2009 NHL Draft

The 2009 NHL Entry Draft in Los Angeles made Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s parallel rise into a professional rivalry with immediate consequences. Ilya was selected first overall by the Boston Bears; Shane went second to the Montreal Voyageurs. The draft gave a personal competition a durable public structure: the young stars would play for Montreal and Boston, archrivals whose meeting points kept their careers in view of one another.

The Draft and Its Results

In June 2009, after the selection, Shane and Ilya stood together for photographs. The photographer asked Shane to move closer, and Ilya’s arm brushed his as they pressed together for the cameras. A Phoenix-drafted American defenseman named Sullivan stood to Ilya’s other side, but the order that mattered most to Shane was already set: Ilya had been drafted first, Shane second.

The result landed against a season in which the two had seemed strikingly alike. Both had captained their respective teams to championship victories, earned league and playoff MVP honors, and led their leagues in scoring. Their World Juniors results supplied the sharp contrast: Shane had a silver medal at home, while Ilya had gold. After a lifetime of coming first in hockey, Shane experienced the second overall selection as another defeat, even as the draft began his NHL career.

Montreal and Boston

Shane had good reasons to welcome his destination. The Montreal Voyageurs were a legendary franchise, about a two-hour drive from his hometown of Ottawa. He was fluent in French and English and respected the team, although he had grown up cheering for Ottawa. Those advantages made Montreal a strong fit; they did not erase the sting of being chosen after Ilya.

Ilya’s selection by the Boston Bears made that disappointment consequential beyond the draft order. Because Montreal and Boston were archrivals, the two players’ professional paths would repeatedly cross. Shane recognized that their careers were now inescapably linked: had either gone to a Western Conference team, the rivalry might not have taken hold in the same way. Instead, the draft gave their comparison a recurring setting and a ready public narrative.

A Rivalry with a Private Cost

The draft did not create Shane’s interest in Ilya from nothing. In the six months since the World Juniors, Shane had become increasingly preoccupied with him. The selections intensified that attention by turning a shared record of achievement into a contest with an unmistakable ranking. Shane could congratulate Ilya after the photographers finished, but courtesy did not make the result feel less personal.

That public rivalry later existed alongside Shane’s private fear of being attracted to a man who was also his archrival. He understood the NHL as a place where homophobic slurs circulated in locker rooms and on the ice, and where no player had come out publicly. Ilya’s later response to a slur directed at him treated it with a joke, but the exchange also made the surrounding hostility explicit. For Shane, the possibility of exposure carried professional as well as personal risk; he believed Ilya had as much to lose as he did.

Aftereffects

The draft’s pairing continued beyond the rink. In July 2010, before Shane had played an NHL game, he signed a lucrative endorsement deal with CCM, only to learn that the company had also signed Ilya and wanted to launch an advertising campaign featuring them together. Their competitive connection was already commercially legible: the same contrast that made them opponents could also sell them as a pair.

Years later, Shane described the fear of becoming attracted to his archrival at eighteen as something he had carried for almost a decade. Their private Boston meetings eventually moved from hotel rooms to Ilya’s penthouse, a change Shane resisted partly because entering Ilya’s home made their encounters feel more personal. The draft did not determine the shape of their relationship, but it established the public opposition around which their careers—and the secrecy surrounding their intimacy—would develop.