Two leagues, five rings: How Mathieu and J.P. Darche forged their unusual NFL-NHL success
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Peter Baugh
Separated in age by only 21 months, the Darche brothers navigated unconventional paths to their sports’ highest levels together.
Not long after Islanders forward Kyle Palmieri crashed into the end boards in November, general manager Mathieu Darche received a text from his older brother, J.P., with a clip of the play.
“Let me guess,” he wrote. “ACL?”
J.P. would know. A retired NFL long snapper, he’s now a team physician for the Kansas City Chiefs. Unfortunately for the Islanders, his assessment was right. The team announced Palmieri had torn his ACL a day later.
The brief interaction encapsulated how Mathieu and J.P. operate. Separated in age by only 21 months, they kept frequent contact while navigating unconventional paths to their sports’ highest levels as players. Nowadays, the two remain each other’s trusted confidants in their successful second acts in the athletic world: no surprise to their mother, Lucie Darche.
“Right from the beginning, they were more friends than brothers,” she says.
The 49-year-old Mathieu dressed for 250 games in the NHL, and now he’s in his first year as a general manager. He has helped reenergize the Islanders’ fan base by restocking the team’s prospect pool, all while keeping a competitive roster on the ice. Halfway across the country, J.P., 50, practices medicine full-time for the University of Kansas Health System, which is the health care provider for the Chiefs. He has three Super Bowl rings thanks to his work with the team.
The brothers, who grew up in Montreal, have been taken with sports since they were kids. On winter days, they would carry their skates and sticks to an outdoor rink to play hockey with friends until dark. Summer was for street hockey. Sometimes, they’d line up and pretend to listen to the national anthem as if they were Montreal Canadiens players waiting for a game to begin.
Sports dominated conversation, too. Lucie, a school teacher, would urge her sons to read more. Her best strategy was buying them Sports Illustrated magazines.
“Do you want to know how many arguments we had at the supper table where all they would talk about was sports, sports and sports?” she says.
Because of everyone’s busy schedules, car rides to and from practice were often the best time for one-on-one conversation. Lucie cherished those drives — except for the smell of musty gear.
The Darches’ late father, Édouard, shared his kids’ passion for sports, but he never forced them to play anything specific. His only rule was that they couldn’t quit in-season. That meant Mathieu once had to suffer through a swimming season after quickly realizing he didn’t like it.
“We did every sport,” says Mathieu, who opted out of hockey one season so he could ski more at the family cottage. Along with hockey and football, the brothers tried everything from baseball to soccer to tennis to golf. Their older sister, Isabelle, took to swimming.
“Once we got older, in college and even after that, we weren’t the guys who were just (burnt) out,” J.P. says. “All that extra stuff that kids do nowadays, we didn’t do it. We played sports just because we loved it.”
J.P. was two years ahead of Mathieu in school, and every other year, they were in the same age group for hockey. Lucie might say her sons are more friends than brothers, but J.P. certainly embraced a fraternal role on those teams.
“I took a lot of stupid penalties to stick up for him,” J.P. says.
Unsurprisingly, given his future in the NHL, Mathieu had more skill than those around him. His older opponents often didn’t take kindly to a smaller, younger player dominating, so they’d sometimes try to go after him on the ice. That’s when J.P., a bruising defenseman, stepped in. Mathieu remembers J.P. getting kicked out of games for hits he laid on opponents — many of which were to make sure his brother felt safe on the ice.
“That’s when I could do whatever I wanted,” Mathieu says with a smile. “He was my bodyguard.”
J.P. stopped playing hockey when he was around 17. He had a poster of Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor on his wall, and football became his athletic focus when he enrolled at McGill University in Montreal. Mathieu followed him there two years later. He had only one college offer for hockey — UMass Lowell — but McGill’s football coach had recruited him and told him he could also play hockey.
Mathieu took snaps at nickelback his first year with McGill and got significant playing time.
“I had a better football season than hockey season,” he says. “I was never recruited for hockey (at McGill).”
J.P., a standout linebacker who set the school record in tackles, was managing a knee injury that year. The brace he wore made long snapping hard, so Mathieu handled those duties that season.
“He was just as good as I was,” the older brother says.
Despite his strong season, Mathieu decided to play only hockey after his first year. It was better, he thought, to put everything into one sport rather than maybe being average at two. The results came quickly: He went from a one-goal, three-point season his first year to 28 goals and 45 points in 40 games in his second.
By the end of his McGill career, Mathieu was a force, catching the eye of NHL clubs. Lou Lamoriello — then with the New Jersey Devils and, eventually, Darche’s predecessor as Islanders general manager — was one of the first people he remembers scouting him, which they have reminisced about since.
“It’s funny how things come full circle,” Mathieu says.
It turned out he wasn’t the only Darche brother on the precipice of his sport’s pinnacle.
After breaking his leg playing for the Toronto Argonauts in a Canadian Football League playoff game, J.P. assumed his athletic career was over. He had already completed two years of medical school while playing at McGill, and it looked like the time to return and finish his degree.
His agent had other ideas. He pitched J.P. to the Seahawks as a long snapper, and Seattle flew him in for a tryout. J.P. was excited but kept low expectations. CFL teammates told him to use the trip as a chance to steal some free gear, so he nervously stuffed his bag with Seahawks T-shirts: souvenirs from what was potentially a one-day NFL experience.
“I always thought I’d never come back,” he says.
His agent called again by the time he got to the airport. The Seahawks wanted to sign him. In May 2000, he inked a deal. The same week, Mathieu signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets. Neither had gone to McGill with professional sports aspirations, but through a mix of strong performance and fortuitous circumstances, they’d made it.
“Now it gets real,” J.P. remembers thinking.
J.P. Darche runs downfield during a 2004 playoff game against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. (Scott Boehm / Associated Press)
The older brother went on to play seven years with the Seahawks, then two more with the Chiefs. He reached the Super Bowl with Seattle in 2006. Mathieu, playing professionally in Germany at the time, flew in for the game. The long snapper he once played over in college was now vying for a championship. (Pittsburgh ultimately beat the Seahawks — the loss J.P. finds most painful from his career.)
Mathieu made his NHL debut with Columbus in February 2001, only a few months after J.P.’s first game with Seattle. Establishing himself as a full-time NHLer proved difficult. He played 552 career games in the AHL and never appeared in more than 14 games in an NHL season until 2007-08, when he was with Tampa Bay. At various points, his mom talked to him about retirement.
“I remember telling him, ‘Mathieu, you have a degree (from McGill). I think it’s enough,’” Lucie says. “And he kept telling me, ‘Mommy, I’m going to make the NHL.’”
“I am where I am because I’m stubborn,” Mathieu says. “I don’t quit on something.”
Mathieu Darche skates for the Lightning in a 2007 game against the Detroit Red Wings at the Joe Louis Arena. (Dave Sandford / Getty Images)
He leaned on J.P. throughout his playing days. They spoke almost every day. They could relate to each other, Mathieu says, because they were living through the same pressures. The two would dissect roster situations — J.P. says Mathieu always had a sense of where his teams were from a big-picture standpoint — and sometimes frustrations. Once, when Mathieu was finally getting consistent NHL time with the Lightning during the 2007-08 season, he found chemistry on a line with Jeff Halpern and Michel Ouellet. Coach John Tortorella switched him off that line, though, and he grumbled about it on a call with J.P.
“Who are you playing with?” he asked.
Future Hall of Famer Martin St. Louis and All-Star Vincent Lecavalier, Mathieu told him.
“Well shut the f— up!” J.P. told him. “Stop whining! You’re playing with the two best players on the team!”
There’s a long history of brothers playing in the NHL, but a pair of brothers playing in the NHL and NFL is rare. According to NHL Stats’ research, Chargers tackle Joe Alt and former NHLer Mark Alt — who played 20 games with the Flyers, Avalanche and Kings spanning between 2015 and 2021 — are the only other two brothers to accomplish the feat.
In 2009, Mathieu signed with the Canadiens, setting up a late-career homecoming. He played 149 of his 250 NHL games with the club and appeared in the 2010 Eastern Conference final. For J.P., whom Mathieu once saw rattle off former Habs captains from memory at a game, the first time seeing his brother play for Montreal was emotional. After that game, Mathieu showed him the locker room. J.P. remembers gazing around the players’ area and taking in the photos of Guy Lafleur, Jean Béliveau and other NHL greats.
Because of his NFL experience, J.P. doesn’t often get starstruck. He’s played in a Super Bowl and shared the field with Hall of Famers, after all.
That day was an exception.
“You remember being a little kid, bonding over the Canadiens,” he says.
Now his brother was one of them.
Facing a life-altering choice, Mathieu turned to J.P. for advice.
After his playing career, the younger brother had used his business degree from McGill and settled into a job at Delmar International, a customs brokerage firm for which he was managing a staff of 40. The Lightning, though, wanted to hire him in a front-office role in 2019. Julien BriseBois, who had gotten to know Mathieu while working for the Canadiens, offered him a role as the director of hockey operations. Mathieu had to decide: Was leaving his home in Montreal and all the stability that came with his job worth pursuing a hockey management career?
“Do you love your job?” J.P. asked him.
“Yeah.”
“How about going to Tampa, becoming a GM at some point, going that route?”
“Oh, that’d be my dream,” Mathieu told him.
So, with encouragement from his older brother, that’s what he chose to chase.
J.P. Darche poses with the Lombardi Trophy after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl against the Eagles in 2023. (Courtesy of J.P. Darche)
J.P., meanwhile, had a promise after his NFL career ended in 2009. His mother couldn’t believe he left medical school for sports, but he immediately told her he’d become a doctor someday. After the Chiefs released him, he made good on his word. He restarted medical school at the University of Kansas, completed four years of residency and earned his degree. He started as a team physician with the Chiefs in 2019, the same year Mathieu made the leap from the business world to the Lightning.
Thanks to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs’ recent run of success, J.P. has three Super Bowl rings, one more than Darche’s two championships as part of the Lightning front office.
“I need to catch up,” Mathieu says.
Mathieu Darche watches a New York Islanders practice in June at the team’s training facility in East Meadow, N.Y. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
The brothers’ father died in August 2024 after a battle with amyloidosis. Later in his life, he wasn’t able to accompany Mathieu on the Lightning’s dad’s trip, which allowed players and staff to bring their fathers on the road. So the now-general manager has brought a different loved one — his older brother — for the past three years, including in December with the Islanders. On the recent trip, J.P. got to meet Patrick Roy, whom he watched win a pair of Stanley Cups with the Canadiens in the ’80s and ’90s. The brothers had a blast and heeded their mother’s pre-trip warning to behave.
Mathieu and J.P. don’t talk on the phone every day like they did when navigating their playing careers, but they still chat around once a week and are in frequent contact via text, including in a group chat that includes their kids. As big a Canadiens fan as J.P. once was, he’s fully converted to the Islanders, just as he did with the Lightning before.
