How USA's Will Horcoff became NCAA's top scorer and a 'unicorn' for Penguins
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Scott Wheeler
Horcoff, picked No. 24 by Pittsburgh in the 2025 NHL Draft, leads college hockey with 19 goals in 20 games.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Brandon Naurato gets excited when he talks about how far Will Horcoff has come in a year.
It was Dec. 23, 2024, when Naurato called him and posed the question, “What do you think?”
At the time, Horcoff was playing at USA Hockey’s NTDP, and his draft year wasn’t going according to plan. Naurato and his University of Michigan Wolverines were preparing for the second semester. They weren’t initially planning to bring Horcoff in until his post-draft season, but Naurato felt his team had a need at the net-front on the power play, he had an open scholarship slot to use and he knew that the 6-foot-5 forward was already academically admitted to the school for the following year.
He couldn’t promise him anything but told him that they recognized that it was his draft year and laid out where they saw him fitting in if he wanted to consider joining them for the second half. A couple of weeks later, he made his NCAA debut at Wrigley Field in front of 60,000 people and had a goal and an assist.
He arrived on campus in Ann Arbor, Mich., slotted as a projected third-round pick by NHL Central Scouting. In June, the Pittsburgh Penguins took him with the 24th pick in the NHL Draft.
Almost exactly a year after that phone call, he has two points and eight shots on goal through three games as a member of Team USA at the World Juniors. When he left for the Twin Cities, he led college hockey in goals with 19 in 20 games. He’s a sophomore now, but it’s his first full season of college hockey.
“It’s an awesome story,” Naurato told The Athletic. “He’s a 6-5 unicorn to me who was almost like a baby deer last year where he’s still growing into his body, and when all this comes together, it was like ‘This is going to be special.’”
Before Horcoff and Naurato were Wolverines together, Horcoff’s dad, Shawn, a former NHL captain, was Naurato’s boss with the Detroit Red Wings.
Naurato was a development coach for them before getting hired at Michigan, and Shawn was in the middle of his rise through the ranks as an executive in Detroit, going from director of player personnel to his current role as assistant general manager.
From ages 11 to 14, Will worked with Naurato on the ice. Respecting Shawn and knowing Will, the decision to extend the early offer to join the Wolverines last year became a bet on the person as much as the potential.
“He’s academically intelligent, he’s a worker and he’s always trying to get better and just has the right mentality,” Naurato said.
He’d also followed Will’s career closely, had been rooting for him and knew that before the national program, he’d always been a scorer.
“It’s not like they didn’t do a good job, but different people view different players differently, and for me, I love offence and appreciate guys that can score and get open and shoot pucks and make plays, and that was always there,” Naurato said.
All of the credit for what has happened since, though, belongs to Horcoff, Naurato insists. He put the work in right away and had a big summer.
“What he’s doing this year, he’s not getting lucky. Like, he’s not hot. He’s in spots to do it, and he’s doing it, but like his routes away from the puck and how he gets open and his shot are elite,” Naurato said.
Michigan assistant coach Kevin Reiter has watched Horcoff play since bantam, too, and has “always really loved his IQ and the way he can use time and space with his frame.”
He felt it was about getting Horcoff with players who could get him the puck in the good spots he puts himself in, because they knew he could “really shoot it.” Once he joined them, they tried to do that and give him rope to make mistakes and find his game.
There were some growing pains at times last year, but they could feel it coming together for him.
Reiter said Horcoff’s dexterity and coordination have come a long way in a short period. Both Reiter and Naurato laughed about his big moment at the NHL Scouting Combine in June when he broke the long jump record and gave an animated fist pump to his former NTDP strength and conditioning coach Brian Galivan in the crowd.
They say that moment sums up Horcoff. Other players would have been stoic in front of an NHL audience, or maybe cracked a smile. But he was proud of himself.
“He’s giving Gali credit, like ‘Hey, we did it man, f—in’ rights.’ It was like giving a point to a teammate that had just made a great pass to you. I think he’s just ultra competitive,” Naurato said.
It was also a signal of his athletic ability, which Reiter argued has always been there.
“I know some people have beat him up a little bit for the skating or the acceleration, but he has put together a really good program and he works at it all the time,” Reiter said.
That program has included work with new assistant coach Max Pacioretty, who Reiter said has been huge for him, and with Reiter in pre-scouting goalies and finding spots he can exploit.
Horcoff has also brought a new energy to Michigan’s practices, where Naurato and Reiter said he’s constantly whooping it up and celebrating with his teammates. They both separately compared him to his future Penguins teammate and Michigan alum Rutger McGroarty in terms of his energy, constant smile and gravitational pull.
All of those qualities also drew in the Penguins — who interviewed him twice at the combine, and who he told were his first choice. Penguins assistant general manager Jason Spezza and special assistant Trevor Daley also played with Shawn in Dallas and have known Will since he was a kid.
Will isn’t Shawn, according to Spezza, though. He has his dad’s professionalism and love for the game, Spezza said, but he also has four inches on him, more skill and hockey sense, and “untapped athleticism.”
“We felt like he would be a guy who would be great to have in the organization and to work with, knowing that he’d put the work in and we’d be able to maximize him,” Spezza said.
Both Spezza and Reiter said they didn’t see this coming this quickly, though.
“We were attracted to the qualities that are giving him success now, so I’m not shocked, but I’m also pleasantly surprised,” Spezza said. “It’s a hard league to come into and do what he’s doing at that age. For a big man, he gets inside, but he also knows how to find the quiet areas in the slot. He’s got a nice release. He’s got a natural goal-scoring touch. And I just think he’s a student of the game. He spends a lot of time working on his game, thinking on his game and he’s benefiting from that.”
He also spent a lot of time in the summer building more lean muscle mass, and Reiter said, “his body has made a huge transformation, and that’s a huge reason for why he’s at where he’s at now.”
Horcoff said he put on 10 pounds in the short summer to get to his current listing of 201 pounds.
“This was a big summer for me. I filled out a lot in my body. And I still have a long ways to go and think I can be even better next year,” he said. “Adding that weight changed my game.”
He’s not a one-trick pony, either. Reiter talks about how he has scored taking pucks to the net, on breakaways, on fakes, on tips, on rebounds, off passes, with his one-timer, up high and down low this year. Even when the goalies stop it, his shot is so heavy that it creates chaos because goalies at the college level can’t control it, according to Reiter. Naurato said his game has some “FU” to it as well.
“That’s one of the biggest things that has impressed me and is really intriguing for the next level is he scores a lot of different ways,” Reiter said. “You worry when a guy only shoots in one or two different ways, but he has been scoring with a lot of variety and that’s really intriguing.”
When Shawn moved back to Detroit at the end of his career, Will needed a place to play and wanted to join Brian Jardine’s Little Caesars team.
But Jardine’s roster was already full, and so he couldn’t get him on the team. He played in one preseason game for them that year.
It was a game in Windsor, and Jardine hadn’t seen him play before.
Horcoff scored six goals.
Once he joined the team the following season, Jardine had a pair of 1,000-game NHL veterans on either side of him behind the bench: Shawn (who he calls a “brilliant hockey mind” and who Spezza called an up-and-coming executive in hockey) and Kevin Hatcher.
By the time Horcoff’s U15 year was finished, Jardine didn’t think there was a better offensive forward in the country. He was big, he played center and he scored in every which way (including on the penalty kill). Jardine expected, when Horcoff left for the national program, that he’d be in their top six “at a minimum.”
So he’s not surprised — “not in the slightest” — that he’s now become one of the top offensive forwards in the country again.
“Because he was so big at a young age, people would criticize everything that he did. But if you watched him, you knew that it was only a matter of time until he grew into his body,” Jardine said. “And when you have hockey sense, and you have a work ethic that’s instilled, eventually you’re going to get there, and he has.”
Heading into the World Juniors, Spezza felt that because of Horcoff’s versatility, he could fit in multiple spots in USA’s lineup. After playing the first two games on the Americans’ top line with James Hagens and Brodie Ziemer, he started Monday’s third game on the third line with Cole McKinney and Ryker Lee before being re-elevated to play with Hagens and Ziemer in the second half.
After the game, he paused inside Grand Casino Arena to consider what the last year had been like.
“It has been pretty crazy,” he said, shaking his head. “Lots of ups and downs. I’ve learned a ton. It’s hard to believe.”
There’s still work to be done, too, so don’t confuse his steep ascension with a finished product.
Naurato and Team USA both view him as a winger now, and he hasn’t played much over the last few years of the center position he played growing up. While he excels off the puck inside the offensive zone in getting open, Naurato thinks he can hunt and forecheck as the first forward better, and that there are times when he needs to fight through contact more.
“Now we’re just trying to help with other things to hopefully in a couple years be able to put on a Penguins jersey,” Naurato said.