Chris Drury is the ultimate champion, but he would never tell you that. With a strong sense of humility, the general manager and president of the New York Rangers has quietly achieved unparalleled success in each stage of his sports career.
He was the Blueshirts’ captain when I fell in love with the team. Nearly 15 years later, I now realize how lucky I was to experience the Drury era.
Before he was a Hobey Baker Award winner or Stanley Cup champion, Drury was the pitcher for the 1989 Trumbull, Connecticut Little League baseball squad. Freshly 13 years old, Drury and his teammates hit the field at Howard J. Lamade Stadium in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on Aug. 26 to compete for the league’s World Series title.
David Galla, one of Trumbull’s teammates, grew up playing sports with Drury and recalled the excitement of beating a Taiwan group that had won 13 of the last 20 tournaments. On the mound, Drury pitched a shutdown performance to secure the title.
“Chris is a good guy, he’s humble, he does not like the limelight,” Galla said. “He’s a person who allows his actions to speak on his behalf.”
Following his reign on the baseball field, Drury devoted himself to hockey and won a high school championship with Fairfield Prep two years later. He brought the same calm, confident demeanor to the sport he would make a career out of.
“He is a strong leader that people always wanted to follow,” Galla said. “As his career has progressed, I can’t imagine that that would’ve changed at all.”
Galla’s right: It hasn’t changed.
After getting drafted by the Quebec Nordiques in the third round of the 1994 NHL Draft, Drury joined Jack Parker’s team at Boston University. The 1994-95 campaign was Drury’s first collegiate season on a roster he would soon lead.
Boston University hoisted its fourth Hockey East championship and NCAA title at the end of Drury’s freshman season, marking the beginning of Drury’s distinguished collegiate run.
“I place him in the top three most competitive players I’ve ever coached,” Parker said. “He wanted to be as good as he could possibly be and he wanted to win.”
And win he did.
In 155 games at BU, Drury captured two conference titles, one national title, four Beanpot championships and two Hockey East Player of the Year and USA Hockey College Player of the Year honors.
“He wanted to outwork everybody,” Parker said. “To this day, if you woke him up at 3 o’clock in the morning and told him, ‘We’re going to have a pickup game at a local rink,’ he would have to beat you to the puck.”
To top everything off, Drury collected the Hobey Baker Memorial Award his senior year as the nation’s best collegiate hockey athlete. There’s a framed photo of Drury with the trophy hanging on the wall in T Anthony’s — BU’s campus spot for late night pizza — and next to it, a signed photo of Drury as a Ranger.
It reads: “To the entire T Anthony’s Crew, I miss you guys! Go BU!” I exclusively eat my T’s mozzarella sticks in the booth that those images hang above.
Drury’s program-best 113 goals showed dominance on the stat-sheet, but his impact exceeded the rink. Instead of inking a pro-contract after his junior season, Drury decided to come back for his senior year and was named co-captain of the Terriers.
“He was always compassionate as a leader,” Parker said. “He was close to the guys that didn’t play a lot and made sure they felt part of the team.”
This sentiment was particularly true in Drury’s relationship with Travis Roy. Eleven seconds into his first collegiate shift for BU, a collision in the corner boards cracked Roy’s fourth vertebrae and left him paralyzed from the neck down — dreams crushed for a kid who had finally made it.
The BU student body — the men’s hockey team in particular — had to find a way to rally around Roy in the midst of such devastation. It’s safe to say Roy’s legacy will continue to impact the program. In the following years, Drury made it his mission to ensure Roy felt as much a part of the team as he did before the injury, and their friendship remained strong long past Drury’s four-year tenure at BU.
The sport of hockey transcends the stats and scores of a given game. It allows players and fans to be part of something greater than themselves — Drury understood that.
The winning didn’t stop in Boston. Drury earned the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie with Colorado in 1998-99. Two years later, his name was etched onto the cup.
Drury’s 11 postseason goals helped the Avalanche lift Lord Stanley in 2001. Drury was a champion at every level of hockey and still had an entire career ahead of him.
Drury signed with New York in 2007 where he spent the final four seasons of his 12-year NHL career. As the Rangers’ captain from 2008-11, Drury played with an edge to his game and demonstrated a legendary work ethic that infected the roster. He was the veteran leader New York needed and taught the locker room to wear the jersey with pride.
Drury’s career extended off the ice when he was named general manager and president of the Rangers in 2021. Despite the chaos of a rebuild, Drury’s sturdy leadership earned the trust of the opinionated fanbase.
He showed just how much he understood the pulse of the team. He executed a series of roster moves at last year’s trade deadline that propelled the Blueshirts to the Eastern Conference Finals.
Drury’s legacy is pasted on the walls of Agganis Arena. It’s felt throughout Madison Square Garden as frustrated fans with beers in hand say, “This team could really use a Chris Drury right now, huh?”
Good things are destined to come in this new chapter of Drury’s journey. I wouldn’t complain if that included a Stanley Cup on Seventh Avenue.
“It didn’t surprise me that he wanted to stay in hockey, and that once he decided that’s what he wanted to do, that he would become great at that as well,” Parker said. “It just follows him around, that’s who he is.”
