Former OHL coach Paul Thériault had CTE, family says

When Janice Thériault met her future husband Paul at Lake Superior State University in 1969, he was a charming hockey player with a scholarship and a wink that caught her eye in the cafeteria.

Decades later, after a long coaching career that touched the lives of hundreds of players, including a 16-year-old Wayne Gretzky, Paul died in January 2024 in a Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario care home, unable to speak, trapped inside a mind ravaged by the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He was 74.

Janice, who now lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, spoke with TSN at length for the first time about her husband’s illness and his posthumous diagnosis of CTE, which is caused by repeated head trauma.

She said Paul, even as his condition worsened, understood what was happening to him - and insisted his brain be donated for research after his death.

“Paul was a gentle man and a gentleman,” she said. “He didn’t deserve to go out this way. Nobody does. He said, ‘I can’t speak to this, but I can donate my brain.’ He wanted his suffering to mean something.”

Paul’s brain was sent to researchers at Boston University. In February 2025, more than a year after his death, Janice, their son JP, and Paul’s brother Jack received confirmation: Stage 4 CTE had destroyed Paul’s brain. At the time of his death, Paul’s brain weighed less than a kilogram—about what you’d expect for a one-year-old child.

Since the early 2010s, a disturbing wave of posthumous diagnoses has revealed just how deeply hockey has been affected by CTE. According to Boston University, 19 of 20 former NHL players whose brains have been examined have tested positive for CTE. Among them are hockey legends Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and Henri Richard.

Yet despite the mounting scientific evidence - the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed CTE is caused by repeated trauma to the brain, including concussions and sub-concussive events – Commissioner Gary Bettman and NHL leadership continue to dismiss any causal link between playing hockey and CTE.

That position has drawn sharp criticism, with some comparing the stance to years of tobacco companies denying that cigarettes cause cancer.

“I want the NHL to acknowledge the link between hockey and CTE,” she said. “These team owners need to take responsibility.”

Paul Thériault’s life in hockey spanned continents and generations. After his playing career at Lake Superior State ended due to a catastrophic head injury - he was knocked unconscious and hospitalized for over a week in the first game of his senior year - he turned to coaching.

Thériault started behind the bench with Ontario Hockey League teams in Sault Ste. Marie and Oshawa, then moved on to the American Hockey League’s Flint Spirits and eventually coached in Germany, Italy and Japan, winning an Asian championship. He also served as an assistant coach with the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres under Ted Nolan.

Paul coached Gretzky during his early OHL days. According to Janice, her husband didn’t give the young prodigy the ice time he expected, a decision that didn’t sit well with the Gretzkys.

“Paul believed in team-first,” she said. “He wasn’t about stars. He was about teaching the game, and life.”

That philosophy resonated with players like Scott McCrory, a former Oshawa General who played for Thériault and who would later recognize the signs of Paul’s decline and help him seek medical attention. 

“Paul was a guy who would give you the shirt off his back and he was years ahead of other coaches,” McCrory said.

When he coached the Generals, Thériault created the model of a rink in the middle of the team’s dressing room, McCrory remembered.

“Some guys aren’t audible learners,” he said. “For those guys who just didn’t grasp it when Paul told them what we were going to do on the ice, Paul was able to use this model and actually show them.”

Thériault also impressed on players the importance of an education.

“I had a teammate who regularly didn’t show up for school,” McCrory said. “Paul would go to this guy’s billet home and pick him up and drive him to school. He always told us to remember there was life after hockey.”

Paul Thériault and his son JP in 2017

The first signs of something being terribly wrong came in Thériault's early fifties. He started forgetting things. Janice said when Paul went for walks, she began putting business cards in his pockets with his home address.

By 2015, Thériault could no longer carry on conversations. Aphasia, a neurological disorder that can make it difficult or impossible to express or comprehend language, had set in.

“Eventually he didn’t talk at all,” Janice said. “He just hummed. I think it was how he comforted himself.”

Still physically strong, Thériault was trapped in his body as his mind deteriorated. He would look out the window of their beachside home and call to his own reflection, believing it was his brother.

“Pete, come on in,” he would say, waving through the glass.

In 2017, Janice admitted Paul to a long-term care facility in Sault Ste. Marie. “It was the worst day of my life when he didn’t come home anymore,” she said.

Janice said she wants the public to understand why her husband acted the way that he did as his neurological problems worsened.

“He was at ease no matter the situation and treated everyone the same,” she said. “This was a man who deserves to be remembered.”