MINNEAPOLIS — Barry Butt can’t remember the year exactly, but Braeden Cootes was 10 or 11, and that puts it at Christmastime 2017 or 2018.

He remembers the rest vividly. His son, Lincoln, had gathered with a group of friends in their Sherwood Park neighborhood just outside Edmonton for a holiday game of pickup hockey on the backyard rink. Lincoln was a 2003, and on the ice with him were his teammates from Sherwood Park and Braeden’s older brother Sean, a 2005 goalie.

As usual, Braeden, who was two years younger than Sean and four years younger than everyone else, had found his way into the mix.

And Butt says he was “literally the best player on the ice.”

All these years later, Cootes, a 6-foot, 183-pound center, is now a first-round pick of the Vancouver Canucks and playing for Team Canada at the World Juniors. Butt, who has known him since he was little, became his strength and conditioning coach a few years ago. Among his clients are names like Guenther, Guhle, Savoie, Dach and Zellweger.

Cootes was always a little different, even within that group.

Butt’s story from the backyard rink is just one of the many he uses to explain how.

Among them, he’ll tell you about when Cootes joined the 2022-23 Seattle Thunderbirds team that won the WHL title, and he started getting calls from other clients on that team — Colton Dach, Luke Prokop, Dylan Guenther — raving about how good he was at such a young age. “Even then, the older guys gravitated to him, and that doesn’t always happen,” Butt said.

He’ll tell you, too, about the first time he had him in the gym and what an “outstanding” athlete he is — and how Sean, who is currently playing in the AJHL, is actually one of the best athletes he has ever worked with.

Butt was surprised, as he watched Cootes develop, by just how responsible he was on the ice early. But over time, he has realized that that’s just “Cootesy.”

“The biggest thing for me is how well he understands the game,” Butt said. “It’s easy to watch a guy like him and be like ‘Oh yeah, he’s skilled, he’s fast.’ But when you understand the game, you can see that he does too.”

And everyone who has ever been around him has similar stories, and a prediction that comes with it: That at the World Juniors, he was going to find a way to make a difference for Team Canada.

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Ask Seattle Thunderbirds head coach Matt O’Dette or general manager Bil LaForge for a Braeden Cootes memory, and they both go to the same one.

Cootes had joined the Thunderbirds late in that 2023 season as a 15-year-old.

Though he didn’t play in their playoff run, he made an immediate impression on his teammates, opening their eyes with his skill, competitiveness in practices, and the way he carried himself.

During some downtime between two of their playoff series, they had a three-on-three tournament. On a loaded team of junior stars who’ve since gone on to play in the NHL, Kevin Korchinski fought to have him on his team. At the time, O’Dette remembers noting to himself that that was interesting, the respect he’d immediately commanded from older players.