Antoine Vermette wore No. 50. Five-zero.
Keith Yandle wore No. 3. Three.
Mike Smith wore No. 41. Four-one.
Shane Doan wore No. 19. One-nine. They all played for the team that was once called the Phoenix Coyotes.
Those teams helped Doan’s son, Josh, learn how to identify numbers and how to count. Hockey became a mnemonic device for the younger Doan, as he sat in the stands of a cold rink in Arizona and watched his father skate in circles, fire pucks and rib his teammates.
“I was probably 3 when my aunt was asking me who all the players were, based off their numbers, and I could probably just list the whole team off at that age,” Josh Doan said. “That was just me being more of a fan of the players more than anything else. But the numbers – in all sports, whether it’s hockey, baseball or football – I’ve always found that interesting.”
Josh Doan absorbed it all, down to the numbers the Coyotes wore, and some of the statistics they recorded. Shane Doan was astounded when his son once said to him, “Keith Yandle scored a goal last night, and he now has 28 points.”
Being a part of the pro hockey environment didn’t just help Josh Doan grasp basic numerals. It introduced him to the sport linked to his family, it and opened doors for him, in athletics and education.
Doan, 23, joined the Sabres in June with defenseman and roommate Michael Kesselring as part of a trade from the Utah Mammoth for JJ Peterka. He is slotted to play left wing on the Sabres’ third line when they open the season Thursday against the New York Rangers at KeyBank Center, and he joins a team that’s forging its identity and pursuing its first playoff berth since 2011.
Greg Powers, Doan’s coach at Arizona State, labels the former Sun Devil as “literally the biggest hockey nerd you will ever meet. I mean that with the utmost respect.”
But he also sees Josh Doan as an individual whose aspiration is to unite a group of people who are working toward a common goal.
“He sets foot in the locker room, and he will make that organization better by connecting with every player in the room,” Powers said. “He will understand where he will fit, and what will benefit the greater good. It will be about everybody in that room but him.”
‘He allowed us to be ourselves’
It’s easy to draw an immediate comparison to someone else when you play hockey and your last name is “Doan.” All Josh Doan had to do was look across the dinner table at his father.
Shane Doan is the Arizona Coyotes. He played all 21 seasons of his career with the team, including his first season in 1995-96 with the Winnipeg Jets, who moved from Manitoba after that season because of financial issues and an antiquated arena in the NHL’s smallest market.
The Buffalo Sabres are a week into training camp this year, and have grasped the scope of a training camp designed and led by head coach Lindy Ruff.
Doan moved with the Jets, the team that selected him at No. 7 in the 1995 NHL Draft. He and his wife, Andrea, settled in the Phoenix area and raised their four children, Gracie, Karys, Josh and Carson.
The Doans never demanded that their children play hockey, or to pick a hobby or focus on a subject like medicine or foreign languages.
“He does an unbelievable job of allowing us all to be us rather than his kids,” Josh said. “My two younger siblings and older sister, none of them play hockey. They did when they were little, but when they stopped, it was, that’s it. If you’re not passionate about something, or you’re not going to be good at something, you’re not going to have fun.
“He took that pressure away from us when he allowed us to be ourselves.”
The Doan children have varied interests. Gracie embraced theater and Karys studied all forms of dance. Carson tools in computers.
Josh loved hockey – it was the main reason he played.
He never felt the weight of his dad’s legacy. Shane Doan retired from the NHL after the 2016-17 season and finished with 402 goals, 570 assists and 1,353 penalty minutes in 1,540 games.
Instead, he knew he had a mentor at the dinner table and on the ice. His father saw how Josh assimilated among the Coyotes.
“I was pretty young, but I think going to the rink with him and going to game days and helping out around the locker room, as a kid, it allowed me to find out what it was all about,” Josh said.
The belt
Powers, the Arizona State hockey coach, can tell you exactly how Josh Doan pulled together a group of hockey players that began in Division I with no conference affiliation and little visibility in an area that isn’t a hockey hotbed.
All it took was an interest in pro wrestling.
Doan bought a WWE-style championship belt, paired it with a crazy wig and embellished sunglasses, then gave it to Powers during his final season with the Sun Devils, in 2022-23.
“We need to give this out right now,” Doan told his coach.
Arizona State hockey’s “Ultimate Warrior” award goes to the player who does all the right things to contribute to a win. It isn’t just about scoring goals or making pretty passes. It’s sacrificing your body to block a shot or throwing a hit that keeps an opposing player from reaching for a pass and breaking up a play.
“Josh committed to us when we were an independent program, and he wanted to build a culture and build a tradition,” Powers said.
Powers can also tell you how Shane Doan made a first impression on him.
He remembers a presentation Shane Doan gave years ago at the Brophy School, an all-boys school in Phoenix. Wayne Gretzky was also one of the featured speakers, and hockey was still a relatively young sport in Arizona.
Powers remembers that Doan didn’t brag about his hockey accomplishments or his status as the Coyotes’ poster child. Doan spoke of values.
“You can’t always earn respect,” Powers recalled of Doan’s speech. “You certainly can never demand respect. But you can always give respect. That’s the one thing you can do, as it relates to respect. If you give people respect and treat people the right way, it comes back to you, in spades.”
Ultimately, it lent to the tenet that Josh Doan believes is the best piece of advice his father gave him. It wasn’t just applicable to hockey. It applied to moving through everyday life.
“His biggest thing, always, was to be a better person,” Josh said.
Josh Doan on his mother’s new role within Arizona hockey circles: “She made sure that I had the full hockey experience. She is the ultimate hockey mom, so it’s cool to see her doing this now.”
“Be a better person than a player. That applied to myself, my siblings and whatever they were doing.”
A few years later, Powers recruited Doan’s son, Josh, to the Sun Devils. He scored 28 goals with 47 assists in 74 games over two seasons with the Sun Devils.
Doan, though, learned about the business of hockey the hard way, after he turned pro following the 2022-23 season and joined the Arizona Coyotes, who selected him in the second round of the 2021 NHL Draft.
The Coyotes relocated to Utah after the 2023-24 season, a bittersweet moment for him. The team that essentially raised him was leaving the region that embraced his father and the Doan family.
Josh moved with them because playing hockey was his job. He helped the Mammoth establish a series of firsts: The first NHL game in Utah. A first class of Utahan children to play organized hockey. The Mammoth’s first NHL draft.
Youth hockey programs in Salt Lake City even reached out to Doan to ask: How did you and your family help cultivate hockey in Arizona, and how do we do it here?
That was a compliment – not just to Josh Doan, but to his family’s impact on the sport in Arizona.
Then, after his only season in Utah, the Mammoth shipped Doan to Buffalo, with Kesselring, for Peterka. Doan found out around 8 p.m. June 25, as he was unwinding from a day at his family’s summer home in British Columbia.
The first call he made was to his father, telling him about the trade. Then, he ate dinner with his mother and younger brother.
Shane Doan wasn’t upset his son was heading across the U.S. He thought of his working relationships with Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams, Eric Staal, the special assistant to Adams; and head coach Lindy Ruff. He considered the Sabres’ core players this season, including Tage Thompson and Jason Zucker, who have strong ties to Arizona and the Southwest.
“And I was excited for him,” he said of his son.
‘He loves being a teammate’
Shane Doan is a likely Hockey Hall of Famer who now works with the Toronto Maple Leafs as a special assistant to general manager Brad Treliving. Coincidentally, Leafs star forward Auston Matthews grew up in Arizona and idolized Doan, a skilled right wing with a defined mean streak.
“On the ice, he was a rough-and-tumble power forward, he’d hit, fight and do everything he could to help the team win,” former Jets and Coyotes center Keith Tkachuk told ESPN in 2019.
Shane Doan draws the comparison between Josh and his mother, Andrea, who is carrying her family’s legacy as chairperson of an effort to bring the NHL back to the Phoenix area.
“He’s smart, just like his mom,” Shane said. “He thinks before he talks, and he’s very deliberate in his approach. She’s pretty competitive, and that comes from both of us, but she is competitive and smart, and she understands people.”
Shane Doan doesn’t necessarily define the similarities to him in how his son plays the game, even though Josh wants to be more physical and play with more of a bite.
He sees it when his son interacts with teammates and becomes fully engaged in conversations.
“He loves being a teammate,” he said. “Josh is laughing at jokes. He’s helping people be better, offering advice. His ability to be in the moment and to be a teammate, and a cheerleader, and someone that gives them confidence.
“And I hope that’s what my teammates thought of me.”
There is one more significant similarity between father and son.
Josh Doan will wear No. 91 – nine-one – with the Sabres, and wore it with the Mammoth, Coyotes and at Arizona State.
It’s only appropriate that he wears the transposed numbers his father wore in his 21-season career with the Jets and Coyotes, and the number the Coyotes retired in 2019.
But is Josh Doan his father’s son?
“I think so,” he said. “Just the joy that we both have in hockey and in everyday life. There’s so much going on, around the world, and to be able to wake up and do this every day, you’d be a pretty sour person to be upset about anything going on here.”
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Rachel Lenzi
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