Work Ethic Lifted Whitney To Nhl

Ray Whitney learned early as a pro that living on his innate quickness was a ticket to nowhere.

The star center of Spokane’s 1991 Memorial Cup championship team, Whitney, Sunday morning, spoke about adjusting to the pace of the National Hockey League.

“Things happen a lot quicker in the NHL,” he said a few hours before he and the San Jose Sharks took on the Vancouver Canucks. “You can usually out-skate the big guys who are running after you.

“Here, the big guys can catch you.”

So each year he comes in stronger.

“When I first came up, the quickness I had in juniors really didn’t help me. I had to find other ways to improve. It took three hard years to bring my strength up to where it’s acceptable. I expect it to go a little higher yet.”

It’s by holding himself to a higher standard that Whitney has won an admirer in San Jose coach Kevin Constantine.

“Ray’s a guy I coached in Kansas City when I was down there (in the International League),” Constantine said. “He’s come along way in his play, his strength and his attitude.

“He has an amazing personality in terms of figuring out a way to get a job done. He has no desire to be an average player. His desire is to be great at something. I love people who refuse to be average.”

Said Whitney: “You don’t get anywhere by being average. You don’t want to look back and say you were just an average player in the National Hockey League.

“I have a good feeling when I look back at the WHL,” he said of his three seasons in Spokane, from ‘88-89 through ‘91. “I can say I was in the upper portion of the players in the WHL. Now I want to do the same thing in the NHL.

“I don’t want to be known as a guy who just played.”

Whitney spent a frenetic year after leaving Spokane. He went to Germany, played 10 games with Cologne and came back for 63 games with San Diego of the IHL and two with San Jose.

The knock on him was - and to an extent is - his size. At 5-foot-9, Whitney will never be a mountain, but he is noticeably stronger than the darting goal-scorer who left here with nothing left to prove.

If he had it to do over, he’d change nothing.

“There’s nothing saying I would have made the NHL that first year (at 19, in the fall of ‘91). “They told me to come to camp, but they didn’t give me a contract right away, so obviously they had some doubts in their minds about that season.

“I didn’t want to go back to junior that year just for the purpose of development. I didn’t think I was going to develop any more in junior. There just wasn’t much left for me to do.

“I did what I did to to stay out of junior. I’m not saying it was the best move I could have done but it certainly helped me develop. I got a year in the minors out of the way a year earlier than most kids. That gave me a year jump on everybody else.”

He was in Kansas City for 46 more IHL games in the ‘92-93 season before becoming a San Jose regular.

, DataTimes