‘Big wake-up call’ pushed Flames’ Weegar to work on his game

Follow| Archive

Seven years ago, MacKenzie Weegar thought his future was more likely to be spent working on a construction site than playing hockey in an arena.

Then a Florida Panthers prospect, the 2013 seventh-round draft pick had just been demoted from the American Hockey League to the East Coast Hockey League. Weegar had to mature, on and off the ice, and was told as much by team brass.

“I thought the world was ending and I was crying,” he said, recounting that moment during the 2014-15 season in Adirondack, N.Y., when he was in his early twenties and told he’d be going to the ECHL.

“[Dale Tallon, then the Panthers general manager] had some choice words for me that I won’t ever forget…he basically said, ‘You’re easily replaceable. You haven’t done anything major to keep yourself around. You’ve got to wake up.’ That was the nice way he probably put it.” 

By his own admission, at that time Weegar didn’t even know how to do his own laundry.

“That was a big wake-up call I needed,” Weegar, now 28, said. “He pushed the right buttons.”

Tallon wasn’t the first hockey decision-maker to read the riot act to Weegar. As a rookie in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, Weegar was a key part of the Halifax Mooseheads’ 2013 Memorial Cup-winning squad, anchoring the second power-play unit on a team with future NHL stars Nathan MacKinnon and Jonathan Drouin. 

“You could see really good potential, but at the same time, he had a lot to learn, on and off the ice,” said Dominique Ducharme, then the Mooseheads’ head coach.

“You could see really good vision, good poise with the puck, and competitiveness. He’s a competitive guy. The bigger the moment was, the better he was. He had to mature as a young man and hockey player and slowly he