At 19, Marcel Marcel is 6-4 and 243 pounds, has one of the funniest personalities to ever pass through Fifth Third Arena and is actually named Marcel Marcel.
The Blackhawks obtained a truly one-of-a-kind prospect with their fifth-round draft pick.
“When you see him the first time, he’s a big boy,” said Louis Robitaille, Marcel’s former junior coach with the Gatineau Olympiques this past season. “But for me, with his personality, he’s such a good person. A quality human.”
Marcel didn’t attend the draft in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday and said he didn’t expect to be picked at all. Instead, he was hanging out at his billet family’s house in Quebec, having “just gone on the toilet,” he said — igniting the first of many rounds of laughter in his introductory news conference Saturday that felt more like a stand-up comedy show.
“My billet mom, she was just checking on the phone, and she was like, ‘You were drafted!’ ” he said. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ . . . I was looking on TV, waiting for the pick, and then I saw my name, and my phone went crazy. I got 50 calls at the same time.”
It turned out the Hawks, having selected a number of smaller forwards with earlier picks, wanted to even out the size distribution within their prospect pool and thought Marcel could be worth a flier. Scouting director Mike Doneghey said he would “always get a text on Marcel” this season from scouts watching fellow Hawks prospect Sam Savoie play for Gatineau.
The NHL remains a long way off for Marcel — probably even longer than for an average fifth-round pick — but the fact that he’s enormous and a surprisingly decent skater is intriguing.
He came over from Czechia last summer as a winger, and he still projects to be a winger at the pro level, but his mobility impressed Gatineau’s staff enough that they moved him to center a few weeks into last season. He had 32 points in 52 games; Savoie ranked fifth on the team with 59 points in 60 games.
“[Marcel’s] skating is good,” Robitaille said. “It’s more like the first three steps [that he needs to work on]. He’s never going to be the quickest when he has that frame, right? But he’s so powerful in his stride, and he has a good glide.”
And of course, once he gets in front of the net, he’s dominant.
“Whoever was in front of him, he was able to outmuscle him,” Robitaille said. “He was a beast out there.”
Marcel described himself similarly, mentioning he’s staying in the Ottawa area throughout the summer to keep improving his explosiveness and adjusting to North America.
That’s a blessing to the local community because his dry yet clever sense of humor must brighten any room he enters.
“It’s important to make people laugh because it’s better than crying,” Marcel said.
Added Robitaille: “He’s always laughing. There’s never a bad day for him. . . . But for me, it was [most impressive] the way he respected everyone.”
And now for the most pressing question: Why is he named Marcel Marcel? Well, let’s let Marcel explain.
“Sometimes when you’re in Czechia, they put your last name as the first and your first as the last,” he said. “[So when my mom] went with my [older] brother to see a doctor, they called her Mrs. Patrick, because he’s Patrick Marcel. But she’s Marcel. At first, she wanted to name him Marcel Marcel, but they couldn’t do it because of the government or something. When I came, it was the only option.
“I’m happy for that. There’s a lot of people who make fun of it like, ‘Whose name is that stupid?’ But it’s cool, I would say.”
