Former No. 1 pick Alexandre Daigle reflects on NHL career and "unrealistic" expectations

Alexandre Daigle had a career most hockey players could only dream of, registering 616 games in the NHL.

But rather than being remembered for what his career ended up being, Daigle is most often remembered for what it wasn’t.

The first overall pick in the 1993 NHL Draft with the Ottawa Senators, Daigle was supposed to be the league’s next marketable star — as fans latched their hopes onto the French Canadian junior phenom.

Daigle hit the same career high in points — 51 — three times across his 10 NHL seasons, but never quite became the professional hockey superstar he was expected to be.

He was out of Ottawa after four-and-a-half seasons, playing for six NHL teams over the course of his career.

But while many fans, pundits, and media have wondered what led him to not live up to his full potential, Daigle is the subject of a new documentary on Prime Video, Chosen One, where he offers up a bit of his own reflection on how his old career unfolded.

What exactly happened to Daigle?

Now 48 and living in Montreal, Daigle’s life is quite different than when he was a teenage star plastered across newspapers, magazines, and TV as the next face of the NHL.

“Nobody recognizes me anymore,” Daigle said in an interview with Daily Hive. “Time passes, and there’s new people in the media.”

The documentary details how Daigle, who put up 137 points in just 53 games with the Victoriaville Tigres in his draft year of 1992-93, struggled to deal with the expectations once he turned professional.

“It’s fun to be a celebrity until you are a celebrity because it’s not meant for everybody; there’s a lot of sacrifice. And for me, so being a celebrity really was never something I was I was looking for,” Daigle added.

The documentary also discusses the hype surrounding Daigle’s rise as a prospect akin to that of Connor McDavid or Connor Bedard. And while his physical talents were always one step ahead of his competition during his rise to the NHL, Daigle admitted that he lost a bit of a mental edge at age 15 and was never quite able to recover.

While sports psychologists are a staple of today’s NHL, the profession — and even the stigma around seeking help for mental health — was one that was foreign to Daigle and other players at the time.

“Did I ever not love the game? No, because, you know, I wouldn’t play today, I wouldn’t coach today, if it was the case,” Daigle said. “I had a burnout, and I couldn’t reset it and have that little edge… I couldn’t play to the fullest of my talent.”

Daigle initially took a two-year hiatus from hockey in 2001-02 at age 25 before coming back two seasons later, splitting his time between the AHL and NHL.

Daigle says he eventually was more accepting of his own career arc, which included spending four seasons in Switzerland at the end of his career.

“My mental health was more resetting my goals. You know, it was not depression. I was lucky enough that I was not part of that. But it was more [finding a] reset,” Daigle added.

Though some might [see] playing abroad as the end of the road, Daigle didn’t quite view it that way, calling it “a life-changing experience,” which included a series of championships with Davos HC.

While he hasn’t played professionally in nearly 15 years, Daigle’s passion for the game remains. He’s at the Bell Centre to watch the Canadiens “maybe once or twice a month” while finding time to coach for his kids’ teams. And he’s still playing along with a league of ex-pros, hitting the ice a few times a week.

Daigle hasn’t done much to speak about his own life since he last played professionally in 2009-10, save for a rare podcast or radio appearance. But when approached to be part of the project, it didn’t take Daigle long to come to a decision.

“They explained it to me, and I decided to do it for the simple fact that I could probably tell my side of the story,” Daigle said. “My kids never saw me play hockey, so they don’t really know what I went through.”

What if Daigle came into the NHL today?

The NHL environment that Daigle entered is a drastically different one than today: nine new expansion teams entered the NHL from 1992 through 2001, with the Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights joining the NHL in the next two decades.

The Senators missed the playoffs every year Daigle was on the team, save for 1996-97 when he was traded away to Philadelphia, winning no more than 18 games in each of their first four years.

One of the biggest hurdles for a young player like Daigle to succeed in the league was the quality of his teammates, given the restrictive NHL expansion drafts that allowed 14 position players and two goalies on every team to be protected.

That didn’t leave much of a support system of veteran NHL talent to play alongside young players like Daigle, who were expected to step in and be one of the team’s top players right away.

From the start of the 1993-94 through season through the season he left in 1997-98, Daigle was third on the Senators in scoring over that span, putting up 172 points over 301 games in Ottawa. But the Senators finished dead last in both goals for and against over the total five-year span, hardly an environment for a young player to do well in.

“The expectation on Canadian teams and Canadian players is through the roof and magnified by the fact that I speak French and [Ottawa is a] French-speaking city, the expectations were unrealistic for sure,” Daigle said.

Daigle recalls a conversation with a friend complaining about Seattle and Vegas’ quick success: Vegas reached the Stanley Cup Final in their first season, while the Kraken upset the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the playoffs in just their second year in the league.

“It’s not fair,” Daigle’s friend said to him about the new expansion teams’ quick success.

“I said, yeah, but [the teams in the 1990s] were spending $50 million to get a team, now it’s $650 [million for an expansion fee]… They want everything to be competitive, and I think the league got it right,” Daigle added. “It’s a tough setup. It took San Jose, Ottawa, Tampa — Florida was a bit quicker [to find success], but just to get on track, it was super tough.”

While his own career might not have gone exactly as planned, he’s hopeful that teams around the league have better help today to support their young players.

“The teams are making huge investments with those kids, and they do give them the resources and the time to grow. So I think get the resources around you and use it,” Daigle said.

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