In his new book We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture, TSN Senior Correspondent and award-winning author Rick Westhead does a deep-dive into the state of hockey in Canada today, giving a voice to those who have been sexually assaulted by hockey players, revealing the struggles they’ve had with local police officials in their efforts to seek justice.
He also goes inside the dressing room to find out how attitudes of misogyny and homophobia continue to flourish, and speaks to former players who were forced to perform degrading acts of initiation in order to “be one of the guys.”
Looming large in Westhead’s reporting are the gatekeepers of the game - league officials, team owners and members of the sport’s governing bodies - who are reluctant to impose change from the outside and willing to sacrifice the well-being of their players and the community for profit.
Westhead also offers hope for hockey’s future, profiling those individuals and organizations who are committed to educating players around issues of consent, putting an end to hazing and redefining what it means to be a man on and off the ice. Featuring a Foreword by bestselling author Stephen Brunt, We Breed Lions is must-reading for parents, players and all of those who love the game and want to see it get to a better place.
Here’s a preview of We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture - available Tuesday, November 4 wherever books are sold.
---
From WE BREED LIONS: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture by Rick Westhead, published by Random House Canada. Copyright © Rick Westhead, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
On the ice, it was a blur of motion as teenaged hockey players collided in a corner of the rink, limbs entangled, groans rising as one voice over the Plexiglas. The puck popped out from the tangle of players, and Alex Hage, a centre with the Vaughan Kings, controlled it and skated down the ice. He darted toward the opposing goalie, bobbing and weaving like he was being chased by a swarm of angry wasps.
It was 8 a.m. on a Monday in late March 2024, and the Scotiabank Pond Arena in North Toronto was packed with teenagers, parents and serious-looking middle-aged men wearing parkas with the crests of Hockey Canada and various Ontario Hockey League teams.
Midway through the regular season, the U16 Oakville Rangers— that is, a team of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—was facing off in a tournament game against the GTHL’s Vaughan Kings, who were widely regarded as the best team in their age cohort in the world.
This was a big season for the players on the ice. At the end of their “age fifteen season,” players in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, are eligible to be drafted by a team in either the OHL or what is now called the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, depending on where they live. (Players from provinces and territories west of Ontario can be drafted by Western Hockey League teams after their age fourteen seasons.)
These days, while a growing number of top young players are opting to play US college hockey, where there are fewer games, less travel, no fighting and the promise of a better education for those who want one, playing in the major-junior OHL, QMJHL and WHL is still widely considered to be the best way for a hockey prospect to make it to the NHL.
The Rangers jumped to an early 3–1 lead, and the parents of some of Kings players grew anxious. “Let’s go!” hollered one mom, wrapped in a blanket. This was meant to be encouragement, but anyone could hear the irritation in her voice over the fact that Kings players had missed converting on a few scoring chances. Vaughan supporters sat on one side and Rangers families were on the other. A number of dads took solitary positions standing around the rink boards, hands in pockets, nervously shuffling from side to side.
High above the players and above the first section of seats, Brad Rossen stood alone on a walkway at the centre-ice line. Tall, lean and wearing a green puffer jacket, the thirty-two-year-old was one of about a handful of hockey agents who were there for some face time with both the young players they represent and their parents.
Rossen worked with CAA Hockey, an agency whose NHL player clients include Pittsburgh Penguins veteran forward Evgeni Malkin and Boston Bruins star David Pastrňák. Rossen was there to watch and connect with Alex Hage. He had represented the fifteen-year-old for the past year. He also advised Alex’s brother Michael, who was seventeen and playing junior hockey in Chicago.
Rossen was a relative newcomer in the player agent industry. A native of Peterborough, Ontario, he first had the dream of becoming a sports industry executive as a teenager after reading Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball, which detailed how Billy Beane, the general manager of Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics, challenged traditional scouting methods and saw value in digging deep into statistics in order to field a competitive team.
After completing his master’s degree in business administration, Rossen worked for five years with the Arizona Coyotes in the NHL team’s analytics department. Following a change in ownership in Arizona, Rossen left the team and joined CAA. Although the player agent business in hockey is high-stakes, there is no money to be made representing fifteen-year-old players. Agents are placing a bet that their young clients might be one of the very few minor-league players to make it to the NHL. For those players who do make it, agents typically charge clients between 2 and 4 percent of the value of the pro contracts they negotiate.
Most agents begin, as Rossen was now doing, by paying their dues and working as “bird dogs,” as they are known in the industry. Bird-dog scouts are typically paid very little and might receive a bonus if they recommend a player who eventually signs a pro contract and makes it to the NHL.
While his more experienced agency colleagues attended to the needs of NHL stars they represented, Rossen concentrated on cementing ties with amateur players and minor-league professionals, doing what he could to ensure that if and when a player like Hage became a pro, he would remain as a CAA client.
A fourteen-year-old player wearing a black Toronto Junior Canadiens bomber jacket walked by and stopped for a brief chat.
“We didn’t play great,” the player said, shaking his head.
“Get some revenge when you get back on the ice,” Rossen said with a smile.
Rossen was at ease talking with the young teenage players, and the fact is, he and others in the industry now recruit the families of players who are as young as eleven or twelve. Recruiting players so young is controversial; some in the agent business, Rossen included, acknowledge that preteens having agents is a negative development.
The young players being recruited by agents are not brick-bodied players with muscles upon muscles. They are young boys who have not yet hit puberty. What can you honestly say to the parent of a sixth-grader about their child’s prospective professional hockey career?
When I asked Rossen how he felt about building relationships with players who are so young, he bit his lip.
“My go-to line when I meet parents is usually, ‘I think your son is a really good player but I’m sorry to be meeting you already,’” Rossen told me. “I feel like it relaxes them and I say it as a bit of a joke. But I know it’s a travesty. Do twelve-year-olds need agents already? Of course not. But there are no rules about this, at least in Canada, and so [every agency] does it. And you can’t be the only one not talking to families.”
Some hockey organizations in Finland and Sweden are beginning to try to insulate young players from the pressures that come with minor hockey being professionalized. But at least for now in North America, the rules for player agents are simple: There are no rules.
As Rossen demonstrated by being at a cold rink early on a Monday morning, it’s important to build trust and rapport with the most talented kids and their parents before anyone else does. Several minor hockey coaches of twelve-year-old Triple-A players have told me their dressing rooms have been divided between players who have agents and those who don’t. “It’s the haves and the have-nots,” one GTHL coach told me. “You can see that some of the players who have agents . . . have been told how good they are going to be [and] really want to believe it. It’s one of the worst things about elite minor hockey. We just aren’t letting kids be kids.”
It’s not uncommon for preteen minor league players to step onto the ice fifteen times a week—some five hundred times per year—some days practising and playing, or playing multiple tournament games. “By the time they are ten or eleven, they have picked up all the hockey tics, how to talk and walk like a hockey player,” the GTHL coach told me. “They all wear the team tracksuits all the time, use smelling salts the same as the pros. They all practise rolling their tongue the right way so they can spit like the NHL players do on TV.”
For his part, Rossen sees himself as playing the long game. “I tell these players that if they are really going to go on to play in the NHL, that means we’re going to have a fifteen- or twenty-year relationship. I tell them we should talk every few weeks. If you don’t build trust, the kid isn’t going to talk to you about how he’s doing, how maybe he broke up with his girlfriend and he’s struggling. I need him to trust me so I can help him.”
Rossen told me that he had plans over the coming weeks to watch the GTHL’s top twelve-year-olds compete in their playoffs at rinks in and around the city. He had his eye on only a few of those players and said he and his colleagues are choosy when it comes to representing clients who are so young.
“There are some families you just know it won’t work out with, and we call them ‘not CAA families,’” he said. “I was texting with the dad of a thirteen-year-old who’s trying to get his kid exceptional status to play in the OHL next year.”
While most OHL first-year players are sixteen, the league has only ever granted “exceptional status” to eight players, allowing them to play major-junior hockey a year earlier, at the age of fifteen.
Rossen said he had sent a few messages to the thirteen-year-old player’s father, who seemed to have high expectations of an agent, and didn’t receive a response. Then he heard from another parent that the player’s father had been showing other hockey parents all the text messages from agents that he had not responded to. “That’s not a CAA family,” Rossen said.
Rossen watched the Vaughan Kings finish their game before walking through the arena to another ice pad at the facility, where fifteen-year-old players with another top GTHL organization, the Toronto Junior Canadiens, were about to play against an Ottawa-area club. He ran into a hockey dad, a former professional player who also coaches in the GTHL, and the two quietly discussed some of the bizarre things they had seen during the season: one coach who during a timeout was upset with his players and emptied all the team’s water bottles on their heads; the father of a coach ejected from an arena for screaming obscenities at on-ice officials; a coach who was suspended for a season for threatening to get a gun from his car when he got into an altercation with another coach in the parking lot. “That coach is back next year!” the hockey dad said with a laugh and a shake of his head.
On an April Saturday afternoon a few weeks later, Rossen was watching the GTHL’s U13 Toronto Junior Canadiens play the Toronto Marlboros in their playoff championship game in the north end of the city, at Herbert H. Carnegie Centennial Centre. Fathers sat in lawn chairs in the parking lot, drinking beers and talking about the upcoming NHL playoffs and about their own team’s prospects.
Family members walked into the arena and took their seats, Marlboros supporters on one side and “JRC” supporters on the other. Even before the game began, the Junior Canadiens supporters started chanting, “1-2-3, JRC.”
“This is nothing,” Rossen told me in response to the fans’ exuberance. He mentioned that the parents of one GTHL team were known to hang their sons’ jerseys from the rink glass during warmups before moving them to the railings near where they sat during the game.
“Parents are crazy,” he said. “In regular-season games, the GTHL only has two referees working now. They used to have three but they are bleeding officials. Parents swearing at them, throwing things at them. No one wants the job anymore.”
Rossen was there to watch Kade O’Rourke, a twelve-year-old from Dallas, Texas, who played with the Junior Canadiens in Toronto. Rossen told me he’d met O’Rourke’s father a few weeks earlier and was in the early stages of building a relationship with the family. As the game moved on, Rossen’s attention was fixed on O’Rourke.
After each of the player’s shifts, Rossen took notes on his phone. One read, “Should have unloaded.” Rossen said he’d share his comments with O’Rourke’s dad later, after the game.
I asked Rossen again about the wisdom of boys so young having agents, and noted that some former NHL team officials had told me it was an example of how minor hockey had become professionalized. Former Calgary Flames general manager Craig Button, who had moved over to television as a hockey analyst for TSN, told me that being chased by agents at such an early age is why some young players have come to believe that advancing to major-junior and professional hockey is their right, not a privilege.
“It’s a problem because it really sets these kids up with unreal expectations,” Button told me. “The agents want to get hired, so they tell the kids all the upsides, all the things they’re doing great, and what a good chance they have to make it to the National Hockey League. The reality is that for all the kids born on earth in one year, [only] forty of them are going to go on and play at least four hundred games in the NHL.”
I shared Button’s viewpoint with Rossen and he nodded his head in agreement. “The pressure on boys this young isn’t fair,” he said. “I’ve seen full-blown breakdowns. I’ve watched coaches screaming at kids on the bench, kids crying. We’ve all seen players who are called phenoms who still miss [turning professional]. It can be ugly.”
