St. Louis’ hockey journey comes full circle in return to Calgary

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When Brian Sutter was coaching the Boston Bruins in the early 90s, many in the scouting world were fixated on Paul Kariya, then a hotshot college player with the Maine Black Bears who would go on to be a top pick in the 1993 draft and have a Hall of Fame career. 

Sutter’s eyes, however, were glued to one of Kariya’s opponents in the Hockey East conference – an undersized, relentless forward from Quebec on the Vermont Catamounts named Martin St. Louis. 

“I loved him from the first time I saw him play,” Sutter said. His brother, Darryl, will coach the Calgary Flames against St. Louis and the Canadiens on Thursday.

“This isn’t a knock on Paul Kariya, but I thought Marty was as good a player as Paul was, and Paul ended up being the big draft pick…every time I watched [Marty] play, I thought, ‘What’s going on here? Why hasn’t this guy been drafted?’”

After his stint with the Bruins, Sutter found himself back in his native Alberta as the head coach of the Flames in the 1997-98 season and hadn’t forgotten about the college kid he’d seen play a couple of years earlier. 

“One of the first things I did when I went to Calgary when we were getting ready for camp was talk to some of our scouts about Martin St. Louis,” Sutter said.

“They were like all the other scouts in the professional world. For whatever reason, they didn’t think he was ready to be a pro player…I’ll never forget talking to [then Flames general manager Al Coates]. The scouts obviously didn’t feel that he was warranted to get an invite to training camp. That’s all I wanted, was for him to get an invite to training camp, not even for us to sign him. Let’s just get him there; because I knew he had a chance to play.”

Coates and the Flames scouts