Shattered glass, NHL dreams: Clayton Kellers boyhood home a vivid reminder of the goal ahead -

SWANSEA, Ill. — The countless black puck marks on the walls tell different stories for different generations of Clayton Keller’s family.

For Keller’s maternal grandfather, Bill Simpson, they represented some of the last days he spent with his grandsons, Clayton and Jake, before he passed away from a brain tumor on the day of the 2015 Winter Classic between the Washington Capitals and Chicago Blackhawks at Nationals Park.

For Clayton’s dad, Bryan, they are reminders of some of his favorite times with his boys in the basement of the family’s home here in suburban St. Louis. Sometimes, Bryan sat on a chair with a glass of wine, cranked Pearl Jam or Red Hot Chili Peppers, and watched his boys whirl around the slick concrete floor on roller blades. Other times, he took part in the endless array of games that Clayton’s youthful mind invented, all of which were charted in chalk above the dasher boards that are still painted on the walls to create the appearance of a rink.

“He just could not lose,” Bryan Keller said Tuesday afternoon as Clayton returned home with the Coyotes to face the defending Stanley Cup champion Blues at Enterprise Center. “He would just go berserk if he lost. Whatever it was, you’d have to keep playing until he won — and he won most of the time anyway.”

For Clayton, the puck marks are proof of the endless hours he put in to reach the NHL despite always being “undersized.” And the messages still written around that rink remind him of the work ahead as he tries to shake off an early-season goal-scoring slump, justify the eight-year, $52.7 million contract extension he signed in September, and earn more than a place on a basement wall with other hockey icons.

“We’ve always had two nets down there and every house I’ve ever lived in has had an unfinished basement so I could shoot down there,” said Clayton, who was born four years and one day before Jake. “One year for our birthdays, my parents thought it would be cool to create a fake hockey rink so they painted the walls to look like boards and then my dad asked which five Fatheads I wanted on the walls.”

Keller chose his idol, Sidney Crosby, whose footsteps he followed at Shattuck-St. Mary’s. He chose Patrick Kane, whose size and game felt like good models to emulate, and he chose three talented Russians: Pavel Datsyuk, Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin.

Bryan also bought a pair of goalies to place behind the goals, but Clayton could barely remember who they were.

“I think my dad just randomly got two goalies because I didn’t really care who was in goal,” Clayton said, laughing. “We stuck them up behind the nets so it kind of looked like they were in the net. I would go down there every single day after school before practice and just pound them.”

The remnants of Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo and Calgary’s Miikka Kiprusoff could easily pass for LeRoy Neiman paintings if you didn’t know the real story behind their broken form.

Clayton never used soft or plastic pucks. It was always the real deal with a handful of weighted pucks thrown in for strength building.

“Every time I went to practice, my grandpa would always take me early — like an hour before anyone else — and I’d watch other practices,” he said. “Any time a puck would go out of play I’d run and grab it. I had like a thousand in my basement just from doing that.

“The basement looks a little bit different than it used to because I shattered the window behind one goal like 20 times. It got shattered so many times that my dad put a golf net up and taped the window. The first time I shattered the window, I was so scared my parents were going to be mad that I just ran upstairs, took my roller blades and roller-bladed around the neighborhood. I didn’t say anything. It ended up being no big deal and then I shattered a lot more.”

There is no hockey in Keller’s bloodlines like his longtime friend and current teammate Jakob Chychrun. Clayton’s mom, Kelley, knew little about the game. Bryan grew up in poverty in Texas, before the Stars arrived in Dallas, but the learn-to-skate programs hooked Clayton on the basics, and season tickets to Blues games hooked him on the game.

“Our seats were great, six rows behind the goalie, and he was so low that he couldn’t see or even hold the seat down so he sat in my lap,” Bryan said. “He would never let me leave if even a second were left in the game. The Blues could be getting beat 10-0 and we would stay until the end.”

Clayton didn’t spend much time in St. Louis last offseason. He trained most of the summer in Arizona to erase the taste and trend of a sophomore slump that dropped him from 65 points his rookie season to 47 last year.

While he only has three goals this season — including the first goal in a 4-3 shootout win against the Capitals on Monday — he has 11 points and a wealth of confidence from the guy who offered him that eye-opening eight-year extension.

“Clayton has been one of the top possession guys in the league early in the year,” Coyotes president of hockey operations John Chayka said. “He has created a ton of chances. For whatever reason, they don’t go in, but we’re pretty confident that if he keeps playing the way he is and keeps his confidence up, there will be a regression here and he’ll continue to trend the right way.

“He’s still very young so there will be some lessons along the way, but with his dedication, his passion and his willingness to learn and adapt, he’ll just continue to get better.”

There will also come a day when Clayton, Jake, Bryan and Kelley are ready to say goodbye to the Swansea house that holds so many memories. Bryan and Kelley own a home in Scottsdale (Troon) with its own synthetic rink. Bryan, a CPA who is also a partner in a consulting firm, has also grown tired of the cold.

It’s just that nobody knows how to say goodbye to a past that Bryan always reminds his boys is a critical and permanent piece of who they are.

“I haven’t really touched it because any time he comes home I’ll hear him shooting pucks by himself or when his brother is home, I hear them talking and shooting together so it’s kind of like their sanctuary,” Bryan said. “I have every glove, every skate, every jersey Clayton has ever worn. It’s like a museum. I have thrown away truckloads of sticks but there’s still so much more down here and I really don’t know what to do with it.

“I would probably already be out of this house but it’s so special to them and it has so many memories for us. I don’t even know how I’ll do it. Whenever my boys say they’re done with it will probably be the time, but for sure, it would be very hard to leave.”

(Top photo of Keller and teammates celebrating Keller’s goal in Washington on Monday night, Nov. 11: Geoff Burke / USA Today Sports)

(Embedded photos: Craig Morgan / The Athletic)

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