He raised the Stanley Cup as a Raleigh teenager; now he’s got an NBA trophy of his own

There were players on the Denver Nuggets who waited their entire lives to finally hold a championship trophy. Their first-year physical therapist was doing it for the second time, in a completely different sport.

As a freshman at Enloe in 2006, Jack Friesen held the Stanley Cup above his head on the ice in Raleigh 17 years ago this week, as a locker-room assistant for the Carolina Hurricanes. Last week, he did it again with the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy with the Nuggets, although this time he didn’t get to drink anything out of it.

That’s some kind of charmed existence, which doesn’t even count the NCAA hockey title he was a part of last year at the University of Denver, when he was in charge of rehab for the athletic department and traveled with the hockey team to the Frozen Four.

“I feel very fortunate and very lucky,” said Friesen, who attended East Carolina and Duke. “I kind of joke around when we won the Cup, I was living my life in overtime. All of this is a gift to go through that again. I feel very fortunate to be able to go this far in my career already, let alone do that twice, it’s a very special gift.”

In a sense, it’s the family business. Friesen’s father Pete was the longtime head athletic trainer for the Hurricanes, and that’s what brought him to Raleigh from Edmonton when he was 8. Hanging out with his father at work turned into an after-school job during the 2006 season, vacuuming the dressing room, running errands for the equipment managers and refilling water bottles.

He was along for the ride in 2006, getting to know players like rookie Andrew Ladd, who was often on the ice until the end of practice and wound up eating the team meal at the same time as Friesen. On the morning of Game 7, Friesen and his father hid in the showers to listen to Peter Laviolette’s message to the team after the morning skate, and in the final seconds, he had to get out of the way as the NHL marketing people stormed through the dressing room with boxes of championship hats and T-shirts.

Friesen was wandering on the ice amid the celebration when his lunch buddy Ladd skated over and handed him the Stanley Cup.

“I remember it being crazy light,” Friesen said. “There was a lot of emotion. I’m screaming. I look around and my mom was right there. We got a nice picture together.”

The years went by. Friesen went to East Carolina, then graduate school at Duke, then a fellowship in Vail. When his contract with the New England Patriots expired in 2020, mid-COVID, he and his wife moved back to Denver, her hometown. He was working as a physical therapist there when he got hired by the Nuggets, a full-time job traveling with the team, helping players recover from injury.

So he was there the whole way, working on Nikola Jokic’s hamstring or Jamal Murray’s knee, from training camp to the title, from the party to the back of a fire truck riding among a million people on the streets of Denver during last week’s parade.

If he was in the right place at the right time in 2006, he earned this one.

“The in and out of the day to day, dealing with someone in the trenches, where they’re fighting a shoulder injury, finger injury, working with them into the late evening on the plane or early in the morning, hopefully to get them through the game, I definitely have that feeling that this is my trophy,” Friesen said. “The Hurricanes, it was a great story, and I felt like I was a part of that team, but I was going to school while they were going to work.”

That said, for a kid who was born in Saskatoon, started playing hockey in Edmonton and witnessed the Hurricanes’ playoff runs in both 2002 and 2006 both inside and outside the dressing room, there’s still something about that first one.

“I’m pretty biased,” Friesen said. “I am a hockey fan through and through. The Stanley Cup meant a lot to me. That’s who I wanted to be. This is a big accomplishment, a lot longer season being in this role as opposed to my role with the Hurricanes. A lot more responsibility. We’ve had to go through a lot more, so the sense of accomplishment is a lot greater. But the background of the Stanley Cup, there’s just so much more meaning behind that trophy because of my upbringing.”

Freisen this spring reached the pinnacle of team success at 32, a key member of the Nuggets’ support team. But he’ll always be chasing the moment he had as a teen.

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