Dallas Eakins hustled from the rink to the hospital, wishing he could have been there sooner.
Several hours earlier, just before the standard pre-game meetings, Eakins had received a jarring call with news that one of his Anaheim Ducks players had been involved in a serious car accident on his commute to the Honda Center.
Justin Kirkland was supposed to be in the home lineup that evening for what turned out to be a lopsided loss to the Boston Bruins. Instead, he was being treated for head trauma, facial fractures and other injuries. When he regained consciousness, his coach was already there, still decked out in his game-night suit.
“Looking at him, I honestly couldn’t believe he was alive,” Eakins said, recalling his initial reaction when he walked into that hospital room, joining Madison Kirkland at her husband’s side. “He was beat up. He looked absolutely terrible.
“It literally looked like a gang had taken a baseball bat to him, right from the top of his head … It looked like a group of 10 had just pounded him.”
Kirkland has been one of the NHL’s feel-good stories this fall. Now 28, the journeyman centre is making the most of a call-up opportunity with the Calgary Flames.
Over the past few weeks, he has scored his first NHL goal, collected his first big-league assist, earned highlight-of-the-night consideration with a silky shootout move and embraced his ‘Costco’ nickname by joking that he’d love a free membership as part of an endorsement deal.
If he’s in the lineup on Monday as the Flames visit the Vegas Golden Knights, Kirkland will be logging his eighth NHL outing of the season, which would mark a new career high. He was driving to Game 8 with the Ducks when he was nearly killed on a California interstate on Jan. 8, 2023.
As Eakins repeated multiple times during a phone interview from Germany, where he is now pulling double duty as the head coach and general manager for Adler Mannheim of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga: “He’s an inspiration.”
It’s certainly not a favourite topic — who enjoys talking about the worst day of their life? — but Kirkland is often asked to recount the hazy details of his hospital stay. He realizes his recovery and return from that scary crash is part of what makes him such a compelling story, why it seems that supporters of all teams are rooting for his continued success.
Kirkland describes Eakins as “a great man” and although they worked together for only one season, his former skipper in Anaheim remains one of his biggest fans. When Kirkland notched his first NHL goal, burying a backhand in the Battle of Alberta, Eakins was quick to text both Justin and Madison — a ‘Yeahhh baby!’ followed by a string of fist-bump and heart emojis.
“The thing I see now that I love, and I equate this back to personal things, to tragedies that have happened in my life … ” said Eakins, who was himself a journeyman pro player — including 20 appearances on behalf of the Flames from 2000-02 — and had head-coaching stints in both Edmonton and Anaheim. “I’d wish those things on no one, but I am so grateful they happened to me. Or maybe it’s adversities in my professional life. I don’t wish on anyone some things that have happened to me professionally, but I am extremely grateful for them. Because I know what they do. They callous your brain. They give you a new sense of what is hard.
“So now when I see Justin and Madison, they have a different outlook. It’s not like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been sent to the minors. Oh, it’s so tragic.’ No, you start laughing at adversity like that. It’s like, ‘Bring it on. That’s fine. I’m 28 and I’m going to the minors and I’m going to go work because this is a great day. I might not even be supposed to be here right now, so today is a great day.’ And now he gets called up, he scores that goal, he seems to be playing well from the million miles away that I am. And what I see in Justin is that I’m not sure you could throw anything at the kid that will rattle him. And please, someone tell him he can’t play in the NHL. Because I put my money on him now. I bet on him. Like, just tell him that he can’t do it. Tell him: ‘You can’t do this. It’s going to be too hard.’ He’s going to laugh in your face and it’s because of that day, going to that game against Boston. It was a scary, almost really life-altering moment in a bad way that became a very life-altering moment in an amazing way.
“As much as you don’t want to go through that, I have a suspicion that Justin and Madison are extremely grateful for that day. Because what could have been a very tragic day has certainly paid off to a life-altering mindset.”
With Yegor Sharangovich returning for Saturday’s 5-3 loss to the Winnipeg Jets, and with rookie Sam Honzek close to being activated, the Flames may soon be sending one forward back to the AHL’s Wranglers.
Kirkland, with four points and a plus-5 rating in seven games so far, is making a case he should stick on the roster. (He had his best night at the dot Saturday, winning six of eight draws, but his overall success rate of 43.8 per cent requires some improvement.)
Eakins, as he keeps tabs on Kirkland from afar, has been thinking about that call he received as he prepared for that clash between the Ducks and Bruins in January 2023, about the knot in his stomach as he awaited further details.
He’s also been thinking about a call that never happened.
Nearly half of Mannheim’s regulars have past NHL experience. This summer, as Eakins scoured the list of potential free-agent targets, it did cross his mind …
Kirkland, who played a pair of games last winter with the since-relocated Arizona Coyotes, wound up returning to the Flames’ organization on a one-year, two-way contract.
“I am the general manager and coach of a destination place in Europe. If you’re going to come play in Europe, this is a place you would want to get to for a number of reasons,” Eakins said. “And rolling into this past summer, I’m looking at guys who are looking for work and I’ve never told Justin this, but I was sitting there thinking, ‘You know what? There’s a guy right there. I know he would be an unbelievable fit here and man, it would be a privilege to have him and Madison here. These are the kind of people that we want to build our organization on.’
“But it’s probably the only time since I’ve been in charge of here that I did something that wasn’t the best for the organization and what I did, or what I didn’t do, is I didn’t reach out to him. Because I know he respects me and I respect the hell out of him, and I didn’t want him for one second to think that I thought he didn’t have a chance still in the NHL. I didn’t want to put any doubt in his head with, ‘Hey, it’s me calling you. I’m offering you this. You might want to consider.’
“I didn’t reach out because I wanted him to keep plugging and fighting it out over there. What’s to do right by our organization over here is to grab people like him, to make sure you go hard after them. I didn’t because personally I wanted him to keep scraping and clawing over there. I’m glad I didn’t call him, and I’m glad that he still has his head down and he’s still swinging.”