[sureLoss]

http://www.si.com/nhl/2016/03/16/joh...ll-nhl-players

Sometimes it takes even more than on-ice creativity and slick stickwork to get people to look beyond the scale. When he was 17, during preseason camp with the USHL’s Dubuque (Iowa) Fighting Saints, representatives from NHL Central Scouting visited the junior team to measure draft-eligible prospects. At the time, Gaudreau’s weight hovered around the low 130s, not exactly an attractive number for potential suitors.

And so it was that Johnny Gaudreau stepped onto the scale with five pucks crammed inside his jock strap. He fudged the official weigh-in (137 pounds!), hiked up his pants and carefully waddled away so nothing tumbled out. “That’s all I was thinking about, getting as many extra pounds as I could,” he says. “Hopefully someone would [think] I wasn’t as skinny as I really was.”

Burke was working as the Maple Leafs’ GM in 2011 when an early evaluation of Gaudreau landed on his desk. He remembers the wording: “Dazzling player. Will not play Division I.”

“I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to play,” Burke says, equally astonished and admiring. “Nobody was. He shouldn’t be in this league at that height and weight. He doesn’t belong here.”

On a sunny day after practice in mid-February, Gaudreau rolls into a Calgary restaurant freshly shaved, having forsaken his latest attempt at facial hair because too many friends gave him grief. Aside from a few locals eyeing him through the window, lunch passes without interruption. This is unusual. “Oh, yeah, I notice people hiding their phones behind glasses,” he says.

Gaudreau has autographed both a baby’s pacifier and a Loonie coin. At a pregame tailgate during the 2014–15 playoffs, when the Flames reached the second round and Gaudreau led them with nine points, at least 50 people took pictures with his parents. A construction worker once gave Burke his hard hat, requesting Gaudreau sign it for him. “He’s become a poster boy for the city,” teammate and roommate Josh Jooris says. This year, when a deliveryman dropped off packages where Jane Gaudreau works, he slipped into her office because “I just wanted to meet Johnny Hockey’s mom.”