‘He’s a deterrent’: How Ryan Reaves’ uniquely talented family helped shape a unique NHL career
Daniel Johnston
Published Apr 07, 2026
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Willard Reaves, a Winnipeg Bombers legend and one of the best running backs in the CFL for several seasons, never pushed his sons in the direction of any sport.
He just had one rule.
“You couldn’t quit,” the former three-time CFL leading rusher, rookie of the year, league MVP and Grey Cup champ says. “If you hated it, you had to see it through at least to the end of the season, and you had no choice but to play to the best of your ability.”
Advertisement
Ryan Reaves was an outstanding hockey player and an even better football player.
Jordan Reaves, whom Dad considers “the most gifted athlete in the family,” was also an outstanding hockey player. He just didn’t love the sport nearly as much as his big brother.
“We all thought Ryan was going to play football for sure,” says Jordan of the now-Minnesota Wild winger — in his 13th season as one of the NHL’s hardest-hitting, toughest-fighting players and biggest personalities. “I used to go into his room when he was young, and he’d posted on this piece of paper with a Sharpie: ‘WHL, go work out. NHL, go work out.’
“He would wake up, see that note every day … and I knew that hockey was his thing and football wasn’t going to be.”
At the time, Jordan loved football and was tremendous on both sides of the ball. He was a special lacrosse player, too, but he only played because his hockey buddies did. Jordan finally settled on basketball. He was a five-year standout at Brandon University and was considered one of the best defenders in Canada.
He went on to play professionally in Spain, Slovenia and France but got tired of the cutthroat business of basketball overseas, so he returned to Winnipeg in 2014, wondering what he was going to do for the rest of his life.
His family, especially Ryan, worried.
Ryan, now 35, and Jordan, 32, aren’t only brothers. They’re best friends. Each was the best man at the other’s wedding.
But it wasn’t always that way.
When Jordan was a teenager, he got into gangs and drugs. He dropped out of school for a year, got into trouble with the law and went a couple of years without talking to Ryan. That was until a come-to-Jesus moment, when Ryan pulled Jordan out of their house for a heart-to-heart.
“I was going down a different path in life,” Jordan says. “Ryan was in Brandon playing junior, and I was off the scene for a bit and running wild. Ryan came home one day, and I was getting into an argument with my dad. Me and Ryan went outside, and I just got everything off my chest. That talk definitely helped me stay on the straightened edge. I know I could talk to Ryan about anything now and he’s always in my corner. It was one giant sense of relief.”
Advertisement
As it turned out, Jordan’s family had no reason to fret years later when he came back from Europe. He began training relentlessly without really knowing what for. A neighbor reminded him that his first love was football, and this is how good of an athlete Jordan is: He simply decided to become a professional football player.
Jordan went to a regional CFL combine in Edmonton to try out as a wide receiver. He ended up getting cut, but the man who ran the event was Chris Jones, who coached the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Then 25 and having not played football since he was 15, Jordan was signed, switched to defensive back, ultimately settled in as a defensive lineman and played five years for Saskatchewan.
When Jones became the Edmonton Elks’ coach last year, Jordan got a call from his favorite coach on the first day of free agency. That February morning just so happened to land on the day Jordan wed racecar driver Amber Balcaen, a rising star on the NASCAR circuit who just finished seventh in overall points in her first full season racing in the ARCA series. Jordan played eight games in the 2022 CFL season and says he plans to play at least three more.
“Not too many people can just one day switch from being a pro basketball player to a pro football player,” Ryan says.
In this family, you wouldn’t expect anything less.
Growing up in the Reaves household, just about everything revolved around football.
Willard never played hockey. Ryan says his dad looks like Bambi on skates, and Willard says his oldest boy isn’t exaggerating: “My legs are going right, left … everywhere but forward. So I wasn’t a hockey player. I was a hockey supporter.”
Willard grew up in Arizona and was a football star at Northern Arizona University. He was a first-team All-American in 1979, but after he graduated, he aspired to be a police officer but had a chance to play for his childhood hero, Bart Starr, who was coaching the Green Bay Packers.
Advertisement
Willard never played a down for the Packers, but he did spend two years with Green Bay before winding up in the CFL with Edmonton. In 1983, the then-Eskimos traded him to Winnipeg in a package that included Steve Hall, a defensive back who just so happens to be the dad of Bruins forward Taylor Hall.
Willard rushed for 5,933 yards in five CFL seasons, scoring 44 touchdowns and being named MVP in 1984 for the championship Bombers. He scored two touchdowns in that Grey Cup and would ultimately end his football career with cups of coffee with the Washington Redskins and Miami Dolphins.
He returned to Winnipeg, where everywhere he walks, people stop him. He’s in the Bombers Hall of Fame and Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame.
As kids, Ryan and Jordan were amazed by how many people knew and worshipped their dad. They used to watch one of their dad’s highlight video cassettes on a loop. And on a daily basis, they’d play knee football against Willard in the living room. The couch behind Willard was the end zone, but the boys never, ever could score or reach it. Dad would tackle them, swat their feet out from under them — whatever it took to win.
“They’d ask, ‘Dad, how come you never let us get to the couch?’” Willard says. “I’d say, ‘That’s not what winning’s all about. You have to get it. You have to earn it. You have to do it yourself. The person across from you is not going to just give it to you.’
“I taught them, there’s a person standing in front of you. Try to get to that next point behind him while he’s standing there. You go through him if you have to.”
“He wasn’t one of those dads that was like, ‘At least you tried,’” Jordan says, laughing. “It was, ‘No, you were terrible today. Why didn’t you score that touchdown?’ Ryan and I loved that part of growing up. Because going to the next level, whether it was middle school to high school, whether it was college or juniors to pros, we were going to have fun doing what we were doing, but we were there to win, not to just play.”
Advertisement
If you’ve watched Ryan play hockey, you’ve seen this mentality in action.
His objective is to get from Point A to Point B even if he has to bulldoze through a player or sandwich him against the glass. He takes his role as a protector seriously, but he also tries to make opponents look over their shoulders and get rid of pucks quicker. And he’s old school in that he’d prefer getting in the grill of an opponent’s star, to get him off his game, rather than wasting his time with less impactful players.
Plus, he’s one of the league’s great trash talkers
“He’s hard to chirp, too,” teammate Matt Dumba says. “He’s loud. He doesn’t let you get many sentences in.”
If you’re his teammate or a fan of the team he’s playing for, you adore him.
If you’re not, you don’t.
Last week, we were all reminded of the love/hate relationship the NHL has with Ryan Reaves — and so was Ryan’s family — during his first “tone-setting” game in a Wild sweater.
Red Wings fans lost their minds after he drove through (and injured) defenseman Filip Hronek like he was a tackling dummy. Wild fans defended the check, which was not penalized and on review was again deemed a legal hockey hit by the NHL. Ryan’s father and younger brother, meanwhile, watched from their respective homes in Fort Whyte, Manitoba, and Huntersville, N.C., trusting that Ryan wasn’t trying to hurt anybody.
Hronek was skating through the middle of the defensive zone with the puck on the play, and Ryan had every right to separate the player from the puck. The two locked eyes, so Hronek knew what was coming, but he inexplicably looked behind him with his pursuer already committed to the check.
As hard as Ryan hits, and as much smack as he talks, he was raised to never try to hurt anybody.
“Ryan is not an enforcer. He’s a deterrent,” Willard says. “When Ryan’s on the ice, things change up a little bit because everybody’s aware that he’s on the ice — or you’d better be. You know that if you’re going into a corner and you have the puck — if he’s coming down your way, chances are you’re going to get hit, and you’re going to get hit hard. But the one thing that I will not tolerate and have never tolerated is him going out to try to intentionally hurt somebody.
Advertisement
“And if I did see it, which I’ve never seen to this very day, I would say something to him about it, and I would actually stop watching. It doesn’t sit right with me for a person to be unsportsmanlike. Hockey is a gentleman’s sport. It can also be very barbaric, but this is not the ’70s, and I’m glad the days of solely goons are gone.”
As the game has evolved, Ryan has stayed relevant, Willard says, because he’s a hard-hitting, willing fighter “who can actually play hockey, who can actually put his money where his mouth is and skate and shoot and hit while also protecting his players and dishing out a little punishment if need be. But he does it legally.”
Jordan also points out that, even if some fans may not believe it of a player who has 54 goals and 117 points in 779 career games, “in high school, that man could score goals.”
“He was point getter, but he was also still one of the bigger guys, so he could move his body around,” Jordan says. “Then it got to the point in junior where he realized, ‘I’m a good hockey player, but I’m a lot stronger than absolutely everybody on this ice, so I think I see my ticket.’
“He ran with it and did it the absolutely right way.”
And like Dad, Jordan believes Ryan does so cleanly because of their football upbringing.
“We were taught, if that guy ear-holes me, never ear-hole him back,” Jordan says. “My dad would tell us to look him in the eye, run straight at him and drop him. You know what I mean? We were told specifically, ‘Never play dirty.’ And Ryan and me never played dirty in any spot we played. We were always bigger than kids, so if they thought us hitting them harder was dirty, that’s on them. But that’s not a dirty play.”
If you follow Jordan on social media, you know he’s Ryan’s biggest advocate. Last week, when his brother’s hilarious Carshield commercial with pro wrestler Ric Flair debuted, a proud Jordan who helped spread it like a wildfire.
And even though he’s a public figure and pro athlete himself — he hopes to play in the CFL until he’s 35 — Jordan is liable to publicly stick up for his brother whenever fans go after him. He reminds that Ryan hits with the technique of a football player. Hands down, driving through the player like the hit on Hronek.
Advertisement
“He hits clean,” Jordan says. “He hits with the shoulder. He never goes for the head. If someone leans into him and there’s head contact, it’s always an accident. He doesn’t need to play dirty to put an impact on the ice. He’s strong enough, he’s fast enough, he’s skilled enough that he could hit a guy clean like you saw in the Detroit game and knock him clean off his skates. That’s the one thing I love about my brother and that’s why I always go to war with people on Twitter when he hits or gets in fights. Because I know he’s never doing it to try to hurt someone.”
Reaves’ reputation as a fighter may never fade, but the fact is he barely fights anymore. Few are willing to go up against him, although now-teammate Marcus Foligno did so on opening night when Reaves felt Foligno took liberties with his then-Rangers teammate K’Andre Miller. Detroit’s Ben Chiarot also stepped up last week when the veteran defenseman felt he had to make a statement and stop Reaves from pushing the Red Wings around.
“That’s why he’s an assistant (captain),” Reaves said, respecting Chiarot’s courage.
Reaves has gotten into only three fights in each of the past five seasons, per HockeyFights.com, after totaling as many as 13 earlier in his NHL career. Still, when Wild general manager Bill Guerin started to get alarmed by the Wild’s lack of size, ruggedness, energy and swagger last month, he called Chris Drury knowing the Rangers’ GM needed to free cap space and a roster spot. Reaves also wanted a change after barely playing in the weeks leading into the trade.
Guerin shipped off a 2025 fifth-round pick for the veteran, and it had nothing to do with his fighting abilities. It was as much about bringing life to a listless locker room as it was the impact he could make on the ice. Wild players admit they feel six feet taller playing with him.
“Not the fighting,” Dumba said. “Just how he plays and his tenacity. I can remember as far back as some of my first playoff series with the Blues. That fourth line was pretty crazy: him, (Max) Lapierre, (Steve) Ott. Yeah, I remember those days. I knew as a young defenseman, (you’d better) get back for pucks as quick as you can and get out of there. You didn’t want to wait around and see what was coming.”
Blues GM Doug Armstrong, who had Reaves for years in St. Louis, knew exactly why Guerin wanted him.
Advertisement
“He’s one of my favorite players,” Armstrong says. “He’s just a bigger-than-life personality. … He’s going to be a great fit for the Wild. He’s going to be a fan favorite for his style of play. He’s also going to be a fan favorite for what he does in the community. Ryan Reaves, if he desires to be, he’s going to be in hockey a long time after he stops playing because he brings so much to an organization. He’s got great hockey knowledge. You can’t be in the league this long for being a one-trick pony. He’s a physical player, but he’s expanded his game.
“In a game that’s gotten younger and quicker, he’s been able to stand the test of time.”
The Wild have won nine of the 11 games Reaves has played, and he’s beloved in the locker room — even with guys like Foligno, Joel Eriksson Ek and Kirill Kaprizov, whom he’s had heated battles with and last year even mocked on the ice. Before Sunday’s game against Ottawa, Reaves showed up at Xcel Energy Center dressed as Santa Claus. He convinced Kaprizov to dress as his little elf.
Dressed 🎅
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) December 18, 2022
Golden Knights GM Kelly McCrimmon, Reaves’ former junior coach with Brandon, isn’t surprised he’s been able to adjust to this new NHL. Reaves had only nine regular-season scraps in three seasons with Brandon. His first year pro, he got into five fights in 40 games between ECHL Alaska and AHL Peoria.
“I always tell him, ‘I knew you before you were famous,’” McCrimmon jokes.
But after that first year pro, Reaves was sat down by his coach and told that if he wanted to play in the NHL, he was going to have to fight his way there. Reaves returned home, took boxing lessons and fought 43 times over the next three AHL seasons.
He began his NHL career looking for fights but “saw a lot of the guys that played three minutes and ran around asking guys to fight get pushed out of the league.” That’s when Reaves decided to transition from only lifting weights in the gym to working on his quickness and skill.
Advertisement
“I’ve been playing for 13 years after a lot of people in my life told me I couldn’t,” Reaves says. “I don’t take any day for granted. I think I’ve played longer than even I thought I probably would. I know careers don’t last long, and being 35, it’s coming to an end. Hopefully not too soon. You’ve got to enjoy every day.
“But a lot of people said I had too big of feet and I was too slow. So I adjusted my game. There were a lot of people that said I wasn’t good enough to play. I found a niche. I wasn’t a fighter and I turned into a fighter when I was younger. Then the game got faster and I stopped fighting as much and tried to keep up with those young guys. The haters motivate me more than anything.”
It’s kind of fitting that Reaves fancies himself a sheriff on the ice.
He says that will never change no matter how much the sport changes.
And it turns out law enforcement is deep in the family’s lineage.
A few years ago, somebody was doing historical research into Bass Reeves, who was the first Black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River in the 1800s. Willard got a call asking if he’d take a DNA test to see if they were related. He knew that his father had changed the spelling of their surname from Reeves to Reaves. He took a 23andMe test, sent it back and the results showed that Bass Reeves was indeed his great-great-great grandfather.
The family started reading up on him. There’s a Bass Reeves Museum and a bridge named after him in Oklahoma, coincidentally not far from where one of Willard’s daughters lives.
“It’s pretty cool,” Ryan says, laughing. “It’s something to hang our hat on.”
Jordan says that beyond Ryan’s hockey career, his brother should also hang his hat on helping save him.
“If I ever need help, he’s the first person I talk to,” Jordan says. “If something exciting is happening in my life, I’m calling him first. He’s 100 percent, through and through, my best friend. He proved it that one day when he gave me that tough love outside my dad’s house.
Advertisement
“For the longest time, I just felt like I was moving through this early by myself, solo. I was dealing with some s— in my life and was jealous of my brother. ‘NHL, go work out. WHL, go work out.’ I saw where his mind was, and I knew he was on the straight path to get to the NHL, and I didn’t have that same direction.
“For the longest time, I bottled that all up inside me and just took the shots on the chin and just held it back from him just because I knew he was going to flourish and I was at a point in my life where I didn’t see anything good happening. Then we had that talk. I let him know what I was going through, why I did the things I did, why I was acting the way I acted and why I never told him about the things I was going through.
“At that point, he told me, ‘I wish I was there for you, and I’ll never not be there for you again.’”
Ryan has lived up to that over the past 15 years, always there for his brother as they each built their professional sports careers.
Ryan, a free agent this summer, knows he’s hitting the tail end of his.
He wants to keep playing for as long as he can, but the husband and father of a little boy and girl wonders what the next post-hockey chapter of his life will entail.
Remember: This is a family that has changed professions often.
Ryan went from football star to NHL hockey player. Jordan went from basketball star to pro football player.
And Dad, who went from football star to law enforcement in Manitoba, is weeks away from launching a campaign for the legislature in Manitoba.
“I’m truly, truly inspired to help people,” says Willard, who used to secretly buy hockey gear for many of Ryan’s teammates. “As my mom’s always saying, ‘You can’t save the whole world, but you’re bound to prove me wrong.’ Yeah, yeah, I am.”
Ryan and Jordan get a kick out of their dad stepping out of his comfort zone by running for public office: “I love watching his speeches,” Jordan says. “It’s funny to watch, but I’m so proud of him.”
Advertisement
And proud of Ryan, too.
Love him or hate him, and we know which side Jordan is on, you do have to give credit to Ryan for still being in a league that’s tried to eliminate players with what was once his primary skill.
“It’s not an easy league to stay in for a player like me,” Ryan admits. “Thirteen years is a long time. There’s a lot of miles on this body and a lot of adjustments I’ve had to make. I take a lot of pride in it.”
(Top photos courtesy of Jordan and Willard Reaves and by David Berding / Getty Images)
