“Did you see that?”
In a Norris Trophy–winning season filled with highlight-reel plays and huge moments for Quinn Hughes and the Vancouver Canucks, it was one of those moments that stood out.
Not just to fans or to media or to Hughes’ own teammates and coaches, but to Hughes himself.
Late in the second period of a scoreless game against the moribund San Jose Sharks, Hughes gathered the puck near the top of the right circle from Nils Höglander, who passed it back to the Canucks captain after a blocked shot attempt.
GO DEEPER
Canucks defenseman Quinn Hughes wins Norris Trophy
With the Sharks in scramble mode and Hughes at the right-side point, the Canucks captain skated along the blue line. He deked briefly to his backhand, putting the puck near enough to Sharks centre Tomas Hertl to bait him into reaching. The moment Hertl did so, he was beaten. And he was beaten in a way that also froze winger Fabian Zetterlund.
Hughes, in full control, burst around the flat-footed Zetterlund and began to attack downhill. With two defenders behind him, Sharks goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood transitioned into a “reverse VH” post-integration stance. Hughes read it, waited for Blackwood to flatten his body out to protect against a bank shot, and uncorked a drag shot aimed for the top corner far side.
The shot was whisper-perfect, and it had to be. It went across Blackwood’s flattened body and into the Sharks net. It was a postage stamp highlight-reel goal, and a crucial one for the Canucks.
After a hot start to Vancouver’s season, the Canucks’ form had flagged going into that fateful contest against the Sharks.
It was mid-November, and over the past two weeks the Canucks had been torched in Toronto, won despite a poor performance in Montreal, needed to come back from a 3-1 deficit — punctuated by a glorious Hughes overtime winner — to outlast the New York Islanders, and dropped two consecutive games against the Calgary Flames and the Seattle Kraken.
Getting back on track with a victory against San Jose was essential, given the quality of the opponent. Yet nearly 35 minutes into a home game against the NHL’s worst team, Vancouver hadn’t performed well and hadn’t been able to solve Blackwood.
Until Hughes made the difference, as he so often did for the Canucks this season, with a bad-angle drag shot that had never been in his toolkit.
“That shot is for when I beat a guy down the wall, I can shoot and pull it inside and beat a goalie stone cold,” Hughes says, recalling the sequence. “I still have to work on it, but I feel like I can beat a guy now and get some shots off in different ways.”
Nearly 4,500 kilometres away, at his home in Naples, Fla., performance coach Darryl Belfry — who worked with Hughes on developing that shot — was watching the game and hanging on every Hughes puck touch. As Hughes’ drag shot beat Blackwood, Belfry leapt from his chair and celebrated with the passion of the most ardent Canucks fan.
Belfry is one of the most prominent performance coaches in the sport. He’s become famous in the hockey world for his work with star forwards such as Patrick Kane, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews and Hughes’ brother Jack. For the past two summers, Belfry has worked closely with Quinn to refine his game, enhance his shot rate and help him become the best defender in the NHL.
“Player development is so personal, so there’s an emotional investment that you have,” Belfry says.
“That goal was a poignant one because that had a lot of the stitching of what we’d worked on,” he adds. “It was almost exact, every piece we were working on, it all came out. The shot location wasn’t a shot location we’d worked on, but he read it perfectly. The goalie was flat so he shot it in front of his body. Normally you’re trying to shoot it behind him, but the goalie flattened out … that’s an elite read. That means he saw it, he was on it.”
Hughes’ goal wasn’t just a spectacular highlight. It was more than a key moment that helped demonstrate the staying power of the Canucks’ hot start to the 2023-24 season.
For Hughes and Belfry, the goal was emblematic of the years of work they’d put in to enhance Hughes’ ability to manipulate defenders, to hone his shot mentality and to sharpen his aggressive mindset.
The next day, Hughes shot Belfry a text. “Did you see that?”
There’s a lot that goes into being a first-year captain in a Canadian market, levelling up as a goal scorer and winning the Norris Trophy.
“It’s a team effort,” Hughes points out, doling out credit to his teammates, Canucks coaches and especially his defence partner Filip Hronek. “Darryl has been great for me, but my dad has been my biggest influence. He skates with me every day in the summer. A lot of the stuff I do, the tight turns, that’s from him.
“Then Adam Foote and Rick Tocchet, how much they’ve helped my game, both defensively and offensively. The system that we play, that’s all incorporated into what I’m doing, too.”
Ultimately, Hughes needed to score more to earn this honour. It’s extremely rare to see an NHL defender win the Norris without hitting double-digit goal totals. Only two defenders have managed to win it with fewer than 10 goals scored this millennium.
Hughes had never hit 10 goals or more in an NHL campaign prior to this season. Last year, he didn’t score his first until after Christmas.
Things clicked for Hughes as a shooter. He popped off for 17 goals, led all NHL defensemen in total points and helped drive the Canucks to one of the most memorable campaigns in franchise history.
It seemed sudden, but behind the scenes, this was an outcome Hughes had been working toward for years.
“I used to just try and shoot around people, but now, I’ll grab the puck and take it two feet this way and put myself in a position to shoot it,” Hughes says, discussing his adaptation as a goal-scoring threat. “It sounds simple, but go look at tape from two years ago and you’ll see that I wasn’t doing that. I was just relying purely on hockey sense.
“I’d get 60-65 assists a year, but now I have a shot mentality, where I’m putting myself and my body and I have the skill set to get shots off while I’m skating.”
Hughes scored 17 goals this season. The most he’d tallied in a season before 2023-24 was eight. (Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
“Shot mentality is one of those terms that can be very different for each different player in terms of how it’s expressed,” says Belfry.
“In Quinn’s case, Quinn often — prior to this year — was a player who would defer. When he went through his decision tree of when he had the puck and when he was in an offensive position to do something, in his own mind and in his decision tree, his shot was near the bottom of the tree. He’d look for every other possible play.
“So a shot mentality for him means elevating where his own personal shot is in the decision tree. Now when you watch him, the shot is up there.”
That’s reflected in Hughes’ shot volume. Hughes took 199 shots on goal this season, beating his previous career high by 45.
Two hundred shots on goal was a key personal goal for Hughes and Belfry going into this season, but to get there, Hughes had to take 172 more shot attempts than he ever had previously.
“I studied Quinn’s game intently and had an idea of how I could help and how we could get him there,” says Belfry. “We had a conversation early on and he was talking about getting to 10 goals, and I said, I think you can get to 20. In his mind, I don’t think he was there yet mentally. Every player at that level, they believe in their ability, but they’re also very realistic and sequential. It goes step-by-step for most players.
“In my mind, I thought Quinn, with a few changes to his approach and mentality, and with a few added skills, could put himself into a spot where 20 goals wasn’t out of the question.”
If Hughes was going to become a more prolific goal scorer, upping the volume of his shots was key, but it couldn’t come at the expense of making the optimal play for the team.
This is why Hughes didn’t just increase the frequency with which he was shooting, he also put the work in to take shots from more dangerous locations on the ice.
According to NHL Edge data, 57.8 percent of Hughes’ shots on goal during the 2022-23 campaign were point shots and 18.8 percent of his shots on goal came from middle distance — that space between the top of the circles and the hashmarks. This season, Hughes’ attacking profile as a shooter became far more efficient. Only 44.6 percent of his shots were classified as point shots by NHL Edge, while 30.2 percent of his shots on goal came from middle distance.
“It’s just about attacking good ice, not being satisfied with being on the outside,” Hughes says. “All of this, everything I’m doing is about getting inside so you can score, right? You’ve got to get into the meat of the ice.”
Of course, the location of Hughes’ shots on goal is a result. It’s not a key point of emphasis in how he thinks about playing attacking hockey.
“Location isn’t as big a factor,” Hughes says, trying to explain the evolution of his approach when this data is presented to him. “I look at the goalie and I see what he gives me.
“It’s about manipulating defenders, that’s what Darryl would say.”
“You start this way,” says the Canucks captain, holding a phantom stick at his stall in the Canucks locker room and miming a quick deke, “and then you take it this way,” he says, continuing to map out the move. “Then the defender’s feet will go this way and now I can bring it back this way.”
Hughes finishes miming the sequence, the space he’s created crystal clear in his mind’s eye. He demonstrates the act of putting an NHL defender into the dirt with quick hands, quicker feet and genius-level processing as if it were something straightforward and relatable.
There’s genius-level pattern recognition at play here. One born of a lifetime playing the sport at an elite level, but also of the systematic approach Hughes has developed — with Belfry’s input — to putting some of the best defenders in hockey in absolutely hopeless positions.
“When the opponent has no real defense, that’s the utopian place you want to be in,” Belfry says. “That’s where you want to get to, where whatever you do as a defender is wrong. If they play close to you, it’s wrong. If they play off of you, it’s also wrong.
“You want to show something, and then do another thing. And sometimes it’s not that simple. A defender is watching the puck, so if a puck comes to me, he’s coming like this,” Hughes says — and here he mimes a defender rushing up to the point to cut off the top. “Whereas if I start there and skate towards the puck, the defender hasn’t watched me move, they’re watching the pass from J.T. Miller. Now I’ve put myself in a good position to beat a guy, keep my feet moving, but also shoot. And that’s hard to do.”
To accomplish this, Hughes committed to an even more rigorous training regimen during the offseason and in-season. And that included bringing in Belfry to work with him in Michigan during the first week of every month last offseason.
During those weeks, Belfry would fly in on Monday mornings to visit Quinn and his brother Jack for gruelling, individualized on-ice sessions beginning at 9 a.m. He’d stay overnight with Quinn’s parents, the NHL superstar brothers joining for dinner and high-level hockey talk. Then they’d get back at it again the next day.
“It’s just 24 hours a day you’re talking about hockey,” says Belfry of those summer evenings in Michigan with the Hughes family. “They’re totally immersed. They know every player in the league, they talk about situations, they can remember games. ‘Yeah, I had a game in February against Columbus and in the second period this happened.’ I mean, they remember everything.”
The practice sessions are demanding, repetitive and detailed.
“It’s hard, it’s an aggressive skate,” Hughes says. “All these movements we’re doing, you have to do them at full speed, you have to learn how to do that, get the puck and get your shot off. It’s hard and you’re tired.”
And that’s just the skates in the summer. Belfry preaches maintaining an “aggressive mindset.”
“When you know you’re in a shooting position, shoot to score, don’t just shoot to get a shot on net,” he says. “That’s a very different mentality, and aggressive mindset is I get into a shooting area and I’ve moved the shot up in the decision tree, and I believe that I’m a shot threat in a high-value situation, so now I’m not just looking to flip the puck on net or look for the rebound. I’m going to shoot it and I’m going to try to score. It’s actively looking for vulnerabilities in where and how a goalie is moving, trying to open up the net for an area to shoot at.”
Playing that way consistently that will stress out the body — even that of a finely tuned, highly successful, elite NHL defender.
“You have to have an attack mindset every game,” Hughes says of incorporating his new approach into his game at the NHL level. “You’re in attack mode. The skills are great, but you can’t be passive, you have to know your moments and attack and be smart about it. Then you have to be in really good shape. I’m not saying hockey shape, but better shape, because it’s hard to play that way, because you’re always skating.
“So that was another thing: I knew if I was going to play this way I had to be in even better shape. So I went on a strict diet this year also.”
In addition to managing his diet rigorously, Hughes quit drinking entirely last summer and maintained that throughout this season.
“Alcohol is another thing,” Hughes says. “Guys have proven that that’s what it takes to play at a great level. I can’t say it for certain, but there’s stories in the league, and I’ve heard that Connor McDavid doesn’t mess around, Nathan MacKinnon doesn’t drink during the year, Cale Makar doesn’t drink much during the season.
“And I know it sounds great,” Hughes says. “‘Oh the league, a bunch of nerds, nobody drinks anymore,’ but I couldn’t drink and play at the level I wanted to play at for 82 games. It’s just too hard.
“I didn’t really drink last summer either, or have a lot of fun,” Hughes adds. “You can ask my brothers. I was on edge! Oh, I was snappy with them. I was snappy with a lot of people! I just knew I was going to be captain and I didn’t want to disappoint. Because I knew that people outside the market didn’t view me as a captain. So I knew that if we didn’t have a good start to the year that people would be like, ‘What the f—, why did they name this guy captain?”‘
And that’s the other factor here: the captaincy, and the pressure Hughes put on himself to earn it. To leave no doubt that the club’s decision to put the “C” on his chest was the right one.
“He sensed this year, I got the feeling, that this was going to be a good team,” says Belfry. “And his growth is reflected in that. His attitude, his mentality, I think it was a driver. And I think that pushed this team. From the outside, it felt like a perfect storm.”
Chemistry with a new defense partner, a new level of responsibility and the willingness to sacrifice that came with it, and an aggressive shot mentality that he shaped with Belfry’s help.
It all contributed to Hughes levelling up. And on Thursday night it culminated in him being recognized as the best all-around defender in the sport for the 2023-24 season.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Derek Cain, Jeff Vinnick / NHLI / Getty Images)
