Canadiens GM Kent Hughes on Coaching Will Smith: ‘If you keep score, he has to win’ (+)

Will Smith says Montreal Canadiens GM Kent Hughes was the best coach that he’s ever had.

Hughes, then a player agent, coached Smith on the Boston Jr. Eagles from 2018 to 2021, before the future San Jose Sharks’ top pick joined the USA Hockey National Team Development Program.

San Jose Hockey Now caught up recently with Hughes, who spoke about Smith’s formative years, his “cerebral” competitiveness, the tough love that he showed Smith, Smith’s up-and-down rookie NHL season, and more.

“He knew I wanted to make that team, and his kid was on the [USNTDP] team too,” Smith told SJHN. “So he knew what it took to make it.”

What did Hughes teach the teenager?

“He just taught me how to play hockey the right way,” the San Jose Sharks star said.

“He really just instilled a lot into Will and his game and worked with him,” Bill Smith, Will’s dad said.

“He obviously was tough on me and the whole team, just because he cared about it,” Will Smith said. “I just remember doing film with him and stuff like that.”

“Kent Hughes was probably the most influential coach he had,” Bill Smith said. “Kent’s the best. No one better.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sheng Peng: You coached your son Jack with the Jr. Eagles, before Will Smith. What kept you coaching the Jr. Eagles and Will after Jack went into the USNTDP?

Kent Hughes: I always loved coaching, even when I was in college. I used to come home in the summers and coach a spring-summer triple-A team. In fact, I used to coach against Marty St. Louis at the time. He was playing, I was coaching.

When he was playing midget hockey, I would coach a team in the Montreal area, and he was in the suburb outside of Montreal.

I always had a passion for it—I got into it with all three of my kids. Then when that ended, my youngest, Jack, would have been in that split season—you coach in the fall, and then he had started prep school.

Will was playing in the same organization, and my friends, [John Joyce] owned and another ran the program. They approached me because there was some issue, and they needed help coaching this younger Eagles team, which was Will’s team, the 2005 birth year. I agreed to help out for the remainder of that year.

Then, the program director called in the summer and said, “Would you ever consider continuing?” I was reluctant at first, but my wife laughed and said, “All they had to do was get you to agree to help out, and you would eventually be full time.”

That’s effectively what happened.

SP: What were your first impressions of Will Smith?

KH: I knew of Will and saw him periodically—because again, he played in the Eagles organization. At that time, I would have coached the 2000-born players, the ‘03 and the girls team that my daughter played on.

Here and there I’d show up at a rink, and Will’s team might play before or after. He was a prolific scorer right from the get-go with the program, so people within the Eagles organization always kind of knew of Will.

When I got a chance to watch, I always did. He’s very, very talented offensively, very gifted, I guess I would say—probably the most gifted offensive player that I had seen in my years of coaching in the Boston area.

You have to coach him to understand how truly competitive he is, because that competitiveness doesn’t come out that way. You see a hockey player that’s so urgent and competitive, I think of Brendan Gallagher here in Montreal, who was getting cross-checked in the head, and he’s battling all over the place for everything.

Will’s competitiveness, it comes out in a more cerebral way. The more you coach, the more you watch them in practice, and how he hated to lose—even if it was a small ice game.

We ended up designing a lot of the practices around getting that competitiveness out of them, because Will would elevate his line—and his linemate at the time would as well—we kind of felt it brought the whole team up with them.

SP: How did you get more competitiveness out of Will and your team?

KH: If you keep score, he has to win.

The [practice] games, if we were going to do them, we’d make it a best-of-five, and then we would keep a season tally, or like, who’s going to win the month of November.

Let’s say we’ve got our teams, this is for the month of November, you’re Team White, you’re Team Maroon, and we’d keep score—a tally of who’s up in the series. It just fueled that kind of friendly competition.

He wants to be the best, and he wants to win.

SP: Speaking of that competitiveness, did you see Macklin Celebrini wearing Smith’s Boston College jersey? And Will’s big smile next to him?

KH: I saw the Boston College. I didn’t realize it was a Will Smith jersey.

SP: It was actually the specific jersey that Will wore to beat Macklin’s team last year. Does that sound like the competitive Will Smith that you know?

KH: (laughs) Yes, 100 percent.

SP: What was the moment when you knew Will Smith was special, that he could be a high draft pick?

KH: When you get to the U14 age—it would have been that second full season of coaching—in the US, that’s where teams really ramp up, because it’s the first age level that you’re eligible for national championships.

Usually, there’s one or two teams in Detroit that aggregate the most talented kids, and the same for the Boston area and other parts of the country.

In terms of our schedule, rather than just playing a league schedule in and around Boston, at that point, you’re traveling, playing the best kids in the country all the time, and the top kids in Toronto.

For the most part—I would say 90% of the game—Will was the best player on the ice, irrespective of who we played. It became pretty clear at that point that he was an elite talent.

As I said to you, to me, in terms of his offensive skill-set, he was probably the best kid I had seen, because I had already gone through this at the 2000 age level. I followed that ‘01 age level very closely, because John Joyce coached the ‘01 age level, I coached the 2000, and we co-coached the 2003s because we both had sons on the team. We saw a lot of really good hockey players come through during that time. [Alex] Laferriere in LA, [Trevor] Zegras, they were all playing, whether they were playing on the Eagles or against them in Mid Fairfield or New Jersey, those programs.

I had seen most of the best kids in the Northeast over that interval of birth years, and Will was the most talented offensively that I saw.

SP: Will talked about looking at film with you. What do you remember about that?

KH: With these programs, it’s not like you’re playing in your local towns. People are coming from different parts, I’m busy with work and other things.

What I used to use is a software where if I could upload the game into the software, then I could actually cut the video and text clips to the player. Then, they could respond to me.

Sometimes, they’d be team texts that would just go into the group chats and guys could watch A, B, C. Then other times, if I’m watching and I see things that are specific to Will, then I would be able to forward him the video saying, “Hey, watch this. This is what we talked about in terms of being above pucks,” and whatnot.

Then, because I watch so much hockey on TV, clients and whatnot, taping NHL games and watching often, if I see things—my wife would get pretty frustrated, but I’d press pause and be like, “Can you grab the iPad and film the TV?”—and say “Look how they’re doing it in Edmonton,” “Look how McDavid does this,” or “Look how Kucherov does that.” That type of thing.

SP: This definitely doesn’t sound like player agent behavior.

KH: It’s my passion. When you’re doing it, it’s not like, “Oh, shoot, I have to go to practice today,” or “Oh, shoot, I have a game today.” I generally get excited. I had a friend that coached with me who didn’t have any sons or any connections either, so the two of us enjoyed doing it and helping them out.

It definitely has to come from within, it’s not typical of the job duties.

SP: Will also talked about how you taught him to play the right way, showed him some tough love.

KH: I can’t think of a specific moment where in a specific game, I would teach him how to play the right way.

I do remember the very first time I came and coached the team as the head coach in a Labor Day tournament. We were playing a team from Toronto, and he was so gifted offensively, but he would cheat a lot.

I remember bringing the group in after the period and saying, “I just want to make sure I understand, are we going to wait until Will gets his two or three points before he’s going to start helping our team play hockey, or is this just going to be the Will Smith show for three periods? Because if that’s it, that’s not what I signed up for.”

I did it on purpose, because I think naturally in competitive youth sports, when somebody is so talented, people just let him cheat all over the ice because it probably benefits the team to let him cheat.

I had talked to [Will’s dad] Bill about it before while talking over coaching, because Bill was a manager on the team. I said if I was going to do this, I want to coach the team, and I expect everybody to be held accountable and all that kind of stuff—you wouldn’t like me as a coach if you expected Will to be left alone.

He’s like, “No, that’s exactly what I want for Will.”

I can say, sometimes when he wasn’t going, I would get on him, saying “That’s not good enough, let’s go wake up,” or I’d sit him a shift.

I can remember, even in state championships, when you’re doing that and being on him. And he’d turned around and scored two goals in his next shifts. The guy I used to coach with just said, “That’s his way of him saying, Go screw yourself.”

SP: That says a lot about his dad too, right? That he wanted a 13-year-old Will to really learn what it means to be a pro player and not get coddled.

KH: [Bill and Colleen] were great. I don’t think I ever received a call from Bill saying, “Could you do this or that?” or “Will’s upset.” I never heard a word from him.

SP: Bill said you were the most influential coach of Will’s career so far. What does that mean to you, for him to say that?

KH: I love coaching.

I coach my kids. They probably, in some ways, loved it, in other ways, absolutely hated it. I’m sure my wife would say the same thing.

I actually really enjoyed coaching people who wanted to get better. I think that’s the purpose of coaching. While being hard and pushing players and kids to be better, I always wanted to be able to do that and still have a rapport with the kids and be able to joke around with them and have fun and have an impact.

It’s great when you can impact a young hockey player on their journey, wherever they go with the sport.

In Will’s case, that’s the absolute pinnacle. It’s also fun to watch them as they leave and see their games continue to flourish and watch them grow from young kids into young men and good people.

SP: How much did Will Smith grow in the years under you?

KH: The starting point is Will Smith was incredibly talented.

It’s not like you took an ugly duckling and turned him into a swan. He was going to learn these details about the game one way or another.

One thing I will give him credit for, I always feel when you have a star on your team in youth hockey—and this is a reflection on Will, but also Bill and Colleen—sometimes you see there’s a little bit of jealousy, animosity. You could see it among parents, sometimes you can see it among players in the locker room.

Even from the first day that I got there, I never saw that or sensed that. He was very much a part of the team. He was a star, but he didn’t act like a star, but he did need to alter and change those aspects [of his game] to be able to continue that success as he went on.

I think that, whether it was me or somebody else at some point along the way in his career, he was going to get those lessons. Maybe I had a better platform for him to listen to, because I represented Patrice Bergeron, who was the star for the Bruins, and I had coached a couple of the teams above Will that had been pretty successful with the Eagles.

It could be very well just that, I don’t think I taught Will anything magical whatsoever about the game of hockey. It’s just the typical maturation of a young player—a young, gifted offensive player’s game as they grow up. Hopefully, that helped that transition for him to the national program.

Ironically, he ended up being coached by the same guy, Dan Muse, who’s now the assistant with the Rangers who coached my son the second year at the program. I got a few calls from Dan over the years saying, “Tell me about this or that with Will,” and I think he came to appreciate Will for what he was pretty quickly.

SP: Any other Will Smith stories?

KH: Just as I said, very accepted, very part of the group. He loved being around the guys and having fun and being a part of it.

The other part that always stood out to me was just that he hated to lose.

I used to jump in and practice all the time, and it drove my sons crazy. I would come back and say, “I dominated.” I came home teasing my older guy, like “I dominated the 2000s today,” and then I went to the ‘03s. By the time I had stopped, I had hip and neck surgery, so I didn’t play hockey anymore when I was coaching Will’s team, but I jumped in one time.

I jumped in on purpose to say when you’re defending, I want them to understand to not stand around in the offensive zone, instead stay in motion. I jumped in, and we dominated them, and I said, “Well, I’m almost 50 years old and like 20 pounds overweight, how could you allow yourself to get dominated?”

I could tell it was driving them crazy. I jumped in on purpose to say when you’re defending, you need to have your head on a swivel, you need to know where people are, you need to be able to mark up. I was moving all over the ice on purpose to see how he would defend.

My guess is he probably talked to my son, Jack or Riley, and said like, “Yeah, he doesn’t have a helmet on, he doesn’t have equipment on, you can’t hit him, you can’t do this.”

SP: Bill told me you coached a lot against Martin St. Louis with Will’s teams.

KH: I knew Marty from when I used to coach and he was playing, then I coached him in a couple of college preparatory hockey schools and things of that nature.

Then I followed him when he left Quebec and went through midget triple-A, where he dominated—he led the league in scoring. Then, he went to play junior hockey in Hawkesbury and dominated, ended up at UVM, and I was at Middlebury in Vermont. I had left before he got there, but obviously followed his career all the way through.

He ended up [with the Tampa Bay Lightning], and I represented Vincent [Lecavalier], Teddy Purcell and Matt Gilroy, and a number of other guys that came through Tampa, so I was always around and saw him a lot.

Then, he got traded to the Rangers, and all of a sudden, one day, we go to play Mid Fairfield, and Marty’s coaching the ‘03 team, so the 2003 Mid Fairfield and the Eagles.

The Mid Fairfield and Eagles were kind of like sister clubs, so to speak. We played each other all the time.

For the most part, the Eagles were the top program in Boston and Mid Fairfield was always the top program in the Connecticut-New York area.

We coached for probably three or four years against each other at the ‘03 level all the time. Marty was also coaching the ‘05s and the ‘08s because he had kids at that age level.

Then, all of a sudden, when our ‘03 sons had moved on, I showed up behind the bench with the ‘05s for a game in mid-Fairfield. He looked down and was like, “What in the world are you doing here?” and we had another few years of coaching against each other.

SP: Nice to have Will Smith on your side when you played Marty St. Louis?

KH: Oh no, absolutely. Interestingly enough, at the ‘03 level in our circuit—Marty was coaching Mid Fairfield—they played the league in Boston, even though they were a Connecticut team. Mike Grier coached another team in the league, and Tom Fitzgerald, the GM of New Jersey, coached another team in that same league. So there was Tom, Mike, myself, and Marty all coaching.

[Mike will] tell you, I screamed at the refs too often.

SP: Fast forward, 2023 Draft, you’re the GM of the Canadiens, how great a moment was it to see Will Smith get drafted by the San Jose Sharks?

KH: We kind of knew he was going third or fourth in that Draft, so you’re happy for him.

It was less the event itself, although I went over to see them at their party with their agency. I went over to see Will, Bill, and Colleen, so it was great to catch up with them when they’re living that special moment as a family.

For me, it was watching him throughout the year, because he really came on in that second year with the national program, and I had been telling our scouting staff, “Trust me, he’s that good.” Then, he just got better and better and better.

In typical Will fashion, I was sitting with Vinny Lecavalier in Switzerland for the U18s, and they were playing Finland—Will wasn’t having a good game with all the eyes on him, they were losing to Finland.

I said, “Sometimes you may end up like this with Will, but he also can turn it around in a second if he scores.” Vinny was like that as well.

Sure enough, in the second half of the game, I think he had two goals and two assists, and they won the game, and I was like, “That’s what I’m talking about.”

It was really fun to see him continue to do what he’d done at the youth level on the world stage.

SP: Finally, what have you seen of Will Smith’s season this year?

KH: For any 18-year-old or 19-year-old, when you come to the National Hockey League, you go through this process of adjusting to the game where everything happens so much faster. The guys are bigger, they’re stronger, everybody’s in the right place defensively, and you’re not able to cheat offensively, not yet.

I mean, the Kucherovs of the world, they get to do it, and the Will Smiths of the world, they’ll evolve to being allowed to do it.

Along the way to that point, you expect there to be challenges, because it’s the first time in his career. If you consider that, he dominated all the way through, he went to the US National Program, top scorer for a couple years, and would play up with the ‘04 team when he was ‘05.

Then he turns around and dominates the following year, gets drafted, goes to Boston College and scores 70 points as a freshman in college.

This is the first time as an athlete that you’re facing that adversity, but I think with a guy like Will, I look at it and I know he’s coming out the other side.

It’s so easy to think when you’ve been through it and seen it a million times, and you know the character of the player, I know he’s coming out the other end of it, but I’m sure he’s going through it.

It’s hard, and you’re trying to figure it out and make sense of it and how you have to do it. I’m sure there’s moments where you’re frustrated. We lived through the same situation with [Juraj] Slafkovsky here, and I’m sure in those moments as a young hockey player, it probably seems like, “Holy crap, is this ever going to change?”

But it does for guys who are talented and committed.

Special thanks to Maddie Dutra for her help transcribing.