Minor league journeyman Derek Nesbitt plays 1,000 games the hard way

Shortly before game time, national television analyst and longtime minor-pro player Paul Bissonnette posted a video on social media congratulating Nesbitt on his milestone.

Bissonnette, through the popular podcast Spittin’ Chiclets that he co-hosts with former NHLer Ryan Whitney, also arranged for a camera to shadow Nesbitt on his big day. Bissonnette will also be helping the Gladiators honor Nesbitt with a special night in Atlanta in February.

The Jacksonville organization recognized Nesbitt’s milestone during a timeout. The on-ice officials came by to offer congratulations. After the Gladiators ended up losing in a shootout to the league’s No. 1 team, someone grabbed a puck for Nesbitt.

As he prepared to thank his teammates and coaches, the camera appeared from somewhere near the showers. All in all, it was a bit of a blur. But the kind of blur you’ll remember forever.

“I said I’m super humbled by it and don’t know if I deserve it but I’m going to appreciate it the hell out of it and enjoy it,” Nesbitt said with a laugh.

We’re sitting in an office in the Duluth Ice Forum, which long ago was the practice home of the Atlanta Thrashers. Now it’s Nesbitt’s office, where he’s taken on the role as co-director of youth hockey for the Phoenix program which plays out of the twin-pad facility, while fulfilling his other job as captain of the Gladiators.

At various points during our conversation, Declan wanders in and out asking if he can play with a goalie stick, if he can go on the ice and offering other bits of toddler this and that. As we wrap up the conversation we find that Declan has filled a small net in the hallway leading to the rink with pucks. Like father, like son.

Nesbitt grew up in southwestern Ontario, not far from Seaforth, Ontario, where his dad, Graham, ran the local rink from the time Nesbitt was three.

How small and compact is the hockey world?

For as long as Nesbitt can remember, his dad would open the rink early for some of the local players or make sure on snow days that the doors were unlocked, so the kids would have someplace to go. Among that group are a handful of NHLers, including 2019 playoff MVP Ryan O’Reilly and his older brother, Cal.

In early 2021, Nesbitt’s father was suffering from a kidney disease known as Berger’s Disease and needed a transplant. COVID complications meant an early donor had to back out, but it turned out that Bonnie O’Reilly, mother to Cal and Ryan, was a match and ended providing a life-saving kidney transplant for Graham.

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Nesbitt attended Ferris State University. Immediately after his final year, he joined the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs of the Central Hockey League for a seven-game playoff series. The head coach was Scott Muscutt, who grew up in Glencoe, Ontario, where Graham Nesbitt grew up.

Muscutt had been an instructor at a hockey school organized by Nesbitt’s father and former NHLer Dave McIlwain. Muscutt used to park his camper on the Nesbitt’s side yard during hockey camp. When Nesbitt got to Shreveport for that playoff series, there were probably four or five guys playing who had worked the hockey camp in Seaforth.

“If you could model yourself after anyone outside of your own family that’s a guy, one of the best human beings I’ve ever met,” Nesbitt said.

A hockey life like the one led by Nesbitt is full of these kinds of connections and reconnections. Like this one.

Jeff Campbell is from Hensall, Ontario, a short drive from where Nesbitt grew up. Campbell was a year older and had been with the Gladiators during Nesbitt’s senior year in college. The two were pals and Campbell gave the organization rave reviews.

“He was a big reason why I chose to come here,” Nesbitt said.

Campbell and Nesbitt lived together during a successful 2005-06 season. The next fall Campbell was in Grand Rapids for an American Hockey League tryout, but when he got sent back to Atlanta, there wasn’t enough ECHL cap space to keep everyone. So on the first day of training camp, Nesbitt was traded to the Idaho Steelheads in Boise.

“It worked out,” Nesbitt said. “We won a championship there.”

The next season, Nesbitt was back in Atlanta with head coach Jeff Pyle who, coincidentally, is the Gladiators current head coach.

“My first and my 1000^th (regular season pro games) were for the same coach,” Nesbitt said with a chuckle.

“That first game was actually here. I think it was a 1-0 shootout loss to Charlotte at home. If I remember. Against Jeff Glass, ‘05-06. The Arena At Gwinnett Center. I’ve been here for all the name changes. I think I’m also the only guy to ever play in history against the Greenville Grrrowl, Road Warriors and Swamp Rabbits.”

In the intervening 14 seasons after that first regular-season game for the Gladiators, Nesbitt would make his way onto American Hockey League rosters in Rockford twice, San Antonio twice, Winnipeg, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Peoria and Oklahoma City. There was a brief ECHL stop in Toledo and a best forgotten season in Austria before Nesbitt found himself back in Atlanta at the start of the 2015 season.

In some ways a career like this is a marvel.

Not once over the course of almost two decades of pro hockey did Nesbitt ever get called up by an NHL club.

Still, when you listen to him talk about the excitement at seeing teammates get called up to the big club, or called up the next rung on the hockey ladder, there is an honesty that is heartwarming if a little heartbreaking, too.

It’s no wonder that people gravitate to the veteran forward.

Bissonnette, part of TNT’s national panel of analysts and a man with 1.1 million Twitter followers, met Nesbitt when both were at an ECHL All-Star Weekend in Boise. The two have stayed in touch periodically.

The two stayed in contact and when the ECHL season was shut down in March of 2020, with many players simply out of work. without any financial recourse, Bissonnette reached out to Nesbitt about how to help.

It was Nesbitt who was instrumental in helping create a structure for an ECHL relief fund that Bissonnette said helped distribute as much as $175,000.

“I reached out to him because I wanted to see what I could do to help because that league meant so much to me,” Bissonnette said. “Without him that doesn’t happen.”

As this season and the return of ECHL hockey came around, Bissonnette regularly checked in with Nesbitt, knowing his 1,000 game mark was coming up.

We often talk of the love of the game. For a player like Nesbitt, that appears to be an unconditional love. It’s a love that remains even when sometimes the game doesn’t love you back or doesn’t love you the way you want it to.

“You’ve got to tip your hat to Nessy,” Bissonnette said. “He’s done it the hard way and I mean that in a good way. It’s hard.

“At that level it’s not easy. The wear and tear and the grind of it all is a little bit more intense.”

Jason LaBarbera is a goaltending coach with the Calgary Flames. He was in camp with Nesbitt in Edmonton before the 2013 season. Both share a deep love and appreciation for professional wrestling.

“You don’t find too many of us that are into pro wrestling,” LaBarbera said. “Right away we kind of bonded over that.”

Over the years, even though they didn’t see each other personally apart from occasionally playing against each other, they stayed in contact talking wrestling, life, careers.

“It doesn’t matter what level you’re playing at, to play 1,000 games is impressive,” LaBarbera said. “And there’s a lot of things at the NHL level that you’d never have to deal with that you do in the minors.”

What impresses LaBarbera is that Nesbitt has put down roots in Atlanta and is deeply connected to the local hockey community.

“It says a lot about him,” LaBarbera said. “It’s important for our sport having guys like him in cities like that. People would be lucky to have a guy like that to show them the game and teaching them the game.”

There were brushes with the dream, of course.

Nesbitt signed an NHL deal with Arizona before the 2008-09 season. He grew up an Edmonton Oiler and Wayne Gretzky fan, meaning the chance to play for his idol, who was in his last season as head coach for the Coyotes, was a dream come true.

He met and hung out with Shane Doan and the rest of the Coyotes. And while others got sent back to the American Hockey League during training camp, Nesbitt hung around until the eve of the start of the NHL regular season.

He never got in a game, but he recalled a conversation with GM Don Maloney, who explained that Gretzky had taken a shine to Nesbitt and that was why he got to stay as long as he did.

Was that the truth? Who knows.

“I’ll hold onto that one for as long as I live,” Nesbitt said with a laugh. “I’m just going to keep that.”

Maybe there’s not one moment when you realize that the NHL is simply not going to happen, no matter how hard you work or how much you want that dream to be realized. Maybe it’s a cumulative thing.

Nesbitt recalls that Oiler training camp in the fall of 2013 and getting sent down to Oklahoma City, where Todd Nelson was the team’s AHL coach. At one point Nesbitt was in a meeting with, among others, Edmonton GM Craig MacTavish.

“They started talking about some of the guys that were coming up (to Edmonton) from there,” Nesbitt said. “Probably info that I wouldn’t have gotten years ago. It confirmed that his role was not as an NHL prospect, but as a mentor and leader for guys that at some point might get the call to Edmonton. But that was alright.

“It was like, I get my role here now. I get this. And that was okay. I also appreciated the respect and honesty they gave me more. And the role they wanted to put me in. Because I felt I’d done something right to that point to get that chance.”

In January of 2014, though, Nesbitt was traded to San Antonio and ended up finishing the season in Chicago with the Wolves, where he would play his final AHL games.

“My last game in that league, I’m pretty sure was my birthday in April,” Nesbitt said. “So it was the last game in the American League. But at that point I knew. Things were going really well in Oak City. This is how fast they can turn. Which I knew. It is what it is.”

All of those experiences, all of those lessons learned, make Nesbitt the kind of guy that young players want to be around. Is there a little of Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis in the classic baseball movie "Bull Durham" at play in his current dynamic with the Gladiators? Sure.

 “I never played in the NHL so I really can’t clearly tell you everything you want to hear, but at this level I can definitely help,” Nesbitt said.

For instance, Nesbitt realizes that at times he was awestruck around NHL players.

“If I tell anyone now, just go in like you belong there,” Nesbitt said. “Be respectful, but go in there like you’re supposed to be there. Not like this is a fantasy camp.”

And for young players in the minors who believe they deserve to be in a better place, well, Nesbitt has some thoughts on that, too.

“The American (Hockey League) is the most selfish league in the world,” Nesbitt said. “I’m going to say that. I don’t care. Anyone my age who has played that long would agree that’s the case because you’re that close to making a lot more money.

“And yeah, it sucks, but the amount of times you come in an American League locker room and the guys are talking about who just got hurt up in the NHL the night before. Or this guy was brutal, he’s out of the lineup.

“And I tell this to guys that are on AHL or NHL deals in the ECHL now; remember where you want to be, but you have to worry about where you are. It’s the only way you’re going to get better at your game and your craft is if you take care of business, task at hand, at any job right?”

A year after Nesbitt began this latest run with the Gladiators, Pyle also returned to his hockey home in Georgia. According to Hockeydb.com, Pyle will hit 1,400 minor pro games as a minor pro head coach later this season, this after a long career as a minor pro player.

“My body took a beating, but it was the best beating I ever took,” Pyle said. “I know Derek feels the same way.”

One of the first calls Pyle made when considering coming back to the Gladiators was to Nesbitt.

“We’ve always had a great relationship,” Pyle said. “He’s a great player. I push him pretty hard because I want him to be good for the rest of his life. Whatever he does he does 100 percent. He’s got a good heart. Good father, good husband.

“For me it’s just fun to watch,” he added. “I like watching him be successful.”

At one point Nesbitt asked Pyle if he had some video he could show some kids who were attending a camp Nesbitt was running. Pyle had already been working on a highlight video from the Gladiators’ COVID-shortened season and so passed that along.

It featured so many Nesbitt plays that he thought Pyle had misunderstood and had cut personal highlights video.

“I said, no Derek, I didn’t cut it that way, that’s how it is,” Nesbitt said. “When we’re winning and you’re playing the right way that’s the way it is. It was because he was doing everything right.”