Frederik Gauthier Never Became a Maple Leafs Star. But He

There are some hockey players you remember for reasons that have very little to do with their statistics. Frederik Gauthier is one of those players.

When he was coming through the Maple Leafs organization, Gauthier always seemed to be around. He was funny. The other players liked him. There was something about him that made teammates want to hang around. He was one of those guys who seemed to make a dressing room feel a little more like a dressing room.

The problem was that the Maple Leafs had drafted him 21st overall, expecting considerably more.

The Maple Leafs thought Gauthier could become something he never quite became.

Gauthier was supposed to be a big, smart defensive centre with terrific reach and the potential to become a dependable shutdown player. The comparisons were generous — Jordan Staal, Martin Hanzal and Sean Couturier — and Toronto invested plenty of time trying to turn him into the kind of fourth-line centre every contending team supposedly needs.

It never really happened. Gauthier played parts of several seasons in Toronto and eventually got into 153 NHL games with the Maple Leafs, but the offensive development never arrived. And his defensive game wasn't quite good enough to make him indispensable. He moved on, played for the Arizona Coyotes and the New Jersey Devils, and eventually left the NHL.

And yet, this is where the story gets more interesting.

Gauthier’s hockey career didn't turn out the way fans imagined.

He's now playing in Switzerland, where he has found a life that looks considerably different from the one the Maple Leafs imagined for him. He has even tried the KHL, although that didn't work out. Now he's back in Switzerland, playing in a place that may actually suit him better than the NHL ever did.

There is something appealing about that. Gauthier isn't producing huge numbers in Switzerland. That's worth acknowledging. The scouting report suggested more than this, and even there he isn't suddenly putting up enormous offensive totals.

But apparently, people like having him around. And maybe that matters.

Gauthier grew up in Quebec, and now he's playing hockey in French-speaking Switzerland.

He's a French-speaking player living and working in a part of Switzerland where French is spoken. He's still earning a living doing something he clearly loves. He's travelling, seeing the world and continuing to do something he clearly enjoys. That's not failure. It just isn't the career the Leafs imagined when they drafted him in the first round.

There is a tendency in hockey to judge players by the distance between what they became and what we expected them to become. Gauthier makes that temptation particularly obvious. The Maple Leafs wanted a shutdown centre. They got a player who couldn't quite establish himself in the NHL.

Fans have to think Gauthier is enjoying his less-pressured life.

But he still got to play professional hockey for years. He's still young enough to enjoy it. And he seems to have found a place where being Frederik Gauthier is enough. For an old hockey writer, there's something to like about that. Not every player has to become the player we thought he would be.

Sometimes it's enough to find a place where you belong.