Culture
From UberEats driver to NHL goalie: Inside the unlikeliest start in hockey history
Three years ago, Brandon Halverson had all but given up on his hockey dream.
He was delivering UberEats and groceries and working on a farm. He sold his truck. He borrowed money from his parents. Whatever it took to scrape out enough money for rent.
Two weeks ago, he stepped into the net with the Tampa Bay Lightning for the first time as an NHL starter — nearly 11 years after being drafted as a highly touted prospect, and more than seven years after his only other appearance in the league.
From toiling away with a last-place team in Germany’s second division, a tiny club on the verge of relegation that played on an outdoor rink in below-freezing temperatures, to begging a coach in North America’s third-rung ECHL for a training camp tryout, a final Hail-Mary shot at his dream.
Through numerous injuries, several of which required surgery, and wondering multiple times whether he had reached the end of his career. Through tough talks, and tears, and mental health struggles.
His path to that start for the Lightning might be one of the most improbable in hockey history.
“It’s been a very long road,” said Halverson, who turned 29 last weekend. “I’m just happy that after all of everything that I’ve gone through that I was able to start a game (in the NHL). That was the goal in my mind this entire time, was to get that actual start.”
Halverson was 9 when he knew he wanted to be a goalie. He grew up in a working-class family in Traverse City, Mich., where his father, Paul, — a former boxer — put in hard early morning hours as a construction worker.
When the city landed an NAHL junior team in 2005, the Halversons decided to billet players. The first to stay with them was Jeremy Kaleniecki, a 19-year-old goalie who quickly became Halverson’s idol and surrogate big brother. They played countless games of mini sticks with balls of tape in the living room when they weren’t on the ice. Kaleniecki nicknamed Halverson “Fuzz Ball” after his mess of blonde hair.
While Kaleniecki’s playing career ended after that season, leading him to become a local goalie coach, Halverson’s took off. He rapidly grew into a gangly 6-foot-4 teenager and used the athletic aggressive moves he had picked up from his much smaller billet brother to attract the attention of professional scouts.
In June 2014 Halverson was drafted by the New York Rangers with the penultimate pick of the second round — higher than current starting NHL goalies Igor Shesterkin, Ilya Sorokin and Elvis Merzlikins — despite having only 19 games of experience at the major-junior level.
Halverson’s stock continued to rise over the next two seasons; in 2014-15, he won 40 games to help the Sault St. Marie Greyhounds to the OHL’s best regular-season record before they lost in the playoffs to Connor McDavid’s powerhouse Erie Otters. He also made the United States’ world junior team in consecutive years, winning a bronze medal in early 2016 alongside the next generation of American stars in Auston Matthews, Matthew Tkachuk and Zach Werenski.
Later that year, at age 19, Halverson signed an NHL entry-level contract to join the Rangers, an Original Six franchise, with a $92,500 signing bonus. He had made it. But he wasn’t prepared for what came next.
“It was so much so soon for him,” Kaleniecki says now.
The transition to minor-league hockey is often brutal, between the punishing bus rides, packed game schedule and low pay. It’s a meat grinder of a system that leaves many young players behind, whether through cuts or demotions to even lower levels.
When Halverson turned pro in 2016, the Rangers were a perennial contender team with future Hall of Fame goalie Henrik Lundqvist leading the way. They didn’t hesitate to bring in hardened veteran goalies to challenge their kids for minutes, making for a very competitive environment in the minors.
As one of the youngest goalies in his first pro season, Halverson had some tough games early with the Hartford Wolf Pack, to the point he ended up getting sent down to the Greenville Swamp Rabbits of the ECHL for most of the next two seasons.
He struggled with the adversity and conditions, to the point that his mental health took a turn for the worse. At one point, Kaleniecki was concerned enough to hop on a plane to South Carolina to help.
“You take somebody who’s a high prospect who needs just some fostering and development,” Kalenicki said, explaining that in the ECHL goalies often don’t have a dedicated coach to work with them. “Then you compound that with adding in multiple competitors all vying for the same thing. And it kind of becomes a toxic environment. You know, toxic mentally.”
In his third season, Halverson ended up hurting his knee. He tried to play through it, rather than miss time, but he lost his spot to older, more experienced goalies.
He now realizes how much he was struggling, but he explains that he didn’t reach out to the team or league for help, believing he could tough out the challenges as he had in junior.
“I knew there was some sort of thing you can call and reach out for (help),” Halverson said, referring to a players-only phone line operated by the Professional Hockey Players’ Association, the union that represents minor-league players. “But I was just like, ‘I know what I have to do.’ Even though I’m incredibly depressed.”
By the end of his three-year, entry-level contract, Halverson had played 50 games in the AHL, 63 in the ECHL, and only 13 minutes with the Rangers as a mid-game fill-in for Lundqvist in February 2017 after another goalie forgot his passport and missed the initial call-up.
Prior to his first career start, Halverson’s only NHL appearance came as a third-period replacement for the Rangers in February 2017. (Jana Chytilova / Freestyle Photography / Getty Images)
At age 23, New York cut him loose.
Halverson’s next few years are a blur for him now. There were more injuries, including a badly broken wrist that cost him a full season. More thrilling call-ups and heartbreaking cuts. More packing up his life and moving to a new city only to once again return home to an existence of odd jobs and unpaid bills.
In 2019-20, with his ECHL club toiling in last place and the AHL seeming further away than ever, Halverson decided to leave midseason for mental health reasons. At that point, his father met with him for a heart-to-heart to discuss whether the toll was worth it.
“Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” his father asked.
“He was only saying that because he’s being a good dad,” Halverson recalled later. “Just advising me what he thinks is best. I was like, ‘Dad, it just eats away at me. It’s on my mind all the time, every single day. I’ve gotten in my car at work, all I could think about was playing in an NHL game. I don’t think my body and my mind can rest until this happens. I’m gonna keep going forward.’”
That led to nearly two years away to heal his body and mind. After separate surgeries on both his knee and wrist, Halverson tried to make money however he could, delivering UberEats meals and groceries. He also took shifts at a friend’s farm where, with one arm in a cast, he helped build a barn and tended the greenhouse.
Meanwhile, to get ice time, he started training beer-league goalies at 11 p.m. on Wednesdays — including some who were still learning to skate.
Prior to the 2022-23 season, Halverson received a tryout offer from a team in Germany’s top division. He flew overseas and the team ran some tests on his battered body. They indicated they intended to give him a contract, Halverson recalled, to the point that he turned down a competing offer from a British Elite Ice Hockey League squad.
When the German team then cut him before he had played a game, he suddenly had nowhere to go. Five thousand miles from home, Halverson broke down sobbing.
“I’ve never done that before,” he said. “It’s just always been one thing after another in my career. I never could stick it with New York. I never could stick it anywhere else. And there was always something happening, something happening. And when they told me that, my whole body just fell apart and I just wasn’t doing good.”
That was how he ended up in Bayreuth, a German city of 74,000 an hour north of Nuremberg. The pay was paltry, he couldn’t even play some games due to league rules limiting the number of import players, and the second-division team was relegated due to financial issues at the end of the 2022-23 season.
Really, it was the end of the line in pro hockey. But hockey was all he had.
“That was quite a different world for me,” Halverson said. “In my head, I’m just like, ‘This is gonna make for a great story.’ So I just kept working hard and put my head down.”
When Halverson returned home to Traverse City in summer 2023, he was desperate to find ice wherever he could. Kaleniecki helped, bringing him out to skates in Michigan. So did Jon Elkin, a well-known NHL goalie coach who had worked with Halverson in junior.
Halverson also called the Orlando Solar Bears’ Matt Carkner, one of many minor-league coaches who had cut him in the past, and said he wanted a chance to attend camp and beat out their two incumbent goalies.
He told the Solar Bears staff this would be his last attempt to play pro. It was this or retirement.
“He was the hardest worker every single day. And with his ability, his size, his work ethic in preparation, he clearly earned his opportunity to sign with us,” Orlando goalie coach Nathan Craze said, recalling how intensely Halverson dug into video sessions of Solars Bears practices and their upcoming opponents. “But the biggest thing for me was he really found the love of playing again.”
And he started to win. After a successful first few months, Halverson was called up on a tryout deal to the Syracuse Crunch, the Lightning’s AHL affiliate. A late-November shutout — his first ever at that level — got the team’s attention, earning him an AHL contract. By the end of the 2023-24 season, Halverson had posted a 7-3-3 record with a .913 save percentage for Syracuse and, more incredibly, started for the team during the AHL playoffs.
Brandon Halverson and Jeremy Kaleniecki during an on-ice session. (via Jeremy Kaleniecki)
This season, he has continued to justify the Crunch’s faith in giving him their No. 1 job, going 18-10-8 with a .913 save percentage in 37 appearances. In January, he was named an AHL All-Star. A month later, the Lightning signed him to a two-year, two-way NHL contract that guarantees him $300,000 next season.
It’s a long way from where he was even two years ago, when he couldn’t secure a league minimum $575-a-week offer in the ECHL.
Halverson credits his parents, Paul and Jennifer, and a newfound close relationship with God for helping get him here. He also knows he couldn’t have done it without his big billet brother, who watched him get his first NHL start against Utah HC last week with a lump in his throat.
Little Fuzz Ball had done it.
“To be honest, I think that’s probably the most nervous and excited I’ve been for anything in hockey in my life,” Kaleniecki said. “It’s somebody that is truly family. And you’ve seen the struggles. You’ve been a part of it with them … you know what they’ve gone through. It was hard to hold (the emotions) in. It’s just one of the coolest moments in my life in hockey.”
After being named a 2025 AHL All-Star, Brandon Halverson was signed to an NHL contract by the Tampa Bay Lightning.
On March 22, he made his first NHL start against the Utah Hockey Club. pic.twitter.com/9FTpG5oHvT
— Syracuse Crunch (@SyracuseCrunch) March 29, 2025
The game didn’t go the way Halverson wanted, as he allowed five goals in a 6-4 loss in Salt Lake City. Despite the outcome, though, Halverson’s phone blew up with congratulatory messages throughout the night. One of the texts was from Craze, who told Halverson to be proud of where he had come from, and how far he had come. “That’s something no one can ever take away from you,” he wrote. “And this is only the start.”
Halverson knows nothing is guaranteed for him with the Lightning. His start last week was to cover for backup Jonas Johansson, who was away from the team for family reasons, so he knew his NHL stay wouldn’t be a long one.
But after everything he’s been through, he feels ready for what’s next.
“I try not to think about what’s gonna happen,” Halverson said over the phone last week. “I’m here another day. Great. If I’m leaving tomorrow, great. I get to go down and get back to work and play whatever game I’m gonna be in next. So I’m just happy and thankful.”
The very next day, Halverson was reassigned to Syracuse.
His first start back? A 1-0 shutout, his fifth of the season.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Dave Reginek / NHLI via Getty Images, Peter Creveling / Imagn Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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