Can’t? Can’t isn’t just a four-letter word to Bobby Brink. Itap his trigger and rallying cry, the thing that sets him off, the spinach to his Popeye.
It was a button that Luke Strand, who coached the Denver University hockey star for a year and change with the USHL’s Sioux City Musketeers, didn’t have to use often. But he knew when to push it.
One of those moments came late in the winter of 2019. It was during a team meeting, and Brink, the NCAA’s leading scorer, Hobey Baker Award finalist and engine thatap helped power DU to the 2022 Frozen Four, walked in with linemate Martin Pospisil about 50 seconds after Strand had kicked things off.
The coach, torn between apoplectic and disappointed in his best two players, didn’t hesitate.
See that clock?
Can’t do that, Bobby.
Can’t play the next game, kid.
“I lost my mind,” Strand recalled to The Post in a phone interview last week. “I’m like, ‘You guys are late, you’re not playing.’ They weren’t late by more than a minute, but they were late. I might have broken the projector into a million springs.”
But, true to his word, Strand and Posipsil sat. This was before a back-to-back weekend series at Tri City. The Musketeers got swept.
When Brink came back to the lineup, humbled and hurt, Sioux City won three straight and eight of its next 10. Brink became the first player in the history of the USHL to win the league’s Forward of the Week honors three consecutive times. He finished the regular season with 35 goals, a Musketeers single-season record.
“They didn’t miss the next game, I’ll put it that way,” Strand laughed. “If you could not play your best players, then anyone’s fair game.
“I think that, without grabbing him by the collars, it probably straightened him out, like, ‘Whoa, this is real.’ Only because he was going to go to (DU) as an under-ager.”
The message: You can’t — there’s that word again — let it slip when it comes to setting an example. Even for 50 seconds. When you’re a 5-foot-8-ish teenager and the scouts have questions, your margin for error is wafer-thin.
You can’t give the doubters fuel. Ever.
“Maybe someone said that he wasn’t the best-looking skater or he wasn’t the hardest shooter, you know, someone had a knock,” Strand said. “But I know he’s also the type of young man that wants to prove everybody else wrong. Just a driven guy.”
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Can’t? Bobby Brink can’t take his eyes off the prize. Not when he and the Pios are this close. DU is slated to meet top-ranked Michigan at 3 p.m. Thursday in the first of two nationally televised semifinals (ESPN2) at Boston’s TD Garden.
“(Our upperclassmen) said to take it all in because it’s one of the most special things you’ll do in hockey,” said Brink, a forward whose 56 points are the most by a DU skater since Gabe Gauthier racked up 57 in 2004-05. “They obviously had a chance to win in their freshman year (2019) and that didn’t end up going their way. But they just said, ‘Don’t take it for granted, because it’s tough getting there.’”
A fact that the Pios, and Brink, learned the hard way last winter. The junior, a second-round pick by the Philadelphia Flyers in 2019, played in just 15 games during a star-crossed ’20-21 season because of COVID and injuries.
“I don’t know what it was,” Strand noted. “But his decision to come back this year, to prove that, ‘I’ll come back, but I’m going to prove to you that I’m the best player in the country when I do come back,’ thatap him in a nutshell.”
Can’t handle the heat? Can’t handle the pressure? The kid used to play with, and against, Minnetonka High (MN.) teammate and future CSU Rams golfer Gunnar Broin. During a junior golf tournament championship back home, Brink sank a hole-in-one. 142 yards. 7-iron. He was 11.
“He played baseball and golf and lacrosse all at a really high level,” said Brink’s father, Andy, a former collegiate hockey player and golfer at the University of Minnesota. “He would’ve been really elite in any of those sports had he continued with them.”
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Can’t? You can’t believe the irony. The fact that Bobby Orr Brink — thatap his full name — will be playing the biggest games of his collegiate salad days in Boston, where his namesake, Bobby Orr, used to hold court.
The middle name, by the way, was Dad’s idea. He cracked that Mom was too out of it at the time to argue once hospital officials wanted to write it down.
“It was always between Bobby Orr Brink and Bobby Clarke Brink,” Andy laughed. “Which is really weird with (my son) eventually being drafted by the Flyers.
“I was always just a fan (of those players) … it (was) just kind of about what those guys stood for more than anything else. You don’t give a name to someone thinking, like, ‘Oh, they’re going to play hockey like that person.’”
Orr, of course, is a Beantown icon, a Hall of Famer who won two Stanley Cups as a defenseman with the Bruins from 1966 to 1976. Itap like showing up in New England with the name Tom Brady Smith.
“Yeah, basically,” the younger Brink admitted with a chuckle. “Yeah. It’s cool. Pretty good guy to be named after. (Orr) had a great period in Boston. It’s cool to be playing where he had a ton of accomplishments.”
At 5-9, 166 pounds, in Boston, is Bobby Brink big enough, on the big stage, to put the Pios on his back for one more weekend?
“I don’t know,” Strand replied. “Does the heart have a height?”
Can’t argue with that.
“Itap kind of inspiring for a lot of kids who are told they’re not tall enough, not fast enough,” Strand said. “He’s plenty good enough. I’d be shocked if he’s not the best player on the biggest stage.”
