Toews has taken long road to success with Avalanche, Canada

NEW YORK -- Ask a question about Devon Toews in the Colorado Avalanche dressing room and his teammates respond with an unprompted comparison.

"He's kind of like our Nicklas Lidstrom out there," Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon said. "His style, his stick and his IQ is through the roof."

Lidstrom won the Norris Trophy seven times in his Hall of Fame career with the Detroit Red Wings. He's a four-time Stanley Cup champion and an Olympic gold medalist.

Toews has the Stanley Cup championship and next year, he may get the chance at an Olympic gold, but he may never sniff the Norris Trophy, which goes to the NHL's best defensemen each season considering his partner is Cale Makar, who could win it for a second time this season.

"If you threw him in any other era, he's basically in my opinion Nicklas Lidstrom," Makar told NHL.com.

Lidstrom was the best defenseman in his era. Makar is on his way to being the same in his.

Toews is the longshot who made it big, a New York Islanders' fourth-round pick in the 2014 NHL Draft who didn't play full time in the NHL until 2019, the very definition of late bloomer. But his value to Makar, the Avalanche and now to Hockey Canada can't be overstated.

Toews and Makar have formed arguably the best defense pair in the NHL for four years. They will be that against Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers on Friday (9 p.m. ET; TVAS, SNW, ALT, KUSA), and they should be given a chance to do the same for Canada at the 4 Nations Face-Off, starting against Sweden at Bell Centre on Wednesday (8 p.m. ET; MAX, truTV, TNT, SN, TVAS).

Toews has 24 points in 51 games this season. He's plus-15. He plays 20:01 per game in all situations always against the opposition's best. Makar used words like "effortless," and "fluid" and "never overstraining himself" to describe Toews' game.

Lidstrom was the same way.

"When you watch both of their games, the one thing is their sticks are really, really good," Makar said. "Positionally, 'Tazer' is always top notch. If you watch him, the way he moves his stick and the way he's able to poke pucks, especially when guys try to chip it around him, he always knocks those down. That was almost a trademark of Lidstrom. Guys would talk about how hard it was to chip the puck around him. In that aspect of the game, I think he's very Lidstrom-esque. It makes my life a lot easier that I don't have to go back in the corner to get pucks."

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The 4 Nations Face-Off represents Toews' second chance to wear the Canada sweater in an international tournament. The other was at the 2012 World Junior A Challenge. That should tell you all you need to know about how far Toews has come to earn the comparison to Lidstrom.

He's 30 years old. Half his lifetime ago, he was barely on a watchlist for junior players in Western Canada, let alone the entire country.

"I think my bantam draft year I was 5-2, 102 pounds and it was my first year playing defense actually," Toews said. "I was a point per game guy on my bantam team, but everyone looked at me and my size and was like, 'No way you're going to be able to play defense.'"

Toews watched friends get selected in the Western Hockey League draft. He never did.

Instead, he played two seasons of Junior A hockey with the Surrey Eagles in the British Columbia Hockey League from 2011-13. In his second season, 2012-13, he was almost a point-per-game player with 47 points (10 goals, 37 assists) in 48 games.

That got him a full scholarship to Quinnipiac University.

"I was extremely ecstatic about that," Toews said. "I went to college to get my degree, that's what I wanted to do, and if I had the opportunity to play pro or keep moving on, then that was great. Obviously, everyone wants to do it, but I had the outlook that I was getting my degree more than anything else."

Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold said Toews had grown to 6-feet tall when he got to Quinnipiac as a 19-year-old. He was 152 pounds.

"Just physically he was way behind," Pecknold told NHL.com.

He didn't know how to play defense either. He didn't have a good stick.

"No coach had ever really taught it to him or held him accountable for it," Pecknold said. "We teach a lot of the details of the game here at Quinnipiac. We have to. We don't have the first or second round picks like Minnesota and Michigan, BC and BU. But we pride ourselves with having really good sticks defensively. He bought into that. It didn't take long. He's a quick learner."

The game had already started to change when Toews got to Quinnipiac. The speed intensified. Defenseman didn't need to be big and physical to make it to the NHL. They needed hockey sense, a good stick and quick feet.

By the time Toews was a junior, he had the full package.

"His hockey IQ was crazy elite from the get go, and just naturally he matured with us," Pecknold said. "By his junior year, we only lost four games and he was playing 26 or 27 minutes a game. He was so good."

Pecknold was convinced then that Toews would be a good NHL player. He was surprised, in fact, that the Islanders slow-played his development, keeping him in Bridgeport for two-plus seasons, including 2017-18, when he played 30 games before sustaining a season-ending shoulder injury.

"We live right down the street from Bridgeport," Pecknold said. "I would go watch a lot of games and he was light years better than anyone else on the other team. It was perplexing. Now I'm thinking maybe that's just my bias, but he was clearly like 12 steps ahead of everyone else on the ice, and those are good American League players."

Toews didn't get his first NHL chance until midway through the 2018-19 season. He diplomatically credits Islanders general manager Lou Lamoriello and former coach Barry Trotz for believing in him.

"I felt I was ready before that and they said, 'No, grow your game, work on your game, keep going,'" Toews said. "So by the time they called me up, I felt like I was ready to go. I felt awesome about my game. I wish it was earlier. A lot of people do. You want it as soon as you can get it, but for them to make me wait I think was kind of a blessing in disguise of me becoming a true pro and understanding all the little nuances in this game and in this league."

He had 46 points in 116 regular season games and 15 in 30 games in the Stanley Cup Playoffs with the Islanders. They didn't believe in him enough to sign him as a restricted free agent, so Toews was traded to the Avalanche for two second-round draft picks on Oct. 12, 2020.

His game took off. He meshed with Makar, becoming a 50-point, 25-minute per game defenseman. He won the Stanley Cup. He signed a seven-year, $50.75 million contract. He earned a spot on Canada's roster for the 4 Nations Face-Off. Next could be the Olympics.

"Everyone uses the phrase, 'Prove people wrong,'" Toews said. "I don't feel like I have to prove people wrong; I'm just proving myself right the whole way through."