Gage Quinney was 16, home in Las Vegas for a few days’ break from playing for an elite team in Phoenix, when he told his mom he was quitting hockey.
“I’m done,” said Quinney, who less than a decade later would become the only Nevada-born player to skate in a National Hockey League game — for his hometown team, no less, the Vegas Golden Knights.
Angela Riepenhoff, his mother, didn’t want to overreact but remembers, “I like wanted to throw up.”
Gage Quinney always loved hockey, and the next leg of his icy journey was supposed to be Canada, playing at the major-junior level for the Western Hockey League’s Prince Albert Raiders in Saskatchewan province.
“I know his dad was super upset,” Angela says. “The (Prince Albert) coach is calling. I’m avoiding him. Finally, I have to say to his agent, ‘He’s not going. I think he needs a gap year.’”
Ken Quinney, a former professional hockey player, doesn’t clearly recollect why or when his son wanted to quit but says, “There was that time I was really, really pissed at him, and that must have been it.”
All true, says Gage, remembering deciding to hang up his skates. “A lot of mixed emotions. I was 16 and thought I was missing out on a lot of things at home. A little homesickness.
“For my whole life, I had always played hockey here (Las Vegas). And it (living and playing in Phoenix) was such a big change.”
Angela remembers, too, that Gage had his first “real girlfriend” then, and she and Ken were going through a divorce.
There was no one thing, says Gage, 29, now a skilled, strong-skating center in his fifth season with the American Hockey League’s Henderson Silver Knights, the parent team’s top minor-league affiliate. “At 16, you don’t know what’s going on. ... You don’t know life yet. You don’t know what’s right.”
His parents were confused, because hockey had always been the right thing for Gage. But they were patient, too. Give him time, Angela reasoned.
A mother’s intuition perhaps; Angela understood her most sensitive child’s love of hockey. “He just loved being part of the team. ... He loved it all, the travel, the hockey in the hotel hallways, in the house, in the street.”
Two days after saying he was done, Gage told his mom he was heading to the rink. “He tells me he’s just going to watch some of his friends play,” Angela says.
Months later, Gage ended up playing midget hockey (18 and under) for the Las Vegas Storm, with many of his friends as teammates.
He would head to Prince Albert, a year late, but perhaps more recommitted to the dream of making the NHL. “Maybe I was just burnt out competitively,” Gage says. He figures he needed that year with his friends, a year at home, attending Spring Valley High School.
“At that point, I think the fire was back,” Gage says. “Once you realize you’re not missing out on anything ... you want that chase back.”
TO AN OUTSIDER, Gage Quinney’s chase might seem to have come full circle. Undrafted twice, overlooked often at camps and tryouts as a youth player, he’s dug out from what once was a non-hockey environment, Southern Nevada, returned to his roots, and is within a step of the world’s best league. But Quinney yearns to be an NHL regular. His chase, recently derailed by illness and injury, continues.
After playing three consecutive games for the Golden Knights in February 2020, his first and only NHL stint, Gage contracted long COVID, which lingered for parts of two seasons.
“It was scary,” he says, remembering how he’d bruise easily and feel overly fatigued. There were some days he couldn’t practice, couldn’t get out of bed. “If it was a physical game, I might not be able to walk or move the next day.”
He must have visited 10 doctors, each one with different advice. It was early in the pandemic, and “no one was sure of what to do,” he says. One day, he woke up and “it’s just like it was gone.”
He bounced back with a superb 2022-23 season: 64 points, including 25 goals, in 66 AHL games. Then last season, a nasty groin tear limited him to eight goals in 39 games.
Silver Knights coach Ryan Craig, for one, is grateful to see Quinney healthy again. “He’s a cerebral player,” Craig says. “High hockey IQ, highly skilled. We use him to take important faceoffs, and he plays the power play and penalty kill.”
THE IMPROBABLE CHASE — the Quinney Quest, if you will — to reach the NHL full-time started with four full seasons in Canada’s WHL, playing for Prince Albert, Kelowna, Kamloops, and four more American stops; Wheeling, West Virginia, of the ECHL (once also named the East Coast Hockey League), and AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Chicago, and Henderson.
Call it improbable partly because Quinney was passed over in the major-junior and NHL drafts. Major-junior and pro teams scour the world for talent. Drafted players from Europe, Canada, and the United States are ahead in the pecking order when it comes to making teams. Undrafted is tough enough. Add the odds of a Las Vegas player reaching the NHL? Skeptical overload.
So, after major-junior, he worked on the skeptics. Quinney made the Wheeling Nailers, an affiliate of the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, on a tryout and notched 44 points, including 18 goals, in 45 games in 2016-17. His production prompted the Penguins to offer a minor-league deal, and Quinney the next season had 14 goals and 19 assists in 57 games with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
That earned him his first two-way NHL contract with the Golden Knights, and he spent his next two seasons with their AHL team, the Chicago Wolves.
At each stop, his undrafted status served as motivation. “It helps put that chip on your shoulder,” Gage says. “I always knew I could play, so not being drafted, that bugs you. ... There’s always a chip.”
Quinney had no idea that signing with the Golden Knights would mean a return to his hometown with the AHL’s Silver Knights. The Golden Knights dropped their AHL affiliation with Chicago, then bought the AHL’s San Antonio franchise in February 2020. The franchise relocated to Henderson, and Gage happily moved right along with it.
“I’m really lucky, playing at home now, still playing high-level hockey,” he says. “Very lucky, very blessed.”
GAGE WAS BORN in Las Vegas the summer of 1995, between his dad’s second and third seasons with the Las Vegas Thunder of the International Hockey League. From New Westminster, British Columbia, less than an hour’s car ride southeast of Vancouver, Ken was a gifted scorer who played his off wing — a right-handed shot on the left wing — for the Thunder, which played home games at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center. He scored 189 goals in five seasons in Las Vegas.
Ken had been a 10th-round draft pick in 1984 by the NHL’s Quebec Nordiques (which in 1995 became the Colorado Avalanche). He played 59 NHL games over parts of three seasons. Following his stint with the Thunder, in 1998, the family moved from Las Vegas to Germany so Ken could finish his career with the Frankfurt Lions of the Deutsche Eishockey League.
Gage, younger brother, Landon, and mom, Angela, attended most of Ken’s practices and games. When Gage wasn’t pleading with Angela to play goalie so he could fire shots at her, he was skating with her on an outdoor rink near the team’s practice facility.
Angela, a native of Nova Scotia, would skate while pushing Landon in a stroller as Gage scooted about the ice.
Gage remembers only that their dwelling in Frankfurt was near a bakery. “The pretzel bread,” he says. “We’d go every morning for pretzel bread.”
At the end of the 2000-01 season with Frankfurt, Ken stopped playing professionally. Angela thought the family might go back to Canada, but Ken loved Las Vegas’ weather. So, they headed back to the desert, and Gage, now 5, began skating in earnest with his dad as coach.
Ken, 59, is now a firefighter with the Clark County Fire Department. He says he never coached his sons with the idea of hockey being a career. “I just wanted them to have fun,” he says. “I wanted them to love it like I did.”
SEVERAL PEOPLE CLOSE to the sport, including many who have witnessed Gage’s growth as a player, agree with Craig, the Henderson coach — Quinney is talented, smart, and a fluid skater, who solidified the Golden Knights’ third line during his call-up. He is more than good enough to play in the NHL.
“He’s highly skilled, a strong skater and can shoot the puck a ton,” says Henderson resident Jeff Sharples, a former NHL defenseman with the Detroit Red Wings and handful of AHL and IHL teams, including three seasons as a teammate of Ken Quinney with the Thunder. “He’s an NHL caliber player.”
Ken Quinney agrees. But as someone who had great seasons in the minors — seasons of 41, 37 and 55 goals — he also is realistic. “If I was good enough, I’d have made it. So, if a player is good enough, he’ll make it.”
What’s the holdup for Gage, then? “Right time, right place,” Ken says.
Says Craig: “A player right there, so close, just needs an opportunity, and when his time comes, he needs to grab it.”
Sharples, who does some broadcast work with the Silver Knights, says Gage probably would have been promoted to the NHL team during the 2020 playoffs, the pandemic tournament. The Golden Knights had several injuries, providing an opening. But his long COVID likely shelved that chance, Sharples says.
“I’ve always told him the only things you can control are your work ethic and your attitude,” Ken says. He also realizes what his son is up against. NHL teams each year bring in younger, highly regarded draft picks, and those languishing in the system drop deeper in the prospect pool.
The other obstacle in Quinney’s quest is the Golden Knights’ depth at center ice. Jack Eichel, Tomáš Hertl, William Karlsson, and Nicolas Roy give the Knights arguably the NHL’s deepest, most versatile group of centermen.
“Look at the players at center with the Golden Knights, they’re world class, and that’s tough to crack,” Sharples says.
Gage is pragmatic. Climbing the major-junior and pro ranks, he has heeded his dad’s advice on work ethic and attitude. “You just have to work your way up,” he says, “and then everything always plays itself out at the end.”
This season had a hectic start for Gage. He married a Las Vegas woman, Ashley Benson, in the summer of 2023. The two moved into a new house this fall and are expecting their first child in December.
Admittedly, playing and living again in Las Vegas is great, he says. “Sometimes I think about it, and I can’t really believe it.”
But he’s also in the last year of a two-way deal with the Golden Knights ($475,000 in the AHL, $775,000 in the NHL). He’ll be an unrestricted free agent in July. His first choice is to remain with his hometown team. But he realizes that “it’s a business.”
“Obviously, I’m from here, but if another opportunity comes, it’s not something I’m opposed to,” he says.
After all, he stopped playing prematurely once. No reason to do it again.