Every NHL Player Born in Raleigh Has the Same Thing in Common
Raleigh is not a hockey town in the way Thunder Bay is a hockey town. There's no youth pipeline going back generations here, no ponds, no dad who played junior. The Hurricanes showed up in 1997 and everything about hockey in this city started from zero.
So the list of NHL players born in Raleigh is short. And when you look at who's on it, it stops being a list and starts being a coincidence.
The three
Logan Brown, born March 5, 1998. Ottawa took him 11th overall in 2016. He's played for the Senators and the Blues, most recently in the Kings organization.
Jake Leschyshyn, born March 10, 1999 — five days and one year after Brown. Vegas took him 62nd overall in 2017. He's played for the Golden Knights, the Rangers, and now he's in the Sabres system.
Nikolai Kovalenko, born October 17, 1999. Colorado took him 171st overall in 2018. He's played for the Avalanche and San Jose and he's back in the KHL with CSKA Moscow now.
An American who played in Ottawa and St. Louis. A dual American-Canadian who went to Vegas. A Russian who ended up back home. Three guys with nothing to do with each other.
Except they were all born in the same city, within nineteen months, while their fathers played for the same team.
The dads
Jeff Brown was a defenseman who made the 1992 All-Star Game and still holds offensive records for St. Louis. He came to the franchise in Hartford and stayed through the move.
Curtis Leschyshyn was drafted third overall by Quebec in 1988 and played 1,033 NHL games. Same deal — Hartford, then Carolina.
Andrei Kovalenko was a Russian winger nine years into an NHL career that started in Quebec.
All three of them were on the roster during the same short stretch, right after the team relocated. Their kids were born in Raleigh essentially because of a real estate decision their fathers made in 1997.
What makes it strange
The team didn't even play in Raleigh yet.
When the Whalers moved south in 1997, the arena here wasn't finished. The Hurricanes played their first two seasons in Greensboro, an hour and a half away, in front of crowds so small it became a running joke around the league. They didn't move into the building in Raleigh until the fall of 1999.
So all three of these kids were born in a city that had an NHL team on paper and nowhere to play. Their dads commuted to Greensboro.
The players who came through in those two years are mostly a footnote. Bad teams, empty buildings, a franchise that half the league assumed wouldn't survive. And the only permanent thing that came out of it is three NHL careers that all started with a birth certificate from Wake County.
And then the fourth one
Rod Brind'Amour was traded here in January 2000. His son Skyler was born that year.
Skyler played four years at Quinnipiac, signed with Carolina, and made his NHL debut playing for his father — one of a very small number of players in league history to suit up for a team their dad was coaching.
Which means the list of Raleigh-born NHL players is, as far as I can tell, four guys, and all four are the sons of men who played for this franchise.
Not one of them is a kid who grew up here, learned to skate at a local rink, and made it. That kid is coming — there are North Carolina-born players in the system now who never knew a time before the Hurricanes existed, and Raleigh has produced real youth hockey for twenty years. But he isn't on the list yet.
Right now, being born in Raleigh and playing in the NHL just means your dad worked here.
