Karpan’s first big step came in Brandon

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This article was published 04/09/2019 (2404 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In many ways, a lifetime in the game of hockey took flight in Brandon four decades ago for Vaughn Karpan.

Now 58 and the director of player personnel for the National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights, Karpan said the Wheat City remains full of memories for him.

“This is where I came to when I left home,” Karpan said, glancing around Westoba Place last week as he took in Brandon Wheat Kings training camp as interested observer. “I think there used to be a big Reesor’s Jewellery clock right there, and I remember the first practices were so hard and that clock just seemed to stand still.”

He graduated from Neelin, spent a year at Brandon University and his sister Stephanie married Russ Paddock, the current athletic director at Brandon University, so he even has family here.

“My connections to the community were more than just the hockey side of it,” Karpan said. “Neelin at that time didn’t have a semester system, so when you started school in the fall, you finished it there. You weren’t going to go home. It exposed me to a whole different group of people. It’s so easy to come back. There are so many good things that happened to me and this was my first step.”

He began playing hockey at age seven in The Pas, and played there until he moved to Brandon. His first training camp in Brandon came at age 15, and he remembers being overwhelmed by the Keystone Centre, which was then just a few years old.

“It seemed to be twice this size at the time,” Karpan said. “It was full and the hockey was so good. It would like a dream to actually play there one day. It was that impressive.”

He moved to Brandon for the 1978-79 season, joining the Brandon Travellers of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League as a 17-year-old. At the time, they served as a farm team for the Wheat Kings, who Karpan would join a season later.

It was his Grade 12 year. He attended Neelin and lived close by with billets Walter and Jean Pickett.

“They treated me like a king,” Karpan said. “They were so good to me for two years. The sacrifices that those families make … They didn’t make any money and it had to cost them money to keep us fed.”

It was a different era then. It was long before the internet, and long distance calls were expensive. With three other kids at home, Karpan’s father saw him play twice as a Wheat King and once as a Traveller.

The Travellers weren’t one of the tough teams that preceded that year’s squad. With Garry Davidson at the helm — he is now the general manager of the Everett Silvertips — that year’s Brandon team was very young.

“The really crazy days of the Travellers were a year before me,” Karpan said. “We were really, really young so we didn’t win a lot.”

They finished 17-30-1, fourth in the four-team North Division.

The late 1970s was still a rugged era of hockey, and Karpan remembers a fight breaking out one night in Dauphin against the Kings. When the Brandon team started to win, the mood on the ice turned ugly and Karpan suddenly found himself confronted by a Dauphin player who was the toughest guy in the league.

“I ended up finishing third in a two-man fight,” Karpan joked.

There were advantages to playing in Brandon at that time, however. It gave him a birds-eye view of the most legendary squad in Wheat Kings history.

Karpan went through the 1978-79 training camp and played some exhibition games with the Wheat Kings. He received a call at Neelin one morning that he had to play that night, so he hurried over for the morning skate.

“I got to the rink late, and Brad (McCrimmon) was the captain of the team. He was ‘Come on, let’s get going, You have to get going. We have to get on the ice,’” Karpan said. “When I got out there, there was no coach. Dunc (McCallum) wasn’t on the ice. Brad ran the practice with a whistle around his neck. The leadership and the maturity of that team … I still tell that story.”

He added he’s never seen a player who loved to score as much as Brian Propp, saying he seemed to convert on every opportunity in practice. Karpan said McCrimmon and Propp remain his two most vivid memories of that team.

“Brad because of his leadership and Propp because of his determination to score,” Karpan said. “They were the most impactful guys for me.”

In 1979-80, Karpan played with current Wheat Kings owner Kelly McCrimmon, both of whom now work for the Golden Knights. The younger McCrimmon also left an indelible impression.

“Brad was a natural leader, but Kelly was a natural leader in a different way,” Karpan said. “He was in charge. He had a maturity about him, even at that age. He just operated at a different level than most of us emotionally, and it was natural and inherent to who he was.”

The two remained friends over the years. If Karpan was in Brandon scouting, he would stay overnight in the city to have a chance to talk hockey with Kelly.

“I always had an enormous amount of respect for him, and it wasn’t because he was Brad McCrimmon’s brother,” Karpan said. “It was because of who he was, and I think that’s important to distinguish. He’s his own guy obviously. It’s remarkable one family had two such strong personalities.”

Karpan scored five goals, added two assists and took four penalty minutes during his Western Hockey League career. He felt there were a couple of reasons why he would play just 26 games over two seasons in the circuit.

“One, my timing wasn’t very good,” Karpan said. “The Wheat Kings had the best team ever in the history of the Canadian Hockey League, not just the Western Hockey League. Two, I just wasn’t quite good enough. I wasn’t quite confident enough at that time. I was a kid from northern Manitoba, and I would say I was just naive and immature. I wasn’t quite ready.”

When Karpan arrived in Brandon, he was a 145-pound centreman who was more of a finesse guy. He grew a bit as he left his teenage years and gained confidence with added strength.

“My game evolved as I got older,” Karpan said. “I was always a reasonably smart player, and I guess I was smart enough to figure out that I wasn’t good enough offensively to be that guy. I sort of changed how I played in terms of trying to listen to what the coach needed me to be and I became a checker as my career progressed.”

At 19, Karpan joined the Brandon University Bobcats for the 1980-81 season, a club that would go 23-1. He was named rookie of the year as the Bobcats won the Great Plains Athletic Conference but came up short at nationals.

After playing a season of junior in his 20-year-old season in B.C., he headed to the University of Manitoba Bisons for two years.

His timing may not have been great in Brandon, but that quickly changed. In the days before NHL players represented the country at international events, Canada had a standing national team.

Karpan joined the program in 1983-84, returned to school for 1984-85 and then went back to the national team for three seasons from 1985 to 1988. He played in Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984 and in Calgary in 1988.

In 228 games with the national team, usually as a defensive specialist, Karpan scored 44 goals and added 48 assists. He retired after the Calgary Games.

“That was the most anyone had ever done,” Karpan said of the 228 games. “I had played Soviet teams 75 times and there were no Soviet players in the NHL. I played the big team 12 times, and when I played against them, I had to play against one of those top two lines. That was my job. When you think back on it, at 19 or 20 I’m not really going anywhere in the game, and by the time I’m 23, I’m in an Olympic Games, and four years later I’m in another one. For me, I came along at the right time and I would say I got connected with the right people.”

He said that started in Brandon, extended to Wayne Fleming at the U of M and then to Dave King with the national team.

“The one common bond was that they were all Prairie people, and they put some value on the things that I could do well,” Karpan said. “I was fortunate enough that they put some trust in me.”

Following his retirement as a player, Karpan spent five years away from the game with a dairy company and later a furniture chain, working in operations and distribution in both,

Karpan began his scouting career with the original Winnipeg Jets. The team’s head scout, Bill Lesuk, asked him in 1992 for some part-time help, which became a full-time job a year later. He’s been at it ever since, working with the Phoenix Coyotes after the Jets moved, and later with the Montreal Canadiens.

He was hired by Las Vegas in August 2016.

Karpan lives in Langley, B.C., with wife Marjorie and two dogs. He has two sons, Nick and William.

He settled there because it was central to several WHL clubs when he was scouting amateur hockey. On the pro side, Abbotsford had an American Hockey League team at one time, so he could scout AHL and NHL games near his home.

Another advantage is that despite living on the West Coast, Vancouver’s international airport allows him to take direct flights wherever he needs to go. He’s in Vegas less than a month per year because his job is to know what’s going on in the AHL and NHL.

During his scouting career, the game has evolved tremendously to more of a speed and skill-based game. He’s constantly had to adjust the way he looks at the game, something he said is helped by Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, president of hockey operations George McPhee and McCrimmon, who officially became general manager on Sunday.

“You have to be a progressive thinker,” Karpan said. “What worked and what worked yesterday isn’t going to work tomorrow. You always have to challenge yourself to be better. That’s one of the unique things about this group of people we have in Vegas, beginning with Mr. Foley and George and Kelly, is that we don’t talk about the good old days. We don’t have a lot of good old days. We’re always looking to get better and incorporating new ideas.”

He said Vegas has enthusiastically embraced the metrics movement, which is advanced statistical study of the game and its players. That also suits Karpan’s willingness to evolve.

“We continue to reinvent ourselves,” Karpan said. “You have to do that. The world isn’t static, never mind hockey, so if you’re not willing to adapt and adjust, you’re going to get left behind.”

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