Oh No, I've Started Watching Dustin Byfuglien Highlights Again
In praise of the nearest thing to a real-life NHL Hitz player we'll ever see.
I never remember my dreams. I count myself lucky for that. Most mornings I wake up feeling like a goldfish with no immediate memories until I sit up/the cat swats at my feet.
But for about two years now, I’ve been dreaming somewhat regularly, and it’s only of one specific thing: hockey. It started around when the Rangers went on a magical run to the Eastern Conference Finals, reigniting my love for the sport I grew up playing.
And the more I dream of hockey at night, the more I dream during the day about Dustin Byfuglien.
Were the NHL a league that knew how to market its stars, Byfuglien would have been a phenomenon. He was never the best player in the league, and he spent the bulk of his career in Winnipeg, where his superhuman feats did not get much media attention.
Dustin Byfuglien did everything a casual fan wants to see in hockey: score incredible goals and toss around other dudes DJ Jazzy Jeff-style.
His nickname, Big Buff, is purely descriptive: he is 6’5”, 260 pounds — the exact build of Justin Tuck, for reference — and routinely leveled guys in his weight class.
Notice how slowly he’s moving here, yet still manages to send the 6’3”, 213 Mikko Koivu flying.
When smaller guys did collide with Byfuglien, they’d walk away saying things that alluded to needing serious medical attention like, “I thought my sternum collapsed.”
Opposing coaches talked about him the way hikers talk about possible grizzly encounters: “He’s so physically imposing that we have to know where he is.”
Once he mastered hitting guys one-on-one, Big Buff began practicing combo hits…
…and then tossing around two guys at once…
…before finally taking out three guys at once. Sure, one of them is his teammate, but sometimes baleen whales gobble up friends when filter feeding. It happens.
Byfuglien was not just a physical enforcer. He could score from as far as the red line and as near as the goal line, and during the Blackhawk’s 2010 Cup run, he scored five game-winning goals.
Former teammates like Ben Chiarot spoke about Byfuglien’s athleticism like he came from a video game.
“I used to think he was a created player, where you make him as big as possible, as tall as possible, weigh as much as possible and then have all the skill and everything that goes with it,” Chiarot said.
After being traded to Winnipeg, he made a rare switch right winger to defense, yet being further from the goal only led him to score more goals.
Off the ice, Byfuglien was a bit quiet and reclusive, and that eventually led him to walk away from the game. He took a surprise sabbatical from the team in 2020, and a few months later he and Jets terminated his contract. He never felt the need to explain why he up and left.
“Anyone that knows Buff knows he’s more likely to drop his phone in a fishing hole than he is to text you back,” said Jets captain Blake Wheeler during Byfuglien’s absence.
Byfuglien is now an actual professional fisherman. Fans randomly spot him in the wildand photograph him like he’s Bigfoot. Sometimes he’s handling a sturgeon that’s impossibly larger than he is, other times he’s dropping in on beer league hockey games.
Long live Big Buff, hockey’s most delightfully indomitable player of all time.