In praise of the biggest kid on the ice
I need to talk about Aliaksei Protas. Big Pro. Because I’ve been asked who my favourite Caps are more than once, and every time I get to his name my face does a thing. A soft, slightly ridiculous thing. And I think it’s time I explained myself.
First, let’s address the size. Because we have to. It’s the first thing anyone notices, and it should be.
He is big. And I don’t mean hockey-player big, which is already a different category of human to the rest of us. I mean big big. Six foot six. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds. I have spent years telling anyone who would listen that Tom Wilson is a weather event, and I stand by that, but I need you to understand that when Big Pro stands next to Tom, Tom looks small. Tom. Looks small. I didn’t think it was physically possible. I’ve had to recalibrate my entire understanding of scale.
He’s the sort of large where you half expect him to duck going through doorways in arenas that were very clearly built with him in mind. The sort of large where the boards don’t so much get hit as get notified. And then he skates, and he’s quick, properly quick, and your brain just doesn’t know what to do with the information. Something that big is not supposed to move like that. It’s like watching a wardrobe win a footrace.
* * *
But that’s not actually why I love him.
I love him because every time I watch him, I see a kid. A gigantic, nearly two-metre kid who simply cannot believe his luck that someone lets him do this for a living.
You know the scene in Girls Just Want to Have Fun? Sarah Jessica Parker, big eighties hair, all that energy, the moment where Janey explains how much she loves to dance. She’s twirling a strand of hair round her finger the whole time, and one foot has popped up en pointe all on its own, like her body simply can’t stop dancing long enough for her to finish the sentence. Not because of the competition or the prize or anyone watching, but because it’s the thing that makes her feel most like herself. The thing she’d be doing anyway, even if no one was watching at all.
That’s Big Pro. I am absolutely convinced that somewhere, at some point, Aliaksei Protas has given the exact same speech, just swap the dance floor for a sheet of ice. I can see it so clearly. He’s standing at the bench, all six foot six of him, trying very hard to answer a reporter’s question like a serious professional athlete, and the whole time one skate is drifting out to carve a lazy little arc on the ice, and his hands are twirling his stick round and round, because he physically cannot stand still that close to the ice. His body has already gone back out there. The rest of him is just catching up. He loves to skate. He loves being out there. You can see it in the way he plays, in the grin after a goal, in the way he throws himself back over the boards like he’s worried someone might change their mind and make him sit down. He plays like a kid who got let out early for recess and intends to make the most of every single second of it.
I find that completely irresistible. There’s a lot of cynicism in the world. There’s a lot of cynicism in sport. And then there’s this enormous young man from Vitebsk who looks like he’s having the time of his life every time his skates touch the ice. I’ll take that over cynicism any day.
* * *
And it’s not like he hasn’t worked for it.
The Caps took him in the third round back in 2019. Ninety-first overall. Not exactly a headline pick. He did his time in the WHL, did his time in Hershey (and won a Calder Cup there, because of course he did), and spent a few seasons in Washington learning, in his own words, how hard it is in this league. He even had to wear number 59 for his first few years, because he said he wanted to earn the right to pick his own. He waited until he’d earned number 21 back, the one he’d worn as a junior.
I mean. Come on. That’s a character beat. I couldn’t write that better if I tried.
And then the 2024–25 season happened, and he just went off. Thirty goals. Sixty-six points. Plus forty. His first NHL hat trick. Out of nowhere, apparently, except it wasn’t out of nowhere at all. He’d been working on his skating, and it showed. Pierre-Luc, who knows a thing or two about being underestimated, said the biggest part of Pro’s game isn’t his size, it’s his brain. “Pro’s extremely smart,” he said. He wins battles because he’s in the right place, not just because he’s the biggest thing in the building.
Though being the biggest thing in the building certainly doesn’t hurt.
And what does he say about all of it? That there’s so much work ahead of him, and he’s excited about it. Of course he is. Of course that’s his answer. He just wants to keep skating.
* * *
Now, I can’t talk about Big Pro without talking about Little Pro, because the Hockey Gods occasionally have a sense of humour and gave Washington a matching set.
Ilya, his little brother, also a Caps draft pick, has gone and grown to six foot six as well, which means “Little Pro” is now a purely administrative title. Ilya made his NHL debut last April, picked up a point in his very first game, and this season he’s up with the big club and scoring goals. Two enormous Belarusian brothers in the same jersey, and I’m told that at practice they mostly just yell at each other. Ilya has said Aliaksei yells at him more.
If that isn’t the plot of a found family hockey romance waiting to happen, I don’t know what is. (No, I’m not taking notes. Yes, I am taking notes.)
* * *
Which brings me, slightly sheepishly, to a confession.
If you’ve read any of my books, you may have noticed a pattern. My hockey players are, for the most part, enormous. Not “tall for a romance hero” enormous. Huge units. Men who should, by rights, have their own postcodes. Men who have to turn sideways to get through a door and apologise to the furniture on their way past.
And I don’t seem to have any in-betweeners. There’s no tidy, medium-sized winger quietly minding his business in the PHL. If you’re on one of my teams, odds are you’re built like a refrigerator that took up weightlifting.
I’d love to tell you this is a carefully considered artistic choice. It isn’t. It’s Big Pro’s fault. And Tom’s. And PL’s. And now Little Pro’s too, because apparently the Protas family didn’t think one was enough. I’ve spent years watching these absolute mountains of men play hockey, and somewhere along the way they quietly recalibrated my sense of what a hockey player is supposed to look like. My brain now thinks six foot four is “compact.”
What can I say? I’m a schmuck for the big boys. Specifically the ones who are a bull in a china shop on the ice, all crashing and banging and noise, and then step off it and turn out to be ridiculously, disarmingly gentle. The ones who’ll flatten someone into the boards on Tuesday and be photographed carefully holding a puppy on Wednesday like it’s made of spun sugar. That contrast gets me every single time. It got me in real life first, and it’s been getting me on the page ever since.
So if you’ve ever wondered why every second hero in the PHL needs his own postcode, now you know who to blame. Write your complaints to Washington. I’m not changing a thing.
* * *
So that’s why he’s one of my favourites.
He’s huge. He’s fast. He’s smart. He’s a third-round pick who got there through sheer hard work, and he’s the only man on the planet who can make Tom Wilson look small. But mostly, it’s the joy. Every shift, every goal, every grin, he looks like a kid who loves to skate and can’t believe he gets to do it every night in front of a building full of people who love watching him do it.
I hope he never loses that. I hope he’s still grinning like that in fifteen years.
And if he ever wants to give that speech for real, I’ll be in the front row. I’ll bring the eighties hair.
— Bella
