If he was in the right place at the right time in 2006, he earned this one. So he was there the whole way, working on Nikola Jokic’s hamstring or Jamal Murray’s knee, from training camp to the title, from the party to the back of a fire truck riding among a million people on the streets of Denver during last week’s parade. He was working as a physical therapist there when he got hired by the Nuggets, a full-time job traveling with the team, helping players recover from injury. When his contract with the New England Patriots expired in 2020, mid-COVID, he and his wife moved back to Denver, her hometown. Friesen went to East Carolina, then graduate school at Duke, then a fellowship in Vail. I look around and my mom was right there. “I remember it being crazy light,” Friesen said. On the morning of Game 7, Friesen and his father hid in the showers to listen to Peter Laviolette’s message to the team after the morning skate, and in the final seconds, he had to get out of the way as the NHL marketing people stormed through the dressing room with boxes of championship hats and T-shirts.įriesen was wandering on the ice amid the celebration when his lunch buddy Ladd skated over and handed him the Stanley Cup. He was along for the ride in 2006, getting to know players like rookie Andrew Ladd, who was often on the ice until the end of practice and wound up eating the team meal at the same time as Friesen. Hanging out with his father at work turned into an after-school job during the 2006 season, vacuuming the dressing room, running errands for the equipment managers and refilling water bottles. Friesen’s father Pete was the longtime head athletic trainer for the Hurricanes, and that’s what brought him to Raleigh from Edmonton when he was 8. I feel very fortunate to be able to go this far in my career already, let alone do that twice, it’s a very special gift.” All of this is a gift to go through that again. “I kind of joke around when we won the Cup, I was living my life in overtime. “I feel very fortunate and very lucky,” said Friesen, who attended East Carolina and Duke. That’s some kind of charmed existence, which doesn’t even count the NCAA hockey title he was a part of last year at the University of Denver, when he was in charge of rehab for the athletic department and traveled with the hockey team to the Frozen Four. Last week, he did it again with the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy with the Nuggets, although this time he didn’t get to drink anything out of it. Their first-year physical therapist was doing it for the second time, in a completely different sport.Īs a freshman at Enloe in 2006, Jack Friesen held the Stanley Cup above his head on the ice in Raleigh 17 years ago this week, as a locker-room assistant for the Carolina Hurricanes. There were players on the Denver Nuggets who waited their entire lives to finally hold a championship trophy.
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