Red Wings 2024 draft pick Max Plante isn’t a big player at 5’11” and 176 pounds, but he’s a tenacious little bugger, and he comes from a “hockey family.”
Max’s father, Derek Plante, was an NHL player, and the Hermantown, MN native has two hockey-playing brothers in Zam (who will play alongside Max at the University of Minnesota-Duluth this season) and Victor (who will play for the NTDP’s Under-17 team, and is committed to play for Minnesota-Duluth in the future).
This morning, MLive’s Ansar Khan profiles Plante and his family…
“I’m very lucky and fortunate to be around such great hockey people,” Plante said. “I’d say my dad probably watches more hockey than anyone in the world. Growing up, I’d skate on the outdoor rinks and come home, and my dad would be watching hockey, so there was nothing else on the TV.
“He’s probably taught me pretty much everything I know about hockey. My grandpa (Bruce Plante) is the coach of the high school of where I’m from in Hermantown. Just being around hockey people all the time grew my passion for the game.”
He called it special to play with his brother at Duluth, just eight miles from Hermantown.
“It was a dream of mine to play for the Bulldogs,” Plante said. “I couldn’t see myself in any other jersey.”
And Khan notes that Red Wings assistant GM and director of player development Kris Draper is impressed by Plante’s “hockey sense”:
“Grew up around the game; you could tell that by talking to him,” Kris Draper, Red Wings director of amateur scouting, said. “The hockey sense of where he can play up and down the lineup was something that we kept coming back to, a player that the lines he was on seemed to play well that night.
“He’s smart, he can play on the penalty kill, he can play on the power play. The important thing that we love is he can play with really good hockey players, and he showed that. Talking to a lot of his teammates, they had a lot of positive things to say about the way he played, the way he carried himself.”
Continued; I’m not certain whether Plante will grow into a top-six player–he’s almost a pure passer at this point, and he remains undersized–but he already displays a professional’s hockey mentality, and he’s going to have a couple of years to develop into a bigger, better player at Minnesota-Duluth.
