Inside Carter Bear's long road to Canada's World Junior team — and the work ethic that defines him
Bear, Detroit's 2025 first-round pick, drew into Canada's lineup at the World Juniors in Monday's win over Denmark.
MINNEAPOLIS — Carter Bear can’t forget the play.
It was midway through the second period on March 9, 2025, and his Everett Silvertips were down 2-1 on the road to the Portland Winterhawks. After a scrum in the right circle in the offensive zone, the puck squirted to the left-wing corner. Bear chased it like he always does and finished a check on his right shoulder along the boards on Portland defenseman Max Psenicka. As he did, he felt Psenicka fall backwards, and Psenicka’s leg kicked up in their brief clinch, catching the back of Bear’s leg.
When he instinctively got back up onto his feet, his right one gave out. He didn’t know it at the time, but 56 games into his draft year with his WHL-contending Silvertips, his season — and the big plans that he had for the offseason that would follow it — was over. He’d lacerated his Achilles tendon.
“For the doctor to say I’m not going to be playing for the rest of the season, it was pretty hard to hear,” Bear said, looking back on the moment. “It was definitely tough. It was not easy.”
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At the time, he was playing at a 49-goal, 100-point 68-game pace. Despite the injury, the Detroit Red Wings — who he said he had “no clue” were going to select him — took him with the 13th pick in the 2025 NHL Draft. And 295 days after the accident, he stepped out onto the ice at 3M Arena as a member of Team Canada at the World Juniors.
The journey from that night in Portland to this one in Minneapolis was paved by his work ethic — a work ethic which defines his game on the ice and has defined his story off it.
A little less than four months before the injury, the Silvertips were in Seattle, and their new head coach, Steve Hamilton, was beginning to realize what he had in No. 11.
The Silvertips won the game 5-2, and Bear had a hat trick.
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A couple of them were “really impressive,” according to Hamilton, and as time went on, his appreciation for Bear as a player for his team only grew, too.
“Over the course of the year, I just caught myself appreciating some of the things that he did that maybe don’t stand out, but when you see it over and over again, you realize there’s a pattern here,” Hamilton said. “He scores goals where he just finds a way, and he sticks around. But that Seattle game was my first introduction to what became a 40-goal season.”
Bear had two things that drove him: he was “incredibly smart,” and he had a “level of determination that you don’t see.”
“He’s a second, third and fourth effort guy. He just kind of never quits on anything and turns the most casual of plays into something simply because he tracks, outworks, strips pucks and finds a way,” Hamilton said. “(That) doesn’t always get appreciated from a distance, but when you see it firsthand over and over, you really do value that.”