Jake Oettinger picked up the tab when he and Joseph Woll got together on Monday night.
The Dallas Stars goaltender wasn’t going to let one of his favourite people pay for dinner.
“He wanted to, but I snatched it from him,” Oettinger said on Tuesday. “Whenever he’s in Dallas or I’m here, we like to grab dinner and catch up. He’s one of my good friends from hockey.”
The friendship goes back to their days together with the United States national team development program and continued from 2016-19 in Boston, when Oettinger played for Boston University and Woll tended the net for Boston College.
Though Oettinger has more National Hockey League games on his resume — 224 to Woll’s 57 before Tuesday — studying what the Maple Leafs goalie does on the job has been a benefit.
“He’s so calm, he makes so many hard saves look really easy,” Oettinger said. “A lot of the things that he does really well, I’m trying to do and try to do with my game as well.
“He is athletic but he is not a foot outside the crease. He stays back and reads the play really well. Nowadays with how skilled the league is, it feels like guys are turning down great looks to make an extra pass, so you have to be back a little bit just to read the play. When I started trying to do that more, I watched a lot of him because he does that really well.
“You combine patience and hockey IQ with athleticism and natural puck-stopping ability, you have a good recipe and I think he has that.”
Both were born in 1998, though Woll is five months older. After Woll was drafted by the Leafs in the third round in 2016, Oettinger was selected in the first round, 26th overall, by Dallas in 2017.
If injuries didn’t slow Woll’s progress, the likelihood is that his NHL experience, given the way he has played for the Leafs when healthy, would be close to on par with Oettinger.
“He’s just scratching the surface of how good he is and is going to be,” Oettinger said. “He’s one of my favourite goalies to watch.
“He’s like the perfect human. All-around great guy, great family. I really looked up to him a lot when I was at the (U.S.) program because hockey wasn’t as serious for me as it was for him.
“It was eye-opening when I first started playing with him. I still do some of the stuff I took from him.”
X: @koshtorontosun