LOS ANGELES — As Jonathan Quick’s father-in-law, former Ranger Mike Backman, watched Quick and the Kings battle the Blackhawks into overtime in Game 7 of the Western Conference final Sunday night, his mother-in-law, Toni, sat upstairs and couldn’t bring herself to watch.
“During the season I’ll watch him, but when it gets down to this point, I really don’t watch,” she said Monday afternoon. “I’ll watch something where I flip back and check the score.”
So that’s what she did Sunday evening, watching Kevin Costner in “3 Days To Kill” instead of her son-in-law playing in the biggest game of his season. But then she flipped over and saw the Kings players celebrating after Alec Martinez’s overtime goal, and immediately she knew Quick was moving on to face the Rangers for the right to lift the Stanley Cup for the second time in three seasons.
“He was extremely hard working as a kid,” Toni Backman said of Quick, who was best friends with her son Sean growing up and eventually married her daughter Jaclyn, while her other daughter, Alicia, married former Islanders forward Matt Moulson.
“Of course I never dreamed he would win a Stanley Cup and now be competing for another one, but I can see how it happened. He was always talented, but he has a work ethic that is unbelievable.”
The work ethic of the 28-year-old goaltender was unanimously praised by anyone who knew him as a young kid in Connecticut making his name in the hockey world.
“We had really nothing to do with it,” said Bill Verneris, Quick’s coach at Hamden High School. “The only person responsible for Jon Quick is Jon Quick … the kid’s got it.”
After playing for Backman on a youth hockey travel team, Quick’s path began at Hamden High in Hamden, Conn., where as a sophomore fighting for the starting job with an incumbent senior he impressed assistant coach Todd Hall — who only months earlier had ended his own professional career after several years in the Rangers organization, including scoring the series-winning goal for the Hartford Wolf Pack in the 2000 Calder Cup finals.
“I could still shoot the puck back then,” Hall said. “[And] here’s a sophomore kid, and he’s 15, maybe 16, and I’m firing the puck at him and every time that I scored, he would grab that same puck, push it back to me and say, ‘Shoot again.’ Every time.
“He had that competitive edge at that age. … It was obviously too young to tell how well he’ll do, but I said if he continues to develop, with how he’s done so far, it’s endless what he can accomplish.”
So far that has proven to be the case, as Quick has excelled at every level. After starring at Hamden, he went on to play at prep hockey power Avon Old Farms for John Gardner — Brian Leetch’s coach when the Hall-of-Fame defenseman played there — before going on to star for UMass. He made his NHL debut with the Kings during his first pro season (2007-08) before becoming a fixture in net for Los Angeles midway through the following year and never looking back, including beating the Devils for the Cup in 2012 and becoming the starting goalie for Team USA at the Sochi Olympics this year.
“Anybody who sells him short is wrong,” Gardner said, “because the kid is a great athlete and is a great competitor and doesn’t want to lose.”
With Quick now set to play at least two games just a short drive away from his hometown, many of his friends and family are planning to make the trip to Madison Square Garden for at least one of the games.
While most of them will have no problem rooting for Quick when the series begins, Hall admitted he was conflicted on whom to pull for in the series.
“I was a fan and a player [for the Rangers], too,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you … I’m torn. I was dropping my daughter off at school and a buddy of mine was dropping his daughter off, and I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know.’
“I’m rooting for a great finals, regardless of who wins, to be honest with you. But I mean, for Jon to do what he’s done in his relatively short career so far, it’s just tremendous.”