It did not start on a frozen pond in Minnesota. It started in Brooklyn. Danny Dzhaniyev’s parents had left Azerbaijan for New York in the 1990s, Russian was the language at home, and the family knew about as much hockey as the average New Yorker knows about IK70.
Then his dad took his two-year-old son to a Rangers game.
Apparently, that was enough.
After his first trip onto the ice, Danny had made up his mind: he was going to play hockey. From there the sport became a fairly unlikely companion for a small kid from Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. Russian coaches helped him along and before games he studied Pavel Datsyuk — especially the way the Russian stole pucks. If you are going to steal something, you might as well steal from one of the smartest to ever do it.
Family is the thread running through the story. His father comes from the mountains of Azerbaijan, his mother from a small town several hours from Moscow, and Russian was the only language spoken at home when Danny was young. American holidays mixed with Russian traditions and his grandmother’s cooking, while relatives remained on the other side of the Atlantic. Danny has described their much tougher lives as a reminder of why he wants to succeed: he wants to make his family proud.
Then he did it his way. The U.S. National Team Development Program. USHL. Four years at Penn State. An A on his chest in his final college season and the first Frozen Four in school history. Then Utah and his first real professional season: 73 points in 72 games, more than any other ECHL rookie, and Rookie of the Year.
And yes, Danny is around 5-foot-5. Hockey has spent decades searching for big bodies. Danny appears to have missed that memo. When you are roughly half a defenseman shorter than the preferred template and still produce your way through every level, there are two possibilities: either everybody else has been measuring the wrong thing, or you are damn good at hockey.
Now Brooklyn has become Oskarshamn and North America has become HockeyAllsvenskan. On the ice, it has not exactly looked like a culture shock. Two shootout goals and a goal from open play against Kalmar have already offered a small preview of what IK brought across the Atlantic: hands, nerve and a fairly obvious lack of interest in how big a hockey player is supposed to be.
The two-year-old at the Rangers game probably did not have Be-Ge Hockey Center on his map. Now he is standing there in an IK jersey. From Brooklyn via Penn State and Utah to Little Naples, where nobody is ever forgotten — for better or worse.