Gabriel can’t recall how many times he had gone to triple-A tryouts. But he instantly recalls the number of times he had a sniff of interest from a team, a look past the first skate. “None,” he says. The biggest hole in his game was skating. He struggled to keep up and was pushed off the puck too easily. “There were times when I was out there and I couldn’t wait to get off,” Gabriel says. “I knew I wasn’t making it. I was a double-A player. There were 15 guys better than me every time I stepped on the ice.” But he didn’t know and the coaches who cut him couldn’t see what his best asset was.“The first thing I think of is his focus,” says Joe Pacione, Gabriel’s coach in double-A. “I had to push other kids but not him. Nobody was harder on himself than Kurtis. I went to him before tryouts one year and said that I thought he could play on our blueline. He looked me straight in the eye, dead serious, and said, ‘If I can’t make it as a forward, I don’t deserve to be on this team.’”
