It's been quite a year for Pittsburgh Penguins rookie Daniel Sprong.
After ranking among the top scorers in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League last season, Sprong was taken by Pittsburgh in the second round (46th overall) of the 2015 NHL draft. Then, in perhaps the biggest surprise of Penguins training camp, Sprong made the season-opening roster as an 18-year-old and became the first Dutch national to play in the NHL.
Now if only he could finally get a Canadian passport.
"His path has been a little different," said recently-retired Penguins forward Pascal Dupuis, who got a sneak peek of Sprong when the two trained last summer at the same Montreal rink. "He has an NHL shot already. He's definitely fun to have around. He's got that big smile on his face. He's one of those guys who wants to learn."
As a young child in Amsterdam, those skills were already on display when Sprong was 4, by which time he was playing with kids as old as 9. Before long, he was tabbed as the best youth hockey player in Dutch history. Of course, considering hockey's popularity in Holland, or lack thereof, that's a tricky distinction.
"It's like soccer in Canada," Sprong said of hockey in his home country. "No one really plays it. Soccer in Europe and Amsterdam is really big. That and speedskating are the main sports."
But Sprong never had an interest in speedskating.
His father, Hannie, was part of a generation of Dutch youth drawn to ice hockey after the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Games. Lake Placid is remembered for the Americans' miraculous gold-medal performance, but the Dutch national team's inclusion in that Olympic tournament gave the sport a bump in the Netherlands.
After playing with the Dutch national program, Hannie Sprong abandoned the sport before coaching Daniel's youth team. But guiding Daniel's hockey dream was challenging in a city with just one hockey rink and a country whose Olympic committee doesn't contribute a single dollar to the sport.
"In Amsterdam, we had one rink and everybody had to practice there. All the youth teams, the semi-professional team, the short-track speedskaters, the figure skaters," Hannie Sprong said. "There's not many hours to really train. The rink opened in October and closed at the end of March."
With no ice available during the summer in Amsterdam, Sprong took young Daniel and some of his youth hockey teammates to Quebec to participate in summer hockey camps. It was there that they got involved with trainer Karel Svoboda, the brother of longtime NHL player and agent Petr Svoboda.
Before long, these players began dominating youth teams in neighboring countries. They even visited the heralded Jokerit youth team in Finland, where they lost 3-0 but earned the respect of an organization that has groomed players like Teemu Selanne, Jari Kurri and Kari Lehtonen.
Starring on a youth team alongside players three and four years older, Sprong earned an invitation to train and play with Jokerit as well as the Toronto Marlies, a youth program responsible for developing dozens of NHL players.
But Svoboda insisted one summer that the Sprongs move to Quebec to develop Daniel's game. As a joke, Hannie agreed to do just that before returning to Amsterdam.
"Three weeks went by and Karel Svoboda called me. [He asked] 'Are you still coming? You told the team you were going to join. They're waiting for you,'" he said. "In Holland they start school later, so let's go for two weeks. Two weeks turned into a couple of years."
Just like that, Hannie uprooted his wife, son and daughter to Montreal. Seven-year-old Daniel pursued his hockey dreams while Hannie took a job with a company that distributed frozen fruits and vegetables.
That risk eventually landed Daniel with the Charlottetown Islanders of the QMJHL.
"I still think about it sometimes, when that decision was made," Daniel said. "It was an adventure and I'm very happy with it."
That decision earned Daniel an opportunity to star in junior hockey. But it couldn't get him a chance to play internationally, which typically earns junior-aged players greater attention from scouts.
Knowing how far along Sprong's hockey development had come in Canada, the Dutch hockey federation never extended an invitation to play with their national team. Junior teams in the Netherlands are typically required to play their own way and the Dutch under-20 team is relegated to Division II of the International Ice Hockey Federation next year, where they'll compete against teams from Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania and South Korea.
Taking all this into consideration, the Dutch federation assumed Sprong wouldn't accept their invitation. They were right.
"I knew right away I didn't want to play for the Dutch team," Sprong said. "I will hopefully one day play with Canada if everything goes right. I'll always be proud to be from [Holland]. But for hockey, if you have a chance to play against the best in the world, that's what you want to do. It's nothing against my home country, but if I had a chance to play for Canada I want to."
Which explains Sprong's pursuit of a Canadian passport, a lengthy process that ironically is now compromised by his making the Penguins. By now, he's spent more of his life in North America than Holland and hasn't been back to his home country in a few years. But word of his exploits have given the sport a boost in a country that has fewer than 3,000 registered hockey players.
"It gives us good publicity," said Theo van Gerwen, director of the Dutch Ice Hockey Federation. "Unfortunately, ice hockey in Holland is not the main focus. But with Daniel getting to the NHL, that helps us get really good publicity. We're very happy that this is happening."
The federation is happy enough that the Dutch national team finally invited Sprong to participate in an Olympic qualifying tournament in Italy this February. Considering Sprong's NHL schedule, van Gerwen isn't holding out hope that he'll make his international hockey debut anytime soon.
Besides, if all goes according to plan, Sprong will be a Canadian citizen by then.
"Right now there's nothing I can do [about the Canadian passport]," Sprong said. "I love it in Quebec. I love living in Montreal. I go back in the summertime and I went to school there and pretty much grew up there."