Bradenton’s Mike Pastujov could be Florida’s next NHL Entry Draft selection

The grass doesn’t really grow in the Pastujovs’ front lawn anymore. Even when the Florida summer rain pours through Manatee County, and the state’s sunny weather feeds the plants, the Pastujovs are left with patches of green dotting what has essentially become a sand pit.

Florida isn’t a state like Michigan, where Nick and Mike Pastujov moved at 14 to chase their NHL dreams. There aren’t street hockey games in every neighborhood during the summer or pond hockey games in every park during the winter.

Ice rinks are sparse.

The Pastujov family’s training ground became a couple hundred square feet of tattered grass in front of their suburban home where they’d strap sliders to their feet and slap pucks into a set of portable nets they’d set up between their driveway and their neighbor’s.

“You’d hear them like swearing as they found pucks under their lawn mowers,” said Janis Pastujov, Nick’s and Mike’s mother, of the neighbors.

“We’ve had like four or five neighbors on that side,” Nick quipped.

Becoming the first family of hockey in the Tampa Bay area hasn’t always been easy for the Pastujovs, but this weekend the Bradenton family could have a second foot in professional hockey. One year after Nick Pastujov became the first player born and raised in the region to be taken during the NHL Entry Draft, Mike Pastujov seems destined to follow his older brother. The NHL Central Scouting Bureau ranks Pastujov as the No. 90 skater from North America in this year’s class. Sportsnet’s final pre-draft rankings released last month listed Pastujov as the No. 88 player overall.

The 2017 NHL Entry Draft gets underway Friday at 7 p.m. with the first round in Chicago. Pastujov is likely to be taken sometime Saturday, when Rounds 2-7 play out beginning at 10 a.m. at the United Center. Just like his brother a year ago, if Pastujov is selected he’ll probably draw raised eyebrows when spectators dig into his biography and see Bradenton listed as his hometown. Players from Florida are still a rarity, and even for Nick and Mike Pastujov, it still took a perfect convergence of influences.

“It’s definitely pretty cool and it’s just kind of really cool to see Florida grow as a hockey hotbed as a whole,” Nick Pastujov said. “It’s pretty cool to be the first. ... I’m just really, really excited to see what happens Friday and Saturday with Mike.”

Nick and Mike Pastujov were born less than two years apart during the late 1990s in Bradenton, before the Lightning were even sniffing the postseason on any sort of a regular basis and when taking up hockey would have meant crossing county lines to find a rink up in Clearwater or all the way down in Fort Myers. Hockey was the only sport Gueorgui Pastujov, the boys’ father, knew growing up in Russia, though, and he knew he wanted to share it with his children, he just didn’t know how he was going to go about that in Florida after he settled in the state following a defection from a job as a translator in Cuba during the earlier part of the decade. He’d even considered moving up to New Jersey, his wife’s home state, to find a larger hockey community.

Gueorgui and Janis can still remember the day they heard about the construction of an ice rink in Ellenton. Janis was sitting at the kitchen table when she read the news and shouted across the room to her husband.

“Hey,” she said, “they’re building a rink next to the outlet mall.”

“Well,” Gueorgui called back, “take them.”

“No, they’re building the rink,” she said. “I can’t take them until they open the rink.”

They were there the day the Ellenton Ice and Sports Complex opened with Nick, who was 3 at the time. He started skating and playing hockey only a few days later, and as soon as Mike turned 3 he was suiting up with his older brother. Gueorgui coached them the whole way.

Gueorgui was never anything special as a hockey prospect of his own, but he had a unique style to teach his children in Florida. He emphasized skating ability and skill — the traditional European method of player development. The Pastujov boys’ American coaches emphasized physicality and play near the net — the traditional North American method of player development.

The result was a style Gueorgui calls “jumbo combo,” a blend of the North American physicality and European finesse that makes the Pastujov’s somewhat appealing to anyone, and separates them from the American teammates they played with when they moved up to Michigan to play in the Tier 1 Elite Hockey League and then the USA Hockey National Team Development Program.

“That’s what makes them different,” Gueorgui said. “And that’s what makes them stand out.”

They also had help from their mother, who doesn’t have any hockey background of her own, but taught them flexibility and athleticism in her own way.

Janis and Gueorgui first met in the 1990s in distinctly Manatee County fashion — both were working for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Gueorgui as a translator and Janis as a dance captain. Janis still works as a professional dancer and wanted her kids to take up dancing, too. To play hockey, Janis would also make them take dance classes.

“I tried to give them some flexibility,” Janis said.

The Pastujovs always came back to hockey, though. While Gueorgui pushed his two oldest to be in the rink three or four mornings every week, three or four afternoons every week and out at some tournament every weekend, he wasn’t going to push Sasha, his other son who’s now 13, in the same way.

Of course, Sasha was in the bleachers at an ice rink at three days old. Nick and Mike had a game, and there was no real chance Sasha wouldn’t also play one day.

The family’s dedication to the sport always took people up in Michigan aback when they’d first hear about the Pastujov’s hometown. Teammates wondered how they’d trained. Coaches were curious how they even decided to take up the sport.

When they took the ice, though, they blew everyone away with Mike creating from the wing and Nick crashing the net as a center. The Wolverines, typically one of the top teams in the NCAA, recruited both and will reunite them this coming season in Ann Arbor.

Mike capped his career with the National Team Development Program in April by helping the United States with the IIHF World U18 Championship. Pastujov posted the fifth best plus-minus in the tournament and his seven points were tied for 11th most.

He’s already in rare company as a Floridian hockey player. This weekend, he could make an exclusive list grow.

“It’s not your typical spot to be,” Pastujov said. “It’s not like a hockey hotspot, but just to have the opportunity to play at a high level now and hopefully get drafted is just pretty cool.”

This story was originally published June 22, 2017 at 8:30 PM with the headline "Bradenton’s Mike Pastujov could be Florida’s next NHL Entry Draft selection."