Residents get a chance to see hockey star Pietrangelo

July 15, 2014 · 0 Comments

By Jeff Doner
Seeing an Olympic gold medal in person is a rare treat and King residents will get the chance when NHL star Alex Pietrangelo comes home for a congratulatory reception on July 24.
“I was lucky enough during the Olympics to share it with my family and they were able to come over to Russia, but to be able to bring it home and represent King City on that stage and to share it with the community still makes it even better,” he said.
It has been a huge year for the 24-year-old King City native who also put together a solid season with eight goals and 51 points while logging huge minutes on the blue line for the St. Louis Blues.
It was his first Olympics, but Pietrangelo was essential in Canada’s win as one of the team’s top defencemen and said it was the experience of a lifetime.
“That team for two and a half weeks really becomes your family and I was pretty impressed with the way our team was able to adapt to each other and come together,” he said. “It’s never easy when you have that many players in those circumstances coming together as a team, but everybody did a fantastic job.”
Pietrangelo now finds himself in a favourable situation playing with the St. Louis Blues and said he absolutely loves the city he now calls home.
As one of the top ranked teams in the NHL, the Blues are heading into the season with even higher expectations of taking the next step ahead to earning playoff success.
“It’s a fantastic hockey team and what we’ve built over here in the last couple years is really coming together,” he said. “We fell short a little bit this year with what we felt our goal was, but some of the changes that we’ve made here in the off-season, I think everybody is pretty excited to see where we’re going to be next year and a lot of us are excited to get things going here.”
Pietrangelo is now heading into his fifth NHL season and said he and his teammates are ready to take things to the next level.
“I think we’re pretty confident where we stand,” he said. “There’s always going to be pressure when you perform the way we do for a couple years in a row now. The thing is for us is just continuing that momentum going into the playoffs where we’ve fallen just short.
“We feel pretty confident in what they’ve been able to do and for the most part the core group is still together, we have something to accomplish here and ultimately the goal is to win a Stanley Cup.”
That goal of winning the Cup stems all the way back to his days of learning how to play hockey in the old King City arena when he played for the NobleKing Knights. Now he gets to come home and celebrate with the people he grew up with.
“That’s where my love for hockey really first started to take off,” he reminisced. “My dad was my coach and I grew up playing with a lot of my friends. We still talk about playing with the NobleKing Knights and how we used to play in that small rink in King City.
“The memories I have of going out for a skate, playing in my first game, those were all in that King City arena and even now when I go in it brings back all those memories. It was all part of growing up in that community and I’m so thankful that I was able to play there.”
For more information on the event, visit www.king.ca.