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When you’re a young and largely unproven hockey player trying to punch your ticket to the NHL, you usually want to avoid getting into trouble. After all, teams usually aren’t going to go out of their way to prioritize a prospect who, say, gets into a bar fight with another player over a trivial dispute, although that’s the exact scenario that helped Kevin Bieksa ink a deal with the Canucks.
Bieksa played junior hockey in his native Ontario before taking his talents to Bowling Green University, and while he was far from the most highly touted prospect on the planet at the time, the defenseman was selected by Vancouver with the 151st overall pick in the 2001 NHL Draft.
After graduating in 2004, Bieksa headed back up to Canada for a tryout in the hopes of becoming a member of the Manitoba Moose (Vancouver’s AHL affiliate). It’s safe to say his initial visit didn’t pan out as he’d envisioned when you consider it involved him punching one of his own teammates in the face, but the story actually had a pretty happy ending based on what unfolded in the wake of that fateful incident.
Kevin Bieksa caught the attention of the GM of the Canucks after knocking out Fedor Fedorov outside a bar
Bieksa’s tilt with Fedor Fedorov is one of those hockey stories that spent years trickling through the grapevine before a couple of the men involved came forward to shed some more light on exactly what transpired.
That includes former Canucks GM Brian Burke, who told ESPN he heard about the incident in question the day after it transpired and immediately decided he wanted to sign Bieksa to an entry-level contract as a result.
Why? Well, for context, Bieksa is 6’1″ and weighed around 200 lbs. during his playing days, while Fedorov clocked in at 6’5″ and 250 lbs. The Russian (the younger brother of legendary Hall of Famer Sergei Fedorov) also had a pretty short fuse, as Burke said the dispute in question reportedly stemmed from Bieksa accidentally spilling his soon-to-be teammate’s beer at a bar in Winnipeg while some members of the team were drinking after a game
Bieksa eventually shared his side of the story on Spittin’ Chiclets while offering some more insight into exactly what went down. He claims the trigger was actually a cocktail straw he was playing around with before it flew out of his hand and hit Kirill Koltsov, another Russian player sitting in Fedorov’s vicinity.
For some reason, Federov took a ton of exception to that perceived slight and confronted Bieksa before the two men traded words that led to the former challenging the latter to meet him outside. While the man who was still in search of an AHL contract tried to brush it off, he couldn’t stop himself from accepting the invitation and found himself squaring off against an opponent with a significant size advantage.
Bieksa’s disadvantage grew even more when Koltsov arrived to help his fellow countryman, but the outmatched player fended off his leg kicks while focusing on Federov before landing a punch that “dropped him” and left a “puddle of blood in the white snow.”
It’s easy to understand why Bieksa was worried he’d put his future in jeopardy when he woke up the following morning, but things took a turn when he picked up a phone call from Burke expecting some bad news only to hear the GM say “We’re going to sign you to an entry-level deal.”
Bieksa spent the following season in Manitoba before making his NHL debut with the Canucks in 2015, and he spent a decade in Vancouver (followed by a few years with the Ducks) before bringing his career to an end in 2022 by signing a one-day contract with the franchise that gave him his first one due to a bar fight.