Tag: NHL

Coquitlam hockey star defies the odds with his NHL debut

Coquitlam’s Ben Kindel has always defied the odds, according to his mom, former soccer star Sara Maglio.

Tonight, Oct. 9, the first-round pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins in June’s NHL entry draft will make his home ice debut against the New York Islanders.

Tuesday, Kindel became the fifth-youngest player in Penguins history to make his NHL debut. The 18-year-old — who’s still more than half a year away from his 19th birthday — skated on a line with veteran superstars Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in a 3-0 win over the New York Rangers at Madison Square Gardens.

Kindel’s 15:11 of playing time was fifth-highest of all Penguins’ players in the game, he won four of his five faceoffs, recorded one shot on net and blocked another.

Maglio, who was at the game in New York with Kindel’s dad, told Penguins’ team reporter Michelle Grechiolo her son always believed he was going to someday play in the NHL.

“Me knowing the statistics and the percentage, I never really let myself believe it,” Maglio said. “Not that I didn’t believe in him, but we’re realistic.”

Unlikely accomplishment

Making the Penguins roster right out of the Western Hockey League, where he played two seasons with the Calgary Hitmen, is an especially unlikely accomplishment for a kid who grew up in a soccer household.

Kindel’s dad, Steve, played for the Vancouver Whitecaps and the old Vancouver 86ers, as well as Canada’s national team. And his younger sister, Lacey, will play for the U-17 women’s national team that will play at the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup in Rabat, Morocco, from Oct. 17 to Nov. 8.

Steve Kindel told Grechiolo his son’s love for hockey was forged watching Montreal Canadiens games on TV together, as the Habs were his favourite team.

“It seems like when he was that little kid up until now, it went by in a flash,” he said.

Not his first rodeo at MSG

Tuesday’s game in New York wasn’t Ben Kindel’s first time in Madison Square Garden. He and his family toured the famous facility in 2022 during a side trip following a spring hockey tournament in Philadelphia.

“I feel like that wasn’t very long ago,” Kindel told reporters after his debut game. “I think it’s one of the best buildings in the league. The energy in there was just unbelievable, so it was just a great experience.”

Penguins coach Dan Muse was full of praise for Kindel and fellow WHL graduate, defenseman Harrison Brunicke.

“They were poised out there,” he said of the rookies. “They were in good spots. I didn’t think that there was anything too loud the wrong way. It’s a good start.”

Kindel signed a three-year entry-level contract with Pittsburgh on July 8. In his two seasons with the Hitmen, he scored 159 points in 133 games, including a franchise-record point steak that lasted 23 games. He also played five games for Canada’s gold medal-winning team at the 2025 IIHF U-18 World Championship in Texas, where he scored a goal and added six assists.

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Coquitlam player signs with the Pittsburgh Penguins

A Coquitlam hockey player with a soccer pedigree is now a Pittsburgh Penguin.

Ben Kindel signed a three-year entry-level contract with the NHL team on Tuesday, July 8, after the Penguins selected the 18-year-old forward 11th overall in June’s 2025 Entry Draft.

Kindel’s dad, Steve, is a former Canadian national soccer team player who also played eight seasons with the Vancouver Whitecaps and two seasons with the old Vancouver 86ers of the A-League.

Kindel’s mother is Sara Maglio, who played for the women’s Whitecaps from 2001-05 and made four appearances with Canada’s national women’s team, including at the 1999 FIFA women’s World Cup.

His younger sister, Lacey, is an accomplished soccer player with the Vancouver Rise FC’s academy program. She also represented Canada at a qualifying tournament for the FIFA U-17 World Cup that will be played in Morocco Oct. 17-Nov. 8.

Ben Kindel, a right winger, spent the past two seasons with the Calgary Hitmen in the Western Hockey League where he amassed 159 points in 133 games, including a franchise-record 23-game point streak that spanned more than two months from Nov.8 to Jan. 12.

Not to be outdone on the international stage by the rest of his family, Kindel also played five games for Canada’s gold medal-winning team at the 2025 IIHF U-18 World Championship in Texas in the spring. He scored a goal and added six assists.

“You see the hockey sense, you see the playmaking ability,” said Pittsburgh’s director of player development, Tom Kotsopoulos, of Kindel’s performance at the team’s recent development camp. “I think he’s a kid who’s willing to put in the work, and he knows what he has to do.”

Kindel said he’s excited to be part of a team that’s built around veteran superstar Sydney Crosby.

“Obviously, they have a player such as Sidney Crosby and a lot of other great players that have been here for a long time,” he said of the Penguins’ longtime captain. “But I think like looking up to a guy like Sid for his passion for the game, his loyalty to the Penguins, and his hockey sense and the way he plays the game the right way.”

Kindel told Penguins’ team reporter Michelle Crechiolo while he grew up in a soccer household, his dad was a big hockey fan and he fell in love with the game as soon as he started playing.

Still, Kindel added, he gleaned valuable lessons from his parents’ soccer passion.

“Do everything 100 per cent, no matter what you’re doing, Then, play with passion every time you step out on the field or the rink.”

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He’s one of the greatest villains in Canadian sports history. But this Coquitlam historian has a new take

This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on April 2, 2023

A Coquitlam historian is shining a new light on one of the greatest villains in Canadian sports lore.

Cedric Bolz, who graduated from Centennial Secondary School and is now the head of the history department at Douglas College, has published an alternate view of the famous 1972 Canada–Russia hockey Summit Series as it was seen through the eyes of Josef Kompalla, one of its referees.

Kompalla and fellow West German Franz Baader were among eight officials that also included four Americans, a Swede and a Czech, who were assigned to work the historic eight-game showdown between hockey’s two greatest superpowers at the time.

But Canadians old enough to remember the grainy live TV pictures from Moscow’s Luzhniki Ice Palace beamed into their living rooms and even classrooms that September 51 years ago likely recall Kompalla as Public Enemy No. 1.

Even those who’ve only experienced the series second hand through subsequent memoirs and documentary films have come to vilify Kompalla, said Bolz.

Authors and filmmakers have perpetuated the narrative that the amateur referee was out of his depth arbitrating games between hockey’s greatest professional players and the mighty Soviets.

Or worse, they surmised, he was a complicit East German.

Until now.

Historical oversight

Bolz’s book, The September He Remembers, flips Kompalla’s story and his role in the Summit Series on its head.

It is, Bolz said, “the first step in correcting a major historical oversight and adding a new chapter in the Summit Series’ growing, mutable legacy.”

Bolz said he first heard of Kompalla through his stepfather, who’d played professional hockey in Germany for several years before moving his family to Canada.

The veteran referee officiated more than 2,000 games including several world championships.

He was revered in Europe and even earned a place in the International Ice Hockey Federation’s (IIHF) Hall of Fame.

But in Canadian hockey lore, Kompalla is a reviled figure who seemed determined to derail the NHLers from affirming their superiority on the ice over the Soviet Union.

J.P. Parise physically attacked him after he’d been assessed a penalty.

He bore the wrath of a frustrated Alan Eagleson who threatened to pull the Canadian players from Game 8 when Kompalla drew the refereeing assignment for the decisive match and then threw chairs on the ice after Parise was penalized.

He was chased down hallways by players and team officials incensed by some of the calls he’d made.

Even after the series was decided, Kompalla was harassed by Canadian players on a flight to Prague for an exhibition game against the Czech national team.

A quiet life of retirement

When Bolz heard Kompalla was still alive and living a quiet life of retirement in Krefeld, Germany, he reached out, determined to reconcile the conflicting images of a pivotal character in hockey’s greatest drama who seemed to have been left behind by its history.

“I’m a historian,” Bolz said. “My job is to document voices and this was a voice.”

SUBMITTED PHOTO Douglas Collage history instructor Cedric Bolz (right) visits with German referee Josef Kompalla while working on a book about his role in the 1972 Summit Series. Behind them is a photo of Kompalla being attacked by Canada’s J.P. Parise after he was called for a penalty.

Over the course of three years of phone interviews and personal visits, Bolz constructed a picture of a modest man who still loves hockey but can’t understand how he’d become one of the sport’s most notorious characters.

“It was always baffling to him,” Bolz said.

Road blocks

Along the way, Bolz ran into road block after road block in his efforts to gain an understanding of how Kompalla had become so despised.

Players still alive like Red Berenson and Wayne Cashman wouldn’t talk to him.

Even Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender renowned for his thoughtful ruminations about the sport and the author of two memoirs about the series, wouldn’t return his calls.

“A narrative had been crafted,” Bolz said. “Legend continues to trump the way things actually were.”

Bolz believes Kompalla was collateral damage, a convenient foil, in a hockey drama that was supposed to be a friendly cultural exchange in the spirit of detente that had started to warm the Cold War in the early 1970s, but quickly devolved into an athletic expression of the great divide that still existed between East and West when the Canadian NHLers realized their opponents wouldn’t be the pushovers as some observers had billed them.

Time is running out

Kompalla is now 87 and Bolz is all too aware time is running out to set the record straight and reform the referee’s legacy.

He hopes his book, academically annotated and cross-referenced through multiple sources, will help facilitate that.

Some who’ve helped shape the story of the Super Series over the past 51 years have taken notice and made overtures to correct the historical record, like the popular misconception that Kompalla was from East Germany when in fact he’d fled communist rule in Poland and settled in Germany’s democratic West.

As for the aging referee who continues to travel the German countryside to attend hockey games as a spectator, Bolz said he still holds out hope his contribution to the series will be recognized in a more positive light.

“He’s always wondered why he’s never been invited to any of the series’ anniversaries,” Bolz said of Kompalla. “It’s important to see him get some sort of closure.”

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‘I took a leap of faith’: From the Coquitlam Express to the Stanley Cup finals

This story originally appeared in the Tri-City News June 4, 2024

A former member of the Coquitlam Express will be part of the Florida Panthers’ effort to win the Stanley Cup when their final series against the Edmonton Oilers begins Saturday, June 8 — by making sure every seat in the team’s Amerant Bank Arena is filled.

But Taralynn Reburn won’t be electrifying the packed house with ice-length rushes or thundering hits on Oilers’ superstar Connor McDavid.

As the Panthers’ vice president of ticket sales and service, Reburn relies on good customer service and building relationships with new fans to help grow hockey culture in South Florida. It’s a tall order in a part of the world where most people’s connection to ice is to keep their margaritas cold.

Fickle market

“This market can be quite fickle,” Reburn said. “Fans traditionally go in the direction of the team who’s winning.”

Fortunately for the BCIT grad who started her career as the director of sales and marketing for the Express from 2009-12, the Panthers have been doing a lot of that; this is the team’s second straight appearance in the Stanley Cup finals and they follow a run of three straight by Florida’s other NHL team, the Tampa Bay Lightning.

“We’re proving to the NHL that this is a hockey state with competitive teams and we’re a destination franchise that players want to be with,” Reburn said.

Following her stint with the Express, Reburn spent almost two years in sales roles with the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team and more than eight years with the Vancouver Canucks. She said connections she made within the industry led her to Florida in 2022 even though she’d never been there before.

“I took a leap of faith and it has been great ever since,” Reburn said.

It’s also been a lot of work.

Engaging fans

Reburn said engaging fans in Florida requires a constant commitment to make them feel like they’re a valued part of the team’s success with perks like access to the Panthers’ new practice facility in downtown Fort Lauderdale and the organization’s involvement in youth hockey.

“Once people get into the building and see a game for the first time, they’re hooked and love the speed of the game compared to other sports,” she said.

Two consecutive years of Stanley Cup finals has also energized the market, Reburn said.

Panthers’ flags are draped on condo balconies, signs are planted on front lawns, restaurants and bars are tuning in their TV’s to the games.

“There’s a visible increased interest in the team,” Reburn said. “I overhear more conversations in the grocery store now about the Panthers than I ever have before.”

Even though Florida’s opponent is from north of the border, the ex-pat Canadian said she’s all-in to see the Cup remain in America, where it’s been ensconced since 1994.

“I’m 100 per cent Panthers on this one and have even converted a few from the west coast to cheer us on, too,” Reburn said.

But what if the cards had fallen slightly differently and it was her former employer, the Vancouver Canucks, that prevailed in the seventh game of its quarter-final series against the Oilers and then defeated the Dallas Stars?

“I was hoping for a Florida-Vancouver final,” Reburn said. “It would have been an exciting and unique opportunity. It’s just the beginning for this new core of the Canucks and their time will come.”

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