A human being cannot be in two places at once.
Pick any technology or download any app. It can’t happen. The person who comes closest to achieving the feat just might be London Knights general manager Mark Hunter.
Ask anyone in the hockey world. Mark Hunter is everywhere.
He crisscrosses the map so much trying to find players who will help his team compete that he has been known to set off a few alarm bells.
Sometimes it can go as far as triggering safeguards on credit cards.
“I had a situation once where I was in the United States scouting and I used my credit card and then I went early next morning I was in Barrie watching a game and my credit card wouldn’t work because the (company) figured it was moving around so much that it had to have been stolen,” Hunter says.
But this is one of the many ingredients that go into the kind of success that London has enjoyed since Mark, his brother Dale and Basil McRae purchased the franchise from the Tarry family in 2000.
It’s how you compete for championships as regularly as they do. It’s how you construct the Team of the Century.
Since 2000, the Knights have 40 wins (in 68 games) a total of 14 times.
To give that some real perspective you have to look at the rest of the Ontario Hockey League over that same period of time.
The next teams on that list of years with at least 40 victories are the Windsor Spitfires, the Barrie Colts, the Erie Otters and the Ottawa 67’s. Each of them has seven, in other words, half as many.
Get daily London news
London has collected four league championships since 2000. Kitchener, Peterborough, Windsor, Hamilton, Guelph, Erie and Peterborough are next on that list. Each of them has two, or yet again, half as many.
Mark Hunter was named the winner of the Jim Gregory award as the OHL’s Executive of the Year on May 30.
This is only the third year that the award has been handed out in the OHL. James Boyd of the 67’s won the inaugural honour and Steve Staois was selected one year ago when he was with the Hamilton Bulldogs.
So what does it take to keep the success of the Knights franchise going the way it has for so long? It takes dependable vehicles, for one thing.
“I don’t know if I can count the (number of) vehicles I’ve had over the years,” Mark Hunter chuckles. “I think my vehicle right now has almost 200,000 clicks — in two years — so it’s on the road and helping me do my thing.”
Hunter also points to another integral aspect of success and that is family.
“Something you hear in the hockey world is being a family and when you look back at some teams, they are a big family. And when that happens, you usually win games,” Hunter says.
The entire Hunter family plays a role in that as well.
“I think it comes from my dad. The family was important,” Hunter says. “It’s something special when people are part of a team, you know; everybody pushes it in the right direction and cares for each other and things just take off.”
But finding players and developing those players continues to be the biggest key of all.
It is something that the Knights have been doing for decades.
If you average out the number of players who go on to the National Hockey League from major junior each team in the Canadian Hockey League should have seven or eight of their former players playing in any one season. That’s what makes it the best developmental league in the world by the numbers.
London doesn’t quite sit with the average.
On any given year the Knights might have 28 or 29 or even north of 30 former players playing in the NHL — quadruple the average.
So what does Mark Hunter see in a player when he watches him play that may one day see him playing in the OHL or beyond?
Mark thinks back to a player like Mitch Marner, who won a Memorial Cup with London and is now a star with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“He had the skill to make plays, Hunter recalls. “But it’s that he really enjoyed being on the ice. That intrigues me. People who just have that joy in being there in that moment on the ice.”
Hunter’s list of drafted players has names like Marner’s and Hunter’s first-ever draft pick, Rick Nash. There are Hart Trophy winners like Corey Perry and Patrick Kane and heart and soul players too numerous to count who have embraced their roles and helped the Knights to hit the heights that they have.
And that’s why a day after being recognized for his work as a general manager, Mark Hunter was in his office working — training camp for the 2023-24 OHL season is still three months away but it is also only three months away.
“You’re always trying to look forward to what you need to do for the next year,” Hunter says. That’s part of my responsibility. We want to put a good product on the ice for our fans. We know we’ve got the best fans in the CHL and we want to continue our success. Our fans like winning.”
And so does Mark Hunter.
It’s why he and the rest of the organization in London, Ont., work as hard as they do to make it happen.