Top Kraken Draft Pick Had Hockey Star Mom’s Help

LOS ANGELES – Having his mother run a summer hockey school that took him in at age 3 gave Jake O’Brien a leg up on making the NHL Draft podium.

The Kraken took Toronto native O’Brien, 18, a centerman with the Ontario Hockey League’s Brantford Bulldogs, with the eighth overall pick in Friday’s opening round of the draft. With O’Brien by his side was his mother, Amy Turek, a onetime women’s player with the Toronto Aeros and Canada’s national squad.

“Her just bringing me up and knowing where to put me in hockey and stuff, just knowing what skills skates to go to was a big thing,” said O’Brien, a 6-foot-2, 172-pounder who had 32 goals and 98 points in 66 games last season, following up his OHL Rookie of the Year debut the prior campaign. “So, she was great to me. She was supporting me all along the way.”

Years before O’Brien was even born, his onetime Canadian university star mother played three seasons as a left wing with the Aeros in the semipro National Women’s Hockey League from 1998-2001. Teaming with the likes of Jennifer Botterill – younger sister of Kraken general manager Jason Botterill – as well as Hockey Hall of Famers Geraldine Heaney and Angela James, she averaged 1.31 points per game.

She played five additional seasons for the Aeros in a prior incarnation of the NWHL and an ensuing circuit, while also suiting up for Canada at the TSN Challenge event against Team USA in 2000-01. In 2003, she was inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame at her Wilfrid Laurier University alma mater in Ontario.

“I played hockey when it was still a male-dominated sport,” said Turek, smiling Friday as she stood amidst other family members while O’Brien conducted a series of media interviews. “And then after I finished, I went to Teacher’s College and then after that I opened my hockey school. It was originally a hockey school for girls, run by female instructors, to give the girls a place to go where they could have female role models.”

But she made an early exception: Her son became the Victory Hockey School’s only male student.

“Usually, the kids come and they’re eight or nine years old,” she said. “But he started when he was only 3. And he would do it for four days, three or four weeks of the summer. But at that point, we were all hockey players. He didn’t really know the difference at that age.”

Fast forward 15 years and the toddler who’d first learned the game playing with older girls had his name called up onstage Friday at the LA Live Peacock Theater by Kraken investor and famed Hollywood film producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It was the fourth time in five drafts the Kraken have gone with a centerman in the opening round.

“We’ve tried to build our team through the center position,” Kraken general manager Botterill said from his remote location in Seattle in a live NHL Network interview relayed to the theater crowd on one of the venue’s giant video screens. “And as we got to watch Jake, just watching him on the ice – his creativity, his hockey sense – we think he’s going to fit in extremely well with our talented young forwards here in Seattle.”

The NHL Draft was trying a “decentralized” version for the first time, with prospects and one representative from each team on-hand here while general managers and scouting staffs operated remotely from the various NHL cities. The draft concludes on Saturday with Rounds 2-through-7, with the Kraken having two second round selections and one apiece in each of the fifth and seventh rounds.

The early draft spots went as most pundits predicted, with Matthew Schaefer of the Erie Otters going to the New York Islanders at No. 1 overall, followed by Saginaw Spirit forward Michael Misa going No. 2 to the San Jose Sharks, Swedish center Anton Frondell going No. 3 to the Chicago Blackhawks and Moncton Wildcats center Caleb Desnoyers being taken No. 4 by the Utah Mammoth.

After that was a bit up in the air, with the Kraken anxiously waiting to see how things played out.

O’Brien now joins a Kraken team that picked first round centermen Matty Beniers in 2021, Wright in 2022 and Berkly Catton a year ago – with winger Eduard Sale in 2023 ranking as the lone exception. He’s also the second former OHL Rookie of the Year drafted by the Kraken in the first round, an honor also previously claimed by his fellow Toronto native Wright.

O’Brien knows all about Wright, though he’s never met him.

“In minor hockey I always watched him playing,” O’Brien said. “He was on that really good (Toronto area) Don Mills team growing up. So, I’ve always watched him and that was pretty cool watching him grow up and gain Exceptional Status (to play in the OHL a year early) and stuff. So, yeah, I’m pretty excited to meet him.”

Turns out, he didn’t need to wait long. After taking a congratulatory phone call from Kraken captain Jordan Eberle, O’Brien was soon handed another phone on which Wright had placed a FaceTime call. The pair exchanged greetings and spoke on the video call for several minutes.

Wright put in plenty of hard work after the Kraken drafted him at No. 4 overall in 2022. He trained summers in Toronto and followed in-season programs with Kraken fitness consultant Gary Roberts to properly condition his body for pro hockey rigors.

O’Brien said he won’t have to look far to get pushed. He comes from a family of athletes: His grandfather, Ed Turek, was a former No. 1 overall Canadian Football League draft pick from 1966 who later won a Grey Cup title with the Hamilton Tiger Cats in 1967.

His father, Dan, also on-hand for Friday’s draft, played Tier II junior hockey in suburban Toronto before moving on for four seasons at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. Between that and his mother, he’s had plenty of family messaging about what it takes to play and stay in high-level sports.

His mother eventually branched out with her hockey school to include both boys and girls. She ran the program through last year but is considering a break this summer so she can follow her Kraken draftee son around to various hockey events.

O’Brien said he’s learned plenty from her about what it will take to further his career.

“Just hard work and stay humble,” he said. “Just going into each day not thinking you’re the best and just getting in the work every day and getting better.

“Right after this, I’m going to get right back to work, into the gym and hopefully to the NHL.”