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Asian ice hockey players are making their mark in the ‘whitest sport on Earth’

Korean-Canadian Jim Paek helped blaze a trail in the NHL for new talent with Asian heritage, including Jett Woo, Matt Dumba and Kailer Yamamoto. With the league keen to build a fan base in Asia, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will be the sport’s moment in the spotlight.

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Jett Woo of the Vancouver Canucks. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 1:00am, 18 Jan 2020Updated: 4:31pm, 18 Jan 2020

He’s a wide-shouldered defenceman from Canada’s ice-hockey heartland, currently playing with the Calgary Hitmen in North America’s Western Hockey League (WHL), a junior league for players aged under 20. At 182cm (6ft) tall and 93kg (205 pounds), the 19-year-old from Winnipeg, Manitoba is an old-style rearguard with a game built around hulkish power in a league that gets faster every year. In June 2018, he was drafted by the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks. The name on his shirt stands out among the Smiths, Johnsons, Joneses and Browns: Jett Woo (mother German, father Chinese).

Ice hockey – or just “hockey” to true initiates – is often disparaged as the whitest sport on Earth, but 2019 was the third consecutive year that players of Asian descent were selected in the first two rounds of the NHL draft. In 2017, it was Nick Suzuki, who is a quarter Japanese, and Filipino-American Jason Robertson. In 2018, it was Woo. Then last year, Ryan Suzuki and Nick Robertson – younger brothers of the 2017 draftees – and Sasha Mutala, whose mother is South Korean.

The NHL estimates there are at least 20 prospects of Asian descent in its various feeder leagues, which is almost as many players of Asian heritage it has seen in its entire century-plus history.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Woo, who was named after Chinese action film star Jet Li. “The game has changed so much over time and not just with how it is being played, but who is getting the chance to play.”

Things have come a long way since Jim Paek’s first NHL shift in October 1990. Then a spry, 23-year-old defenceman, Paek had been called up from the Muskegon Lumberjacks of the International Hockey League to join the now-legendary Pittsburgh Penguins roster led by French-Canadian superstar Mario Lemieux and rounded out with future Hall of Famers Jaromír Jágr, Mark Recchi, Paul Coffey and Bryan Trottier. Paek recalls lining up for an offensive zone face-off: “My knees were shaking as they were about to drop the puck. It wasn’t until a few games down the road where I was like, ‘I made it’. And it hits you like a ton of bricks. All the blood, sweat and tears, and here I am.”

Paek, who made his name as a stay-at-home defenceman, came into a league then made up almost entirely of Caucasian players of largely European ancestry. And while Paek is not the first player of Asian heritage to lace up his skates in the NHL – that honour goes to Larry Kwong, whose father was from China and who played just one shift for the New York Rangers, in 1948 – his career was the first to take hockey’s colour barrier hard against the boards.