Getting Oleg Up on Defense : Nine Games Into Rookie Season, the Mighty Ducks’ Tverdovsky Is Proving to Be a Quick Learner

The Mighty Ducks want to bring Oleg Tverdovsky along slowly, but they have yet to find anything the defenseman does slowly.

He skates so fast that Duck Coach Ron Wilson calls him a young Paul Coffey, stick-handles so rapidly it is almost a blur, and he has learned English so quickly he now can do broadcast interviews, when six months ago he spoke only a few words. What hasn’t he begun to master?

“He’s not that good at Ping-Pong yet,” assistant coach Al Sims said. “He’s getting better, but he’s still losing to the coaches.”

From across the room, Tverdovsky hears him.

“I beat you last time,” he calls out.

Tverdovsky turned 18 last May, but he could pass for someone even younger. Wilson sees that face, watches him play and can’t seem to quit saying, ‘He’s 18 years old.’ ”

Tverdovsky isn’t the youngest player in the NHL. San Jose center Jeff Friesen is, at 18 years six months. Tverdovsky is three months older, but he has come a lot farther.

He is from the Ukraine, born in Donetsk, where one industry rules the life of the town. “They go under the ground to pick up stones . . . black stones,” Tverdovsky said.

He is describing the life of a coal miner, but that will not be his life. He signed a contract in August that will pay him $4.2 million over three years. “I know I make good money, but I don’t think about it,” Tverdovsky said. Mostly he thinks about hockey, because, he says, “I cannot imagine life without hockey.”

It is hard not to be amazed at Tverdovsky’s assimilation into the NHL, just nine games into his rookie season. But when you understand what he has undertaken, it falls into place.

Tverdovsky is used to going where his stick and skate blades take him, leaving home at 15 to play in Moscow, where he became a regular at 16 for the Soviet Wings, a team in Russia’s most advanced pro league.

The first year he lived in a dormitory with other players from distant cities and towns. At 17, he rented an apartment alone in the city, an unstable one at the time.

“I left home when I was 15. I had to take care of myself. There is not Dad there, there is not Mom,” said Tverdovsky, whose parents and little sister, Anna, recently joined him in Anaheim.

“I have to do by myself in Moscow. I started getting used to being alone. If you want to wash something or cook something, you have to do it by yourself. You do not have a washing machine to put it in there. You have to just wash by hand.”

Some stories, perhaps exaggerated, say he sometimes had no hot water and little heat even in the dead of a Moscow winter. But Tverdovsky, always sensitive that people should not see Russia and the Ukraine as backward places, said it was “not too bad.”

“Sometimes something is broken maybe for a couple of days,” he said. “I always had hot water. In some flats in Moscow, they do not. I made maybe $500 a month, not bad in Moscow.

“The first year I didn’t cook. There was a little restaurant in the complex and the team paid. When I started to live alone, I did it. It was funny the first time. It was OK. Not like Mom’s. I did chicken and spaghetti, something easy.”

Playing defense in the NHL at 18 is not easy, and the Ducks didn’t plan for Tverdovsky to do it so soon. But that changed when Don McSween’s season ended when a skate blade sliced nerves and tendons in his wrist in the second game. Wilson threw Tverdovsky into the lineup on a lark, and he stuck. For a couple of games during the team’s recent defensive struggle, he might have been the best of the team’s six defensemen, most of them a decade older.

“It’s such a difficult position,” said David McNab, who is the Ducks’ director of player personnel and the first of the team’s scouts to zero in on Tverdovsky, the No. 2 overall pick in last June’s draft. “If you’re a forward, you can be hidden away on the fourth line and if you make a mistake you’re probably making it on the far blue line. It doesn’t stand out so much. But if you’re a defenseman, there are so many great forwards in the league and they are going to zero right in on an 18-year-old.”

No one is ready to say Tverdovsky’s adjustment is complete. He is known for his offense and electrifying rushes, which have produced a goal and four assists already. Reports on his dedication to defense were more varied.

“He’s come to the fore. We weren’t sure what he could do,” Sims said. “Offensively, he can do a lot, but I’ve really been surprised with him defensively. I thought he’d be a liability, but he’s been a good positional player.”

Tverdovsky likes to jump into plays in the offensive zone, but he also hustles back when the play goes the other way.

“You’ll see his speed when he’s coming back after a rush. He’ll be the first guy coming back hard, lifting guys’ sticks on a 2-on-1, 3-on-2,” Sims said.

There are times when Wilson and Sims, who handles the defensemen, try to shield Tverdovsky from the pressure-cooker. He gets time on the power play, but very little on the penalty-killing unit.

“He’ll say, ‘Why don’t I kill penalties? I kill penalties in Russia,’ ” Sims said. “I have to say, ‘Oleg, we’re trying to bring you along slowly.’

His eagerness is something Wilson appreciates anyway.

“That’s a nice quality in a young guy, wanting to be on the ice,” he said. “Most guys don’t want to kill penalties because it’s a lot of hard work. We’re trying to spoon-feed him. We’d prefer he not kill penalties.”

Tverdovsky is sometimes kept on the bench for stretches, as he was during the third period of the Ducks’ 3-2 victory over the Kings Sunday. It wasn’t Tverdovsky’s best game, and Wilson, thinking he looked “almost awe-struck at times,” kept him out of the game.

“When you get in a game that’s 2-1, 2-2, and he’s not playing very well, you protect him,” Wilson said. “If it’s 7-2, you can let him continue playing and learning. But to put that burden of responsibility on an 18-year-old, when he’s looking out and seeing Wayne Gretzky and Jari Kurri and knows who they are, it’s overwhelming. No. 1, it can hurt the team, and No. 2, it can hurt the player. All you’re doing is protecting a young player from being in that situation.”

One situation they couldn’t protect him from was the lockout. Tverdovsky, alone in a foreign country with a fat wallet and a nagging groin injury, left Anaheim for Toronto, where his agent Don Meehan is based.

“The thing that impresses me most about Oleg isn’t so much on the ice,” McNab said. “It’s that he comes over, he gets hurt, he’s not healthy and goes through training camp frustrated because can’t play. He has a lot of money, and let’s face it, the season stops and he’s on his own in Toronto . . . Everything’s unstructured, and nothing happens.

“If you said to most 18-year-olds, we’re going to give you a lot of money and let you run wild, they would. He learned the language and worked on getting healthy. He wasn’t out causing any problems. Here is a kid coming from nothing who comes to North America with a lot of money and nothing to do. He was like a freshman in college with a ton of money, and nothing happened.”

After not playing in the exhibition season because of a joint ailment later diagnosed as Reiters Syndrome, Tverdovsky asked the Ducks for permission to play Canadian junior hockey in Brandon, Manitoba, late in the lockout. The young millionaire’s first road trip was a 10-hour bus ride.

The trips are on planes now, but as always the hockey seems to matter more to Tverdovsky than the comfort. When the team travels, he rooms with English-speaking teammates, never even seeking help from Russian veteran Anatoli Semenov.

“He never asked,” Semenov said. “He’s so young, he doesn’t know life anyway.”

Notes

Goalies Guy Hebert and Mikhail Shtalenkov will continue to share the job for the time being, Coach Ron Wilson said. “You’re always trying to figure out who the No. 1 goalie is and there isn’t one,” Wilson said. . . . Left wing Garry Valk, who was the team’s third-leading scorer last season with 45 points but has yet to play because of a sprained left knee, will make this week’s trip to Calgary and Edmonton. He probably will make his debut Sunday at Edmonton if not Thursday at Calgary. . . . Left wing Tim Sweeney, who was fourth on the team in scoring with 43 points last season, is back in the lineup after being a semi-regular scratch to start the season. “It’s tough mentally, but no matter how mad you get that you’re out of the lineup, you’ve got to put it aside and get on the ice and work through it,” said Sweeney, who scored his first goal of the season in Sunday’s victory. “I’ve been in enough situations in my career that I know trying to figure it out will drive you crazy. You just try to stay on an even keel.”