Like the pro for whom he is nicknamed, Ryan Maki has become a physical force.

It was just before the first road trip of the season when Harvard hockey forward Ryan Maki learned that his left foot, which had been bothering him for a couple of weeks, was in fact broken.

He didn’t travel that weekend, but those were the only two contests he has missed all year. Thanks to the help of his trainer, Maki returned with a skate enveloped in hard plastic—spray-painted black, no less, so other teams wouldn’t know to be gunning for the foot.

“It still stuck out pretty bad,” he says now, five months removed from the experience. “Who knows, I may still patent that thing.”

Combine the broken hoof with a month-long virus and a host of pesky injuries, and it’s not hard to see why the Michigan native doesn’t light up at the thought of this season’s first half.

Coach Ted Donato ’91 says of the junior, “Ryan was hurt at the beginning of the season, and he kind of played through it.”

Maki simply says he was “focusing on the wrong stuff,” on “being too cute, on creating too much offense.”

He’s a big kid, 6’3 and 218 lbs., and much of his game is dependant on sheer physicality. On the forecheck, along the boards, and now on a line with offensive sparkplugs Kevin Du and Dan Murphy, Maki’s best bet is to throw his weight around.

“That’s what they do: they create offense,” he says of his linemates. “I try to be physical and help them out, to create space for those guys.”

And what’s good for the line is good for Maki, anyway.

A goal, a primary assist, and a secondary assist are all worth but one point, and in the last 13 games, Maki has tallied 13 points to Du’s 14 and Murphy’s 14. Night in and night out, the line is solid; sometimes, it is explosive.

He had a similar end to last season, but he lost his touch over the summer, maybe, or at the beginning of this season. Whatever the case, the Nashville Predators draft pick never mentions the word “injury” in his analysis.

In any case, he’s figured things out. Now, says his coach, Maki is one of the most consistent physical presences on the ice.

“He’s a guy that we need to be very good on a couple different levels,” Donato says, “but in my mind, he’s elevated his play so much in the second half of the season that it’s really made our team much better.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.