T.J. “No Relation” Hughes: Michigan’s Mobility Man, a Unique Testament to the Maturity of Freshmen, and a Maestro of Hockey IQ
T.J. “No Relation” Hughes: Michigan’s Mobility Man, a Unique Testament to the Maturity of Freshmen, and a Maestro of Hockey IQ
On the subtleties, habits, and hockey IQ that steered T.J. Hughes from breakout stardom with the AJHL’s Brooks Bandits to a featured role as a freshman at Michigan
If you watch the University of Michigan men’s hockey team on television, you’ll notice the same addendum attached to number thirteen’s name whenever he first touches the puck: “There’s T.J. Hughes, no relation to Luke.”
No, T.J. Hughes isn’t related to Luke Hughes, nor Quinn nor Jack Hughes for that matter, and no, unlike many of his Wolverine peers and predecessors, he isn’t a first-round draft pick. He wasn’t even drafted at all.
Instead, the Hamilton, Ontario-born freshman has carved his own path to Ann Arbor, and with thirteen goals and nineteen assists, he sits fourth on the team in scoring. He plays what EP Rinkside’s NCAA Free Agent Guide referred to as “an intelligent game based on off-puck movement, timing, and play-building.” Unlike the other Michigan Hugheses, T.J.’s game doesn’t hinge on elite skating but rather his guile.
“His biggest strength is that he’s got a nose for the net,” says head coach Brandon Naurato. “He’s got the physical skills to bury pucks, but he’s just really good at getting open and timing when to get in certain spots depending on how the play develops.”
When you watch over and over as Hughes pops up in an open parcel of ice in the offensive zone, just in time to collect the puck and slip it past a goaltender, you have no choice but to conclude that the elusive notion of Hockey IQ is on his side. You’d think he was getting lucky if he didn’t pull off the same trick again and again.
Consider this goal from a December date with Michigan State at Yost:
The finish is nothing extraordinary; Hughes has a yawning net to shoot into after a royal road feed from Keaton Pehrson. However, Hughes created the goal for himself—first by deadening a vigorous Daniel Gucciardi clearance with a surgical first touch to regain possession, then by rolling to the net, stick on the ice and in no hurry.
As all five Spartan defenders list toward Pehrson, Hughes settles into a vacant pocket of ice, his gentle pace maximizing Pehrson’s passing window and his blade on the ice providing an inviting target.
“Hockey IQ—it’s hard to teach it, it’s something you have,” explains Hughes. “Getting open, knowing where to be in soft ice and where you’re gonna be open for passes, getting to the net in the right spot to get that puck, so you can either make the next play or shoot.”
While he doesn’t believe Hockey IQ can be taught, he figures his own youth soccer career at least helped—“I feel like soccer is the same kind of thing as hockey, where you need to open up for getting to the right spots and scissor and make all these different inside plays.” Hughes thrives on “making inside slip plays” or “little two-on-ones” and relishes operating in tight spaces.
Of course, while he arrived in Ann Arbor as a relative unknown, Hughes spent the three seasons prior “roasting” the Alberta Junior Hockey League to borrow Naurato’s phrasing.
In his first season out west, Hughes started slowly with thirty-six points in fifty-eight games. Then in 2020-21, his thirty-one points in twenty games topped the league in a campaign abbreviated by provincial COVID restrictions. Then in his final season with the Bandits, Hughes led the league with sixty-six goals, while giving another sixty-one assists for a staggering 2.17 points-per-game over a sixty-game season.
Hughes called his move across Canada from Hamilton and the western end of Lake Ontario to a town of 15,000 about 115 miles southeast of Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway “not scary but different.” It didn’t take too long to find a home on a squad he describes as “always a winning team, great skilled players, it’s always fun to play with them.”
Under head coach and general manager Ryan Papaioannou, the Bandits play an attacking-minded brand of hockey that suited Hughes just as it had once done for Norris Trophy-winning, Stanley Cup champion defenseman Cale Makar, who notched seventy-five points in fifty-four games in his final season under Papaioannou with Brooks back in 2016-17.
On The Coaches’ Site’s Glass and Out Podcast, Papaioannou explained his team’s ethos as follows:
“For us, it’s all about trying to flip the entire script. Everybody’s typically talking about defense first, and we’re talking about the exact opposite—about offense, how we’re going to create it, working through our set O-zone stuff, our O-zone faceoffs, our line rushes—every possible way that we can manage pucks and create offense all the way back to defense.”
In that breakout third season in Brooks, Hughes played alongside Ryan McAllister (now in the midst of a forty-five point season as a freshman for Western Michigan) and Devin Phillips (who has scored seventeen points as a freshman for Holy Cross). Hughes credits a shared understanding of how to play amongst those running mates for his dizzying production.
“I would just say who I was playing with,” Hughes offered, when asked what went into his 127-point season. “We all had the same mindset—just middle plays. We had a lot of backdoor goals. We had a really good connection, and we were confident with each other that we trust each other to make the next play and the right play.”
After Michigan assistant Bill Muckalt heard about Hughes, Naurato turned on the tape to see whether his gaudy numbers emerged via tranferable means. When asked what he was looking for, Naurato explained “Guys who can make plays in tight areas and under pressure and then just winning battles and races. Then you’ve got what he did on the power play. If I just watched breakouts or just watched power play shots or whatever, you can see the trends in their game, and if you feel that translates, they’re in a good spot.”
Naurato added that “some guys fool you—they’re just on a hot power play or they’re the guy that goes to the back post and somebody’s feeding them. Well, if you play with a guy that’s not giving you that pass, is it still going to work out?”
It didn’t take long for Hughes to make clear that the transition from Papaioannou’s iteration of attacking hockey to Naurato’s would be a smooth one.
“He started on the fourth line and then started taking off once we put him on the first power play,” reflects Naurato. “So as he figures out the other things, I was trying to put him in a spot where he felt really good and could contribute, and then it turned into—I don’t know if it’s first line, second line, third line, but the line with Duker and Samo, he’s earned the right to be there.”
To Hughes, the transition from the AJHL to the Big Ten wasn’t a “huge, huge jump,” but “as you go up a level, everything gets a little bit faster, everyone has better sticks and better hockey sense.”
For Naurato, Hughes’ success with McAllister in particular helped clarify the environment in which the freshman center would thrive. The head coach didn’t believe his numbers were “inflated” by his linemates but rather “they were just that good.” “TJ’s super smart, so you’ve got to put him with other smart players, and I think Duker’s Hockey IQ is really high and so is Samo’s. They’ve worked really well together.”
Still, it’s not as though the move to the United States and the college game came without growing pains. He can no longer patronize Boston Pizza or Montana’s (he and his fellow Bandits’ go-tos after games in Brooks), but he can still stop by Tim Horton’s for his “a medium black coffee and a nice donut—either a Boston cream or a sour cream glazed.”
The one thing he doesn’t appreciate about his move south is the exchange rate, but his playoff mullet, which he claims is the same length as before, just with the sides shaved, provides a small reminder of home.
“When you’re a freshman, you’ve got a lot of things coming at you, so it’s just about getting help from coaches and other teammates, just kind of failing forward,” Hughes says of his on-ice transition to college.
“A couple of things for me this year were just being in the right spot and stopping instead of just gliding away. When you stop and you’re patient for the puck, you end up in the right spot, and then the big one offensively is just getting your butt out, shielding, and being able to steer away pressure.”
Of the latter adaptation, Hughes says “That one’s 100% Nar. He’s been teaching that to everyone the whole year. It’s really cool to see because when I watch NHL games, they’re all doing the same thing—just getting your butt out, showing the opponent your back, it really helps to shield and give you an extra second to make the play.”
Naurato never doubted that Hughes would score in college, but he’s even more impressed by the freshman’s off-ice habits. “He’s the ultimate student of the game—everything off the ice, his body, rest and recovery, how he takes care of himself. He’s a pro.”
Naurato continued: “As a freshman, T.J.’s had a great year, and he’s gonna get a lot of points at Michigan, and the other parts of his game aren’t bad, but he wants to play in the NHL, so they have to be that much better, and I think he’s really worked on that stuff.”
Fellow freshman Seamus Casey painted a similar picture after Tuesday’s practice: “T.J. works his butt off every day in practice, working on his draws, he might still be on the ice right now [thirty minutes after the scheduled end of practice].” Hughes confirms this when he arrives at media availability a few minutes later.
Casey adds that Hughes’ devotion to his body has earned him a nickname, sharing “We call him the Mobility Man because he works so hard. I can’t say enough good things about him off the ice. What he does in the gym, what he does to prepare himself to get on the ice. He’s always stretching, working on getting himself more mobile, hence the nickname.” Casey finds himself tailing Hughes around the weight room for tips.
Hughes chuckles at the mention of the nickname, before confirming Naurato’s and Casey’s assessments of his commitment to taking care of himself.
“The last two-and-a-half years, I’ve been getting into it—just the idea of longevity and making sure your body’s prepped for the weekend,” Hughes explains, noting that it’s not about some complex routine but rather daily effort. “Just doing a little bit every day whether that’s quick recovery or mobility, all that stuff, half an hour to an hour a day.”
As the end of his freshman year approaches, Hughes is delighted with his decision to come to Michigan, saying “Every single day, I’m grateful I’m here, and there’s so many resources I take full advantage of.”
He relishes access to a first-class gym, “being able to go on the ice early whenever you want,” a “great academic center” for help with school work across the street from Yost, an “awesome” coaching staff that will “always watch video with you.” In short, “everything’s perfect.”
When he’s not at the rink, Hughes loves watching the NHL. He began wearing thirteen for Mike Cammalleri (a happy accident that his childhood Canadiens fandom led him to an idol whose alma mater he would later attend) and Pavel Datsyuk, but now he enjoys studying Patrice Bergeron’s defensive intelligence, Nathan MacKinnon’s dynamism, or the playmaking and scoring of Mathew Barzal, Auston Matthews, and Mitch Marner. He likes Connor McDavid too, “but he’s like insane” so there’s but so much to learn there.
Hughes knows he could save time by watching highlights and acknowledges that he does watch “a decent amount” of those too, but what really interests him is “the behind-the-scenes stuff, the real stuff,” subtleties like using your butt for puck protection that don’t turn up in highlight packs.
Whether through his on-ice intelligence, off-ice commitment to longevity, or studious eye for the finer points of the game, T.J. Hughes makes clear that just because you’re a freshman doesn’t mean you have to be immature. His habits make him a role model, even in his first year of college hockey.
“I feel like I’m a mature freshman,” Hughes reflects. “And I’ve been playing junior for a while, so I feel like I’ve been learning things along the way that I brought here to help me and my teammates.”
If it’s maturity and experience that count most in the playoffs, Hughes has the young Wolverines covered there too. Papaioannou’s vision of offensive dynamism in Brooks wasn’t restricted to the regular season. Hughes helped guide the Bandits to the AJHL’s Inter Pipeline Cup and then the CJHL’s Centennial Cup a year ago.
This offseason, NHL teams will surely come calling the undrafted free agent, but Hughes’ focus is on something much more immediate. “I honestly don’t really care about [the NHL] right now. I just want to win the Big Ten and then the National Championship with the guys and do it for Michigan.”
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