One year ago, Blake Coleman was sitting in the living room of his West New York waterfront condo, drinking a Labatt Blue tallboy with his father.
He stared out the window at the Hudson River, having no idea how his life would suddenly change.
Coleman’s dad, Rusty, a former Oklahoma State football player, was in town for the Devils’ dad’s trip. A flight was scheduled to leave the next day for St. Louis but neither ended up on it. A few hours before a game on Feb. 16, 2020, Coleman was stopped at the door of the home dressing room at Prudential Center by Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald told the 29-year-old winger he was being traded to a Stanley Cup contender, a team on the East Coast, but he couldn’t tell him where yet.
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It was a week ahead of the NHL’s trade deadline, but Coleman was shocked. Anxious. He called his wife, Jordan, who was a few weeks away from her due date for their first child, a daughter.
“Honey, we’ve been traded,” Blake said.
“What!?” Jordan screamed.
Jordan broke down, racing to the bathroom to tell her mother, Elisabeth, who was in the shower, shampoo still in her hair. “Calm down,” she said. “It’ll be OK.”
Coleman and his father jumped into his Ford-150 and headed to his condo. They had a half-hour drive for this all to sink in and ponder his next destination. Boston? Washington? They never considered the Southeast.
They were back home, having a beer, by the time Fitzgerald called Coleman, telling him he was heading to the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Devils didn’t want to trade the forward they’d drafted and developed. But Tampa Bay GM Julien BriseBois, feeling he was a piece or two away from finally hoisting the Stanley Cup, made Fitzgerald an offer he couldn’t refuse — a first-round pick and top prospect Nolan Foote.
Coleman’s head was still spinning, contemplating the next move when his iPhone buzzed again. It was BriseBois. Rusty FaceTime’d his wife, Sandy, who was back home in Dallas, so she could hear it.
BriseBois told Coleman how much they had watched him, how much they wanted him, how much they needed him.
“I’m super fucking excited,” BriseBois said.
What happened next, as Rusty puts it, “belongs in a storybook.”
Eleven days after the trade, Coleman and his wife welcomed their daughter, Charlie, into the world. The NHL pandemic-sparked shutdown allowed him to not only spend his first few precious months as a parent but mentally adjust to the whirlwind move. Coleman would end up a difference-maker along with fellow deadline acquisition Barclay Goodrow en route to the Stanley Cup. They beat the Dallas Stars, the team that inspired a young Coleman to dare to try hockey while growing up in Plano, Tex. His hometown made Nov. 2 “Blake Coleman Day,” holding a socially distanced ceremony, giving him the “puck of the city.”
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When Coleman heads back home this week, with the Lightning scheduled to face the Stars on Saturday (following Thursday’s postponement), he won’t be able to see family, not with the updated NHL COVID protocols. But there will be around 50 family and friends in the stands at American Airlines Center, all having a piece of his improbable journey.
So 2020, a year many people want to forget, might have been the best year of Coleman’s life.
There’s what feels like a million things that pop into your head the minute you hoist hockey’s holy grail.
So when Coleman lifted the Stanley Cup above his head at center ice of Rogers Place in Edmonton in late September, his mind wandered.
“It reminds you of everything you’ve been through, who helped you get where you are,” Coleman said. “All those people that played a role. That’s the special part. Everything kind of culminates.”
He thought of his grandmother, “Ria,”’ short for Maria, the 92-year-old matriarch responsible for his passion for the game. When the Minnesota North Stars relocated to Dallas in 1993, Maria, from upstate New York, purchased season tickets. Coleman and Ria attended a few dozen games a year, the first when he was three.
“I was following the puck the whole time with my baby head,” he said.
By age five, Coleman was running to the driveway every morning to grab the newspaper and memorize players’ names and stats. When Coleman was eight, he stayed up past bedtime to listen to the radio as the Stars won their first Stanley Cup in 1999.
“From that moment on,” said Coleman’s mother, Sandy, “He knew exactly what he wanted to do.”
Sandy and Rusty Coleman were among the first people Coleman phoned on Cup night.
“We did it!” he yelled from the champagne and Bud Light-soaked dressing room.
Sandy had played hockey growing up, attending many Islanders games at the Nassau Coliseum. So when her son, one of her four children, showed an interest, she was all-in. When Coleman was five, Sandy read the book “Complete Conditioning for Ice Hockey” by Peter Twist, the former strength and conditioning coach for the Canucks. Sandy would be the one driving Blake the hour each way to Euless for hockey practices at 5 or 6 a.m., making sure his nutrition and carb-loading was there, from her green smoothies to chocolate milk and raisins.
“He wasn’t allowed to eat anything bad until he won the tournament,” Sandy joked. “Then we’d go to Krispy Kreme, and get a dozen donuts. He could down the whole box.”
Sandy was the one to call the University of Michigan when Blake, obsessed with the school by age five or six, wanted his bedroom painted in their school colors. The university sent the Colemans the exact Sherwin-Williams tint of maize, which went perfectly with the blue block ‘M’ trim. The wall in the upstairs room is covered with photos and jerseys from every team he played on, from high school to Miami University, not to mention the Dallas Stars Elite program he grew up in. They had coaches like Cup-winner Craig Ludwig, who played for the Canadiens and then won a title with the Stars in 1999.
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The day Coleman was traded to the Lightning, Ludwig said he sent a text message to coach Jon Cooper.
“That’s going to be it,” Ludwig texted. “You’re on the right path.”
“What I meant was they had now taken the right step to build a team that can win in the playoffs,” Ludwig said. “I felt they didn’t have enough push back, not from a fighting standpoint, but having that bite and that edge. I’ve known Blake since he was a kid, and he wanted to run and hit people all the time. I would rather have a kid like that where you have to pull them back than try to push them into the fight. He was the kind of ingredient that I think turned the identity of their team a little bit.”
Cooper wasn’t a stranger, having watched him play since his days in the USHL. Sandy Coleman said Cooper drafted Blake in the NAHL, but her son instead ending up playing for Cooper’s buddy, Jeff Blashill, for the Indiana Ice in the USHL. A year later, Lightning assistant coach Derek Lalonde tried to recruit Coleman to the University of Denver but he committed to Miami University.
“He was back then what he is now — a hard player to play against with skill,” Blashill said. “And those guys are hard to find, guys that can do both.”
“He’s hungry,” said John Hynes, Coleman’s coach with the Devils. “He’s extremely competitive. He’s hungry. When he puts his mind to something, he goes all in.”
Coleman carried the same approach as a “girl dad.”
Charlie, who turns one next week, was in the front row during her father’s “Blake Coleman Day” in Plano in November. There were 60 friends, family and city officials in the community theater for the event, which included speeches from Ludwig and Les Jackson, a Stars exec/scout who advised the Colemans on the unlikely rise to become the first native Texan on the Cup.
Coleman, in a white dress shirt and slacks, started his written remarks by thanking everyone who helped him along the way, from his parents and siblings (Jeff, 38, Kevin, 36, Lauren, 31, Brooke, 26) to his coaches.
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Charlie, getting restless, tried to speak up.
“Hey booboo, I’m almost done,” Coleman said.
The father and daughter were inseparable for her first five months before their 65 days of separation in the bubbles of Toronto and Edmonton. They’d have daily, sometimes twice a day, FaceTime calls, where Coleman would make funny faces, Charlie would make funny noises, and show dad how she learned to crawl. Charlie’s first words were “Momma,” and it’s fitting because Jordan was the family’s rock.
Jordan grew up in Coleman’s neighborhood of Wyndham (now the name of their dog) and became a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. She lost touch with him until the night he scored his first NHL goal — for the Devils, fittingly, against the Stars. They connected via Instagram, with Coleman pursuing her like he does a loose puck on the forecheck. Their first date was TopGolf and they became inseparable before his proposal on the dock of Cedar Creek Lake, their “happy place,” where he first told her he loved her. They recently bought a half acre of land in nearby Frisco to build their first home.
“I don’t know how I could have done it without her,” he said.
After Coleman’s abrupt trade to Tampa Bay, it was Jordan who helped spearhead the move to uproot their life. They started their next chapter by living in the Marriott across from Amalie Arena, the hotel staff becoming like family in their several weeks stay. It was where they brought Charlie home, the “Marriott baby.”
When the NHL returned in the bubble format, there were some players who were hesitant to leave their families for that long.
“She was the first woman to tell me I need to be there,” Coleman said. “I needed to chase it.”
Coleman and Jordan are expecting a second child, another daughter, in June.
“The girl clan is getting bigger,” he said. “I’ll be outnumbered.”
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After Coleman finished his speech on the day in his honor in Plano, the city’s head PR man, Steve Stoler, took the mic. Stoler talked about how Coleman’s jersey from the Stanley Cup Final is headed for the Hockey Hall of Fame. Another signed jersey was going to be hung in the city’s municipal center. They gave him some Plano masks, fitting for COVID-19 times.
“How long is your contract with Tampa Bay?” Stoler asked.
“One year left,” Coleman said.
“We have some people here with pull from the Dallas Stars — I’m just saying,” Stoler quipped. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing if you come back home. Just think about it.”
Coleman laughed. So did the crowd.
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He could be in his last season with the Lightning, who will be cap-strapped this summer when his team-friendly deal with a $1.8 million hit will expire. Tampa Bay would love to keep both Coleman and Goodrow, another pending UFA.
For now, the Colemans are living in a Tampa rental owned by former Lightning (and Devils) goalie Louis Domingue, who was gracious enough to help the family in a pinch last spring. It’s where Blake, Jordan and Charlie had their first Christmas together, tree and all. It’s where their families stayed during the playoffs, then greeted Coleman at the airport when he arrived from Edmonton. Coleman kissed Jordan, held Charlie, then put her in the Cup.
“A day I won’t forget,” he said.
In a year to remember.
(Top photo: Andy Devlin / NHLI via Getty Images; all other photos courtesy the Coleman family)
