mom’s side, Choon Yul Lee, and Mi Soon Lee, as big parts of his life. This season, when the Spirit played in places such as Mississauga, members of the South Asian and East Asian communities often rooted for him and wore his jersey on the road. He aspires to be a pilot, has a passion for chess and considered the college route before deciding on the OHL because he felt he needed to play more games.

“(They) raised these kids properly,” Hofford said. “It was always a mindset of, ‘Here’s a problem, what’s the solution?’”

Both Zayne and his brother Aydin “blew through school.” Where some players manage to accelerate their high-schooling by one year, Parekh did by two, finishing at 16 so that he was done when he entered the OHL. He has already taken some courses through the University of Toronto.

“They’re very smart kids, and they had a work ethic from a very young age, which is something that gets overlooked with all three of them, and certainly with Zayne,” Dalmao said. “He knows what he has to do to succeed and does it, he puts his nose to the grindstone.”

Parekh has fought against some of the negative perceptions of him by leaning further into his strengths.(David St. Louis / CHL)

Despite the fact that all three boys play defense and Dalmao was a D-specific skills coach, Azim’s priorities aligned with Parekh’s interest in offense, and so they each focused, from an early age, on building skills more like forwards would.

Parekh “took that to a different level,” though.

“A lot of players overlook this, but Zayne Parekh, for as much hockey as he’s played, he has seen just as much. And watching developed his ability to see the game in a certain way, and in a way that makes it easy for him to process,” Dalmao said. “Things slow down for him. That’s why it almost looks like there’s not a lot of effort there, but it’s just slowed down to him so much that he just kind of plays like that. And those things have combined to lend themselves to him being so dynamic offensively.”

Hofford said that some of the things people say about Parekh are the same ones they said about Evan Bouchard, whom he drafted with London.

“No kid is going to come out and check every single box all the time,” Hofford said. “You have to resort to coach-ability, character, adaptability, and the maturity of a hockey player and their ability to keep growing as a player. And definitely it’s there with Zayne.”

Parekh has fought against some of those perceptions by leaning further into his strengths.

“He really believes in what makes him a special hockey player, and you have to have that to play that way and pull that off,” Hofford said. “It’s not an easy thing if you’re not a confident human being. Some of these guys are Clark Kent and then they pop into the telephone booth and they become Superman. That analogy sticks with him. He has his game personality and then his off-ice personality.”

His off-ice personality is, according to Hofford, that of a very nice, very humble, very respectful kid.

On the ice?

“He has elite offensive hockey sense. He has elite offensive skills that match the hockey sense, which is sometimes not the case. And I’m talking elite,” Hofford said.

Believing in himself shouldn’t be confused with not wanting to get better, though.

Parekh said that his “skating was really bad — like really bad” when he first started with Braid. He admits it’s still not perfect and says she “turned the whole thing around.”

“I credit everything to her,” he said.

Braid, though, points to the 45-minute drives (worse in traffic) on early mornings before school that he did as being among the many reasons she gives him the credit.

“If we don’t see somebody really excited, and going hard, we can sometimes make the assumption, ‘Oh, he’s lazy.’ Every person is different, and we have to learn to read their personality,” Braid said. “The last two years, every time he came to the rink, I never questioned if I had to do something to get Parekh going. Parekh came to work.”

Braid likes to do before and after look-backs with all of her clients — from Owen Power to John Tavares — to show what years worth of changes look like. Though the computer that had Parekh’s tape from over the years crashed, she has often joked with him, “Oh, I wish I could show you, because, boy, it was bad.”

“He has come a long way. I’m not going to tell you that Zayne is the best, most powerful, most explosive skater out there, but what Zayne has done is, he has always been trending upward,” Braid said. “He was able to have a big growth in his skating. And when I say that, he’s not done. He’s still got room for growth and I don’t think he has reached his full potential. … But we don’t all skate the same, and Zayne is a good skater. And his skating influences his assets.”

Dalmao argues that the way Parekh looks on the ice doesn’t say anything about his competitiveness, either. He has seen it in their countless sessions together. He has seen it in rounds on the golf course.

“Listen, he’s a competitor,” Dalmao said. “As much as he looks a certain way, he wants to win, he wants to do well, he’s a team guy. … He wants to impact the game in ways that really other people can’t.”

Though Parekh was born in 2006, he played up a year with the 2005s from the age of 5. (David St. Louis / CHL)

On a phone call last fall, as Parekh began his draft season with the Spirit, Dave Drinkill, the team’s general manager, worried they were playing their 17-year-old star “maybe too many minutes.”

Two games into the season, he’d played 28 and 29 minutes.

But head coach Chris Lazary just kept putting him out there.

“He’s dynamic. He’s going to be a fun one,” Drinkill said. “Every time he has the puck in the offensive end, you kind of perk up a little bit because you think something might happen, and he’s got that aura about him and that sense on the ice that brings you out of your seat.”

Eight months later, they still haven’t stopped playing him those minutes. Though he battled an upper-body injury through the OHL playoffs and missed several games, he averaged 30 minutes in Saginaw’s final three games of the Western Conference Final, when their season was on the line against London. He then played between 25 and 30 minutes in each of the Spirit’s first three games of the Memorial Cup — on a blue line with three drafted players, two of whom are signed and played at the world juniors this year.

Throughout, while the offense continued to define him, Drinkill says he really worked on his defending.

“Every critic that’s out there says he doesn’t defend hard enough, which I disagree with,” Drinkill said. “He’s just smart about how he defends. If you really watch him play and how he defends, even on the penalty kill, his stick’s so active, he breaks up plays, he reads plays before they happen. … People have to criticize him for something, but I know he’s definitely making a conscious effort to improve that stigma, and I think he has done a heck of a job with it.”

Lazary is quick to point out that Pavel Mintyukov dealt with the same talk when he played for the Spirit. The Anaheim Ducks then took Mintyukov with the No. 10 pick in the 2022 draft and, by the fall of 2023, he was starting a standout rookie season in the NHL.

“(Parekh’s defense) still has room for growth, but if you watch his low battles and his battles around the net, and his gaps, he’s really focussed on showing people he knows how to defend, which he does,” Lazary said on a phone call this year.

While Parekh says he thinks his play defensively has “come a long way,” he knows he still has to continue to work at it and prove it. At a dinner following a four-point game earlier this season, he spent the meal watching his game back on OHL Live because he felt he’d made a couple of defensive miscues.

“If you look a year ago today, you could probably see the difference in my game away from the puck. It’s something I’ve honed in on and I take pride in it because I hate getting criticism that I’m not a good defender and I’m trying to show people that I can defend,” Parekh said. “I’m never going to be a guy who blows guys up or wins puck battles with my physicality. I have a pretty good stick and it’s pretty long, so I’m able to close gaps that way and then I’ve been learning to re-gap and control my gaps when I’m going down ice and that’s been huge for me.”

Both that stick-work defensive style and the way he thinks the game offensively come from being on the smaller side when he was younger, Parekh says. Though he’s a 2006-born player, he played up a year with the 2005s from the age of 5.

“It’s quick-game playing with the older kids. Once I went down to minor midget, everything really slowed down, and guys weren’t as quick as they were so it was easy to find holes and then that juiced me to play offense,” Parekh said.

Parekh moved up to No. 5 on NHL Central Scouting’s final list, up from No. 10 at the midseason mark. (Natalie Shaver / OHL Images)

And he’s not going to ever stop playing it.

Dalmao laughs about how he’ll map out a drill for him and by the third or fourth rep he adds things to the drill himself.

“I’m just like, ‘Hey, from now on we’re just going to do it that way,’” Dalmao said, chuckling. “That kind of stuff comes out in those scenarios where he has that creativity. He has that interest in getting better, but he has other things he wants to apply to his training as well.”

And ultimately it’s working for him.

The critics are starting to fade.

NHL Central Scouting moved him from No. 10 on their midseason list of North American skaters to No. 5 on their final list. Their report talks about his game’s quickness, offensive smarts, reads, instincts, “swag,” handling, creativity, shot and “composed and laid back presence (that) never panics or gets rushed.”

It also now says he “defends effectively with his smarts and stick and is very effective at getting in the way of opponent or puck” and that “his game has matured considerably.”

A few weeks ago, when Hofford reached out to Knights general manager Mark Hunter curious his thoughts on Parekh, Hunter answered, “He’s just too damn good to fail.”

“Parekh’s a star,” another rival OHL general manager texted The Athletic.

— With reporting in Moncton, N.B.

(Top photo: Eric Young / CHL)