Miller, Trocheck bring childhood friendship to Rangers leadership: ‘That Pittsburgh in us’
Oct. 11, 2025
PITTSBURGH – This winter will mark 20 years since J.T. Miller’s youth team, the Pittsburgh Hornets, let a late lead slip away against the Dallas Ice Jets in the 2006 USA Hockey under-12 national championship game.
It’s fair to say that time hasn’t clouded the New York Rangers captain’s memory. Nor has it dulled his desire to take a playful jab at the Hornets teammate who failed to convert a prime scoring chance in the final period of the loss: current Rangers forward Vincent Trocheck.
“He had a breakaway to tie the game,” said Miller, cracking a smile. “He missed it.”
Two decades later, the childhood friends are once again together — this time at hockey’s highest level. With Trocheck serving as an alternate captain under Miller, who joined the Rangers in a January trade with the Canucks, the 32-year-old centers have been handed the leadership reins for a team that is coming off a calamitous 2024-25 season. They’re charged with setting a new culture that embraces the “No B.S.” mentality on which both players were raised.
“If you were around them for 30 seconds when they were young kids and teenagers, you just saw their passion and love for the game,” said Chris Stern, then the Pittsburgh Hornets’ program director. “It just jumped out right away – and their competitiveness. Amongst a competitive group, those two stuck out.”
That the U-12 national title loss has stuck with them for so long comes as no surprise to Stern. As soon as they walked through the door, he could tell that there was something unique about Trocheck and Miller.
As the duo heads for a homecoming of sorts with the Rangers visiting the Penguins at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday night — Trocheck will miss the game after the team deemed him week-to-week with an upper-body injury — it is a legacy that still resonates today.
“Every kid in western Pennsylvania wants to be either (Sidney) Crosby, Trocheck or Miller,” Stern said. “That’s the level.”
For as long as Stern can remember, football was king in his city.
“When you’re from Pittsburgh and you’re a hockey player, the first question everyone asked was, ‘Why aren’t you playing football?'” he said. “It wasn’t always cool to play hockey in this town.”
That began to change in the 1990s. Stern calls it “The Mario Effect,” a reference to Hockey Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux, who led the Penguins to back-to-back Stanley Cup titles in 1991 and 1992 and sparked hockey fever in western Pennsylvania.
“Hockey became — and still is, to some extent — the most popular sport in the area for the best athletes and the most competitive kids,” Stern said.
Suddenly an entire generation wanted to lace up ice skates, fueling a new wave of talent that began passing through the Hornets’ program.
The 1992 birth year produced eventual NHLers Brandon Saad and Michael Houser, but the 1993 group set the bar even higher. Trocheck was the initial standout.
“Vince was one of those players that, at 5 or 6 years old, had the puck on his stick the entire game,” said Don Barber, a former NHL forward who coached Trocheck with the Hornets. “He was just a step above everybody from a very early age. It breeds some jealousy, but at the same time, it made everybody better around him.”
Trocheck joined the Hornets at 9 years old, often playing against kids several years older than him yet still dominating. Among his new teammates: Barber’s son Riley, who was eventually drafted by the Washington Capitals and earned a few NHL looks, and current Detroit Red Wings goalie John Gibson.
A year later, seeking better competition on the ice, Miller moved to Pittsburgh from his native East Palestine, Ohio, and joined the Hornets’ program. That led to the first meeting between the future Rangers.
“Just a chubby kid that could shoot the puck hard,” Trocheck said of Miller, laughing. “That’s the main thing I remember.”
“He was hot s—,” Miller said of Trocheck, assuring that he meant it as a compliment. “Best player on the team.”
Barber had another thought upon seeing Miller play and finding out that the new kid was in Trocheck’s age group.
“Holy mackerel,” he remembered thinking. “If we could just get these pieces together on one team, wow, that would be incredible.”
Miller and Trocheck faced off as NHL opponents, here with Tampa and Florida, respectively, before reuniting as teammates.
The Pittsburgh Hornets’ roster of 1993 birth years began with only 10 players, four of whom wound up playing in the NHL. Gibson was in net, with two forward lines and two defensive pairs rotating every other shift.
“They did (get tired),” Barber said with a chuckle. “They just wouldn’t admit it.”
The superior talent quickly convinced Stern and Barber to seek out bigger challenges, so they began traveling to tournaments around North America and scheduling game against older teams. What the Hornets lacked in size and strength, they made up for in skill and tenacity.
“We competed against teams that in the warmup, they probably thought, ‘Oh, here we go. This is going to be another one of these 10-1 routs,’” Barber recalled. “But nine times out of 10 it went the other way. … We were as complete of team as you could imagine for 10 kids.”
Added Stern, “It’s kind of demoralizing. Other coaches, you would see that resignation of, ‘Yeah, we don’t have that on our bench.'”
Trocheck was the leader on offense, with Stern fondly recalling his exuberance after every goal that he scored.
“And it wasn’t a cockiness,” Stern said. “It wasn’t anything other than confidence.”
Miller put up plenty of points too, but his bulldog approach — which has become his calling card in the NHL — was evident even then.
“He was a handful, and I mean that in a good way,” Barber said. “He was just a competitive handful.”
Trocheck described young J.T. as “fiery,” even more so than he is today. And while those emotions got out of hand at times, Miller’s coaches recognized that he was usually hardest on himself.
“J.T. was hot-headed, but he was such a joy to coach, because his hot-headedness was always frustration about himself not being able to do more — to will his team,” Stern said. “Long before they put a term on it of dragging your team into the fight, that was J.T. Miller. His hot-headedness was never outward. It was always inward. It was always, ‘What can I do? How can I do more? How can I play better?’ And I think that’s what’s made him a successful professional, quite frankly.”
That intensity wasn’t reserved for game day, either.
Even at 10 years old, coaches recall Miller and Trocheck wanting to be pushed in practice and jumping at every opportunity to work on their skills.
“They were the kids who never left the rink and would practice with older teams,” Stern said. “If another team was going on the ice after them, coaches would say, ‘Hey, we’re a little bit short tonight. You guys want to stay?’ Those were always the first guys that were like, ‘Yup.’ They could not get enough ice time.”
Trocheck believes that this work ethic is a product of where he and Miller come from. As he likes to say, “we’ve got that Pittsburgh in us.”
“Whenever I say that, it’s just that blue-collar mentality,” Trocheck explained. “It feels like all those guys from Pittsburgh, we all have a little bit of grit to our game. We’re a little fiery.”
But the dedication is also a product of how they were raised.
Trocheck’s father, Vincent Sr., began working at 13 years old as a cherry picker fixing phone lines and continued to grind throughout his life, bouncing from car sales to real estate to roofing and whatever else put food on his family’s table. Meanwhile, his mother, Rita, is the daughter of Italian immigrants who raised a big family under modest conditions in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood.
“It’s not the nicest area, but they had each other, had the family, and they all grew up blue collar, but very good people,” Trocheck said. “That’s my roots.”
Miller can relate. While less populated than Pittsburgh, East Palestine instilled similar values.
“It’s a very small town,” Miller said. “Farm-town type of people; hard-working people. Don’t-complain, just-eat-your-meal type people. And I never forget where I came from.”
That like-mindedness drew them together, with Miller becoming a fixture at the Trocheck house after joining the Hornets.
“My parents wanted to get rid of me a little more than his did,” Miller said.
They often roomed together when traveling for games, including what became an annual trip to the Quebec International Peewee Tournament. Miller recalled the hyper-active youths bouncing off the walls, throwing pillows and looking for any chance to compete, which inevitably led to them butting heads.
“We fought the whole time,” he said, grinning. “Just, like, brother stuff. You spend a lot of time together and we’re competitive, both of us. A lot of ego when we were younger, especially. It’s funny how it’s all come full circle.”
“We fought the whole time,” Miller, right, said of his relationship with Trocheck as kids. “Just, like, brother stuff.”
Things changed once they graduated from the Hornets’ U-12 program, with Trocheck leaving town in 2006 to play for the Little Caesars AAA program in Detroit. Miller stuck around with the Hornets for a few more years, playing under Stern on the U-18 team at the age of 15 and eventually receiving an invitation to the U.S. National Team Development Program.
Both were eligible for the 2011 NHL Draft, where Miller was selected by the Rangers at No. 15 and Trocheck to the Florida Panthers at No. 64. But it wasn’t until years later that they rekindled their friendship.
“For 10 years, we didn’t communicate, really,” Miller said. “Just playing against each other and saying hello.”
That changed when they were around 25 years old, Miller estimated, when he joined the same Pittsburgh-based gym as Trocheck for summer training. Soon after, they bought houses in the same neighborhood and began spending a lot of time together again.
“It just kind of fell into our lap,” Miller said. “After that, our families are the same age, our wives are close and all that, so we’ve gotten close with them.”
Then came a tumultuous 2024-25 season for both — Trocheck with the Rangers, who tumbled from Presidents’ Trophy winners the year prior to missing the playoffs entirely, and Miller in a drama-filled saga with the Vancouver Canucks. But those struggles opened the possibility to become teammates again.
Rangers president Chris Drury had long coveted Miller, who he believed could jolt a stagnant lineup and push the team in a grittier direction, and he was finally able to pull off the trade on Jan. 31. Trocheck was a strong advocate behind the scenes.
The reunion wasn’t enough to catapult the Rangers back into playoff position last spring, but Drury decided to double down by naming Miller the 29th captain in franchise history on the eve of training camp. Trocheck was elevated to alternate status after taking on many captain duties without the formal title last season, enshrining the Pittsburgh youth hockey legends as the leading voices in New York’s locker room.
“Vince is a great person to lean on, because we think a lot alike and we believe in the same thing,” Miller said. “We have common goals.”
Those beliefs were forged during their shared youth hockey days, where they earned respect by taking on all comers and cemented Pittsburgh’s place among the country’s hockey hotbeds.
“There was always that little extra chip because we weren’t Minnesota, we weren’t Michigan, we weren’t Massachusetts. It was always like, ‘Oh, you’re from Pittsburgh,'” Stern said. “The beauty for today’s players in Pittsburgh is they never have to repeat where they’re from, and it’s because of guys like J.T. and Trocheck.
“That’s how significant those kids are.”