Nino Niederreiter sat in his Canada Life Centre stall, leaning forward with a smile. The pickleball-playing, dog-loving Swiss forward is a cheerful, engaging interview on most days. On this Friday in January, he’d been summoned by The Athletic to comment on winning the title of “best prankster” — as chosen by his teammates.
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Niederreiter laughed. He questioned the accuracy of the vote.
“Fake news,” he joked.
But The Athletic had receipts. Word had gotten around that Niederreiter was responsible for the wipeout-inducing sock tape that had been appearing on linemates’ skate blades. He’d been called out for the avocado that snuck its way into Mark Scheifele’s shoes, for the ginger root in Sean Monahan’s suit pocket and for a whole series of incidents involving Nate Schmidt at the airport.
Niederreiter laughed again — this time, with feeling — and then shared his tales. I’d meant to share Niederreiter’s mischief — and the mischief of so many other Jets — with you as part of our player polls but ran out of time before playoffs. I won’t withhold them from you any longer. Now that the season is over, the draft has passed and July is upon us, it’s time to start emptying my notebook.
With special thanks to Josh Morrissey for the surveillance photos — trust me, this will make sense in due time — here are the stories I wanted to tell you this season but ultimately could not, for whatever reason.
Until now.
The prank on Monahan was simple enough. The Jets have plenty of access to postgame food. Niederreiter swiped a chunk of ginger root and slipped it into Monahan’s suit pocket at the end of a road trip. Monahan found it, tossed it on his kitchen counter at home and woke up the next day to a question from his wife: When had he found the time to go grocery shopping?
Food played a big role in a lot of player’s jokes.
There was the avocado that kept following Scheifele around, showing up in shoes or suit pockets as the moment required. There was the time that Dylan Samberg got dressed after a skate to find his pant pockets plastered full of butter. Samberg cast about for a culprit and landed on the belief that Alex Iafallo was the evildoer. Samberg scraped the butter out of his pockets and into Iafallo’s Crocs, leaving the veteran ankle-deep in unsalted dairy.
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The defenceman who told me about Samberg and butter insisted that Iafallo was not the true culprit.
Was it him, then?
“Oh, I had nothing to do with it.”
It turned out that denial was common. There was a portion of every single conversation I had that involved abject denial on the Jets player’s part.
We polled 15 players. Nearly one-third of the team received votes. And, when it came to discussing the pranks themselves, no one admitted to anything without first being outed by a teammate.
Who is the Jets’ best prankster?
| Player | Percentage of Vote |
|---|---|
20.0% | |
13.3% | |
13.3% | |
13.3% | |
13.3% | |
6.7% | |
6.7% | |
6.7% | |
6.7% |
“Nik’s a sneaky one,” I was told by a right-shooting forward. “Might not always be pranks. Might be little jokes here and there. You don’t think it’s coming but Fly can get you with a good one every now and again. Picture day today, he dropped a good hairline joke on someone right as we were setting up for it. I’m not going to say who (it was about) but he had a good one this morning. Fly’s sneaky.”
Ehlers wasn’t the only surprising name on the list.
“(Logan Stanley) is always messing with guys’ sticks or skates or throwing stuff in the dry stall or hiding stuff on them,” said a top scorer.
“Stan’s always undercover,” echoed a younger player. “He keeps his mouth shut so a lot of guys don’t really know it’s him. He doesn’t give away that he did it but he’s always involved.”
I took the accusation to Stanley himself. First, the inevitable denial.
“I don’t know what pranks I would pull,” he said, conveying innocence. “I like to poke fun at people and I feel like I take a lot of poking, too, so you’ve got to be able to dish it back out.”
Stanley’s handiwork involves sawing teammates’ sticks (at the bottom, so that you can’t see it’s cut until you try to shoot and your stick explodes). He also took partial responsibility for a unique bit of artwork on Axel Jonsson-Fjallby’s stick tape. Still, on a team that talked openly about Adam Lowry, Niederreiter and Mason Appleton messing with each other’s gear (tape on skate blades, stick gum in each other’s gloves, and tape balls tucked inside skates) Stanley seemed to consistently escape blame.
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How does he get away with it?
“I’m under the radar … ‘It wouldn’t be Stan… He’s too nice.’ I’m just too nice a guy.”
Nice guys were the victim of pranks, too.
Schmidt was a renowned mentor to younger players, the team’s funniest player and a bright light to speak to in the room. He gave this reporter more than his fair share of time on multiple entertaining occasions and opened up for some frank discussions over the course of his tenure in Winnipeg. One thing that never seemed to go right for Schmidt, though? Just about any trip to the airport.
Somehow, the team plane would never have the food Schmidt wanted to order. This was because of Niederreiter’s menu prank. Niederreiter sat next to Schmidt on the team plane, providing ample opportunity for the following three-step prank:
Step 1: Spend the first part of the season stealing menus from the team plane.
Step 2: Get to your seat on the plane before Schmidt gets to his. Trade his (current) menu for one from your collection.
Step 3: Watch Schmidt ask the flight attendant for his favourite meal. They won’t have it. Watch Schmidt ask the flight attendant for his second favourite meal. They won’t have that either. Rejoice.
“I get Schmidty quite a lot during the plane rides,” Niederreiter said in January. “He also went home with utensils a couple of times, where he unpacked his bag and there are forks, knives, all of that stuff. He had to bring them onto the next flight.”
It’s funny to imagine Schmidt, the good Samaritan that he is, raging upon the discovery of all these extra cutlery items but still feeling so compelled to do the right thing that he brings them back to the airport. It’s funnier to imagine the scene the day he didn’t know he had cutlery in his bags at all.
A veteran teammate got a kick out of the following scene at airport customs.
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“Nino put the metal utensils from the plane in Schmidty’s bag,” said the veteran. “And Schmidty didn’t notice. So he gets to passport control and it just starts beeping. The lady pulled the cutlery out, like, ‘You have a knife.‘ I thought that was pretty funny.”
One of Niederreiter’s championship-winning votes came from Schmidt himself.
“I can’t give Nino too much credit. I hate that stuff. It pisses me off every day,” Schmidt said, laughing. “The silverware and napkins in my suit jacket t… Never at the rink, though. I’ll say Nino but put Nino with an asterisk.”
The mysterious case of Josh Morrissey and the Montreal Alouettes toque
Josh Morrissey, in addition to being a star and a leader on the current edition of the Jets, serves as a bit of a bridge to the team’s past. When you talk to Morrissey about pranks, then, he thinks fondly of Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd, Bryan Little and Chris Thorburn.
In the old days, he says, the pranks were wilder.
“Their era of jokes was something else. They’d cut the sleeves off a guy’s dress shirt during the morning skate or the sleeves off a suit jacket. You don’t see those happen anymore,” Morrissey says. “Guys would cut the guys’ laces on their dress shoes, stupid stuff like that. I think our generation has a little bit less of the hilarious jokes.”
That’s not to say Morrissey doesn’t get a kick out of how an avocado kept ending up in Scheifele’s suit jacket or the times when someone would slap a player’s name tag on the front of their helmet for practice as if they were learning to skate as a child. He laughed at the other examples given in this piece, plus this story from 2020 about an unnamed player’s series of pranks on Brendan Lemieux. It’s just that those olden days of Byfuglien and Little come with an added sense of mischief.
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Until you bring up the Alouettes toque.
And really, that’s as mild of a prank as it gets — or it would have been, if the players involved hadn’t gotten so with it.
The story starts two seasons ago in the Jets dressing room. A Montreal Alouettes toque appears in Morrissey’s stall. Everyone assumes it belongs to Pierre-Luc Dubois, but he says it’s not his and he doesn’t claim it when Morrissey puts it in the team’s unofficial lost-and-found.
Somebody does take the toque, though. Morrissey’s work is done: he’s given the toque away.
But the toque comes back (the very next day).
Morrissey is mildly amused. He still doesn’t understand why this Alouettes toque has appeared in his life, so he puts it back in the middle of the room. It disappears, then reappears in his stall, the very next day.
“This went on for … A while,” he says.
The Jets start coming up with theories. Some people point their fingers at Dubois, given his Montreal roots. Others push back in a different direction, targeting some of the other pranksters mentioned in this piece. The toque continues to appear in Morrissey’s stall. It continues to be tossed on the floor. As literal months roll by, the toque continues to disappear and then reappear. Morrissey pays closer and closer attention and becomes convinced that Dubois is to blame. Dubois says it was his toque but that someone had taken it from him. Suddenly the toque ends up in Schmidt’s locker.
“No one knew who it was,” Schmidt told me. “People would find it in their stall and throw it into the middle of the room. People would blame Dubie but he would be like, ‘I don’t know! Weird that someone put it in your stall, though.’”
Do you ever meet someone, forget their name, and then wait so long to ask for clarification — multiple meetings, say, over many months — to the point that you feel like it’s too late to ask at all? Sometimes I wonder if this story is like that. I doubt anyone involved expected the toque would continue to get passed around the Jets room like it did — for so many weeks, to so many players. Who keeps a joke going that long? And, how could the prankster keep getting away with it?
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In this day of smartphones, couldn’t someone just put their phone in their locker, set it up to record and wait for the prankster to reveal himself?
Yes.
Yes, they could.
And that’s exactly what Morrissey did.
Presented for public consumption for the very first time, here is the moment the prankster was finally caught.
It’s an open-and-shut case, right? Nate Schmidt is guilty of a months-long toque prank, with video evidence proving it was him all along.
The thing is, Schmidt says he was framed.
He says that he hadn’t participated in the toque prank for months but then, when the toque appeared in his own locker, he couldn’t help himself from joining in.
“I grabbed the toque and put it in J-Mo’s stall and J-Mo had his phone on, sitting there, videotaping for the whole practice,” Schmidt says. “So he’s got a video of me putting it back. He calls out ‘SCHMIDTY!’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘You put it in my stall.’ ‘No I didn’t!’ He goes, ‘Yes you did!’ And he pulls out his phone and he’s got an hour and fifteen minutes of fricken’ video. But that was the first time I’d done that and I got caught, sure enough.”
“Of course the guy says, ‘This is the first time I did it!’” says Morrissey. “Of course he says it was someone else the whole time.”
It just so happens that I found out about this story toward the end of the season, with the Los Angeles Kings in town. Schmidt had told me Dubois set him up. I thought I’d ask Dubois, so I went down to the visitors’ locker room at Canada Life Centre and got Dubois’ side of the story.
“I don’t know what they told you and I don’t even know if they know but it was just a toque that my sister gave me,” Dubois said. “It was in my stall for some reason. I put it in J-Mo’s stall, J-Mo put it in Schmidty’s stall, and then we just started passing it to each other, like a ‘Who’s going to bring it home’ kind of thing. Nobody wanted it, so it was just sitting there.”
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“And then one day I put it in Schmidty’s stall, knowing that he was going to put it in J-Mo’s stall. I told J-Mo, ‘Hey, I think Schmidty’s going to put in in your stall later. So J-Mo put his phone in his stall and it was filming, like a hidden camera, and he has a video. The video is just Schmidty, with his typical smile, opening the locker, laughing, putting the toque there and then closing it really quick and looking over his shoulder. That’s how it all ended. We were all like, ‘Who’s doing this?’ and then we could finally put the blame on Schmidty. That was the end of that prank.”
Shouldn’t it have been obvious that Dubois was to blame?
“I think everybody’s guess was that it was me but nobody ever saw me do it so nobody could tell,” Dubois said. “It kept ending up in other guys’ stalls so no one could be sure what was going on. Then the video, like I said, it’s their own video, so it has to be him, right?
(Photo: Jonathan Kozub / NHLI via Getty Images)
