Not the Best, Only the Finest

It is midnight in Grand Haven, Mich.

Floodlights and shouts fill the air as the Bylsma boys skate wildly around the only ice rink in the city.

Nobody can shoo them home, because they are home. The rink is in their backyard.

The four boys helped flatten the snow, and spray the water, and make giant snowballs for the boards, and now they are playing.

Well, three of them play. The other one irritates.

Three of them shoot with abandon. The other one, the youngest and smallest, knocks shins, bumps hips, steal pucks, makes them scream.

“Danny, knock it off!”

*

It is 9 p.m. in Los Angeles.

Oohs and aahs fill the Forum when, early in a Detroit Red Wing power play, one of the Kings breaks his stick, then loses his glove.

For nearly a minute, he skates desperately in front of his net, wildly waving his arms, bobbing his head.

He fights off the defending Stanley Cup champions with little more than his wits, makes spectators scream.

“Danny, keep it up!”

*

He looks like a wire-rimmed computer software salesman.

He has played on six minor league teams in the last six years.

He would sell his soul to have as much talent as Olli Jokinen has in one skate.

Few Kings are more unheralded and unassuming.

Yet few are more important.

Meet Dan Bylsma, penalty killer.

Always short-handed, but never outmanned.

“Guys like him, they are what make us a team,” Rob Blake said. “Stars are going to be stars. But it’s guys like Dan who are going to win games for you.”

Bylsma, 27, did not play his first full NHL season until last year, when he scored only three goals in 79 games but led the Kings to the best penalty-killing percentage in club history, ranking third in the league.

But at the start of this year, thinking they needed to get younger and better, the Kings sent him to the minor leagues.

When teams think they need to get younger and better, Dan Bylsma is the always the sort of player who always gets sent to the minor leagues.

“Dan has done things well, but he has never done them great,” Coach Larry Robinson said. “We thought for us to be a better team, he didn’t have a place here.”

The Kings proceeded to win one of their first seven games.

Bylsma was called back.

They have won six of 11 games since, while going from the lower to the upper half of the league in penalty killing.

On a team built of spare parts, another plug had fit perfectly.

“He proved us wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it,” Robinson said. “He plays very strong, and we need that.”

That is not the first time this has happened.

As a player from a town that didn’t even have a skating rink, who was a high school champion in golf and baseball, who didn’t even begin seriously pursuing hockey until he was a teenager, Bylsma is used to being taken for granted.

He will tell you the minor leagues are filled with players who took him for granted.

“If guys didn’t waste their talent, I wouldn’t be standing here in the NHL,” Bylsma said. “I’m not going to fool anybody, I’m not the best skater or fastest guy on the ice.”

Bylsma appreciates everything, wastes nothing. He sweats more in his minutes than others do in hours.

“To play in this league is a privilege,” he said. “To not work as hard as you can on the ice, that goes against the game.”

Imagine that. A player worrying about insulting the game.

The Kings are filled with players like this, perhaps one of the reasons they have handled some of the star-filled teams like Detroit and New Jersey in this early season.

The face on their commemorative postage stamp would be Dan Bylsma.

Who, even until now, has been most famous around the dressing room for spending hundreds of dollars so his parents could see him play from Chicago to Philadelphia.

These same parents who, when most hockey folks were sending their kids to rural Canadian towns at age 9, wouldn’t let Dan out of their sight.

Not only did he not play in an important Canadian junior league until age 15, he played on mostly recreational teams before then.

“I thought the most important thing we could give our children was a moral compass, a sense of family,” said Jay M. Bylsma, a business consultant who, with wife Nancy, raised four boys and a girl.

The Bylsmas felt that for their children, sitting with the family at church was more important than pursuing dreams 1,000 miles away.

Family dinners typically lasted two hours, featuring more discussion than dinner.

Before opening any report cards, Jay M. Bylsma would ask his children if they had tried their very best. If they said yes, he would hug them and congratulate them. Only then would he look at their grades.

“Everything my parents did was based on the welfare of our family,” Dan said. “We knew right away what was important.”

What is important to Dan Bylsma now can be seen at the summer hockey camp he runs in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The highlight of the camp is not a weekly game, but an exercise where the students attempt to skate across the ice without being hit by a shooting tennis ball.

The main speaker is not Gordie Howe, but Bylsma’s dad.

Together they are combining on a book to be published this spring, entitled, “So Your Son Wants To Play In The NHL.”

It probably will not be a bestseller. But once you buy it, it will probably be impossible to get rid of.