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When Moore was born, he was showered with soccer jerseys, maybe three or four uniforms, at least one a complete blue-green-and-yellow Brazilian kit. That, of course, was the sport he was destined to play, given that his mother Vanusa was from Brazil.

They put him into soccer at the local community center, an arena that was attached to a hockey rink. But instead of diving wholeheartedly into the sport, Moore kept running away. It happened so many times that Vanusa joined the coaching staff, as an assistant, so she could focus on tracking down her son and returning him to his rightful place.

“He would run away and would go and watch the other people play hockey,” Vanusa said. “We were not very familiar with it. It was very hilarious because we didn’t have the vocabulary – he was little, probably around three or so – and he would say, ‘I want to play that.’ And it’s like, ‘No, honey, let’s go back to soccer.’ It happened every single time.”

Moore wanted no part of the sport. He wanted no part of skiing, either, the sport his father grew up with. Finally, they gave in. It was hockey for him, a sport he was unlikely to have even tried had the family not found its way to the Greater Toronto Area.

And that happened by a quirk of fate, when Vanusa Moore found out she was pregnant while the family was on a one-year work assignment in Canada.

“I thought I had a problem with Tim Horton’s, like I couldn’t smell Tim Horton’s, I was always sick,” she said. “I told the doctor maybe I have an allergy.”

She did not have an allergy.

Moving while pregnant – and very sick – or moving with a baby seemed too daunting to even attempt and, so, they stayed. Mississauga was an area that reminded them of Switzerland, of Geneva, where they had previously been, and it started to feel like home.

For Moore, so did hockey. At six, he found his way to a coach, Chris Stevenson, who nurtured him and his passion, even as his family learned along with him.

“I’m not huge on kids playing up, but seeing the talent that he had, it was a no-brainer for me,” Stevenson said. “And then meeting him, even at six years old, he’s looking you in the eye, he’s shaking your hand. … He’s literally the most coachable kid I’ve ever met in my life. The more you pushed him, the more you got out of him.”

Stevenson recalled a moment when Moore was 12 years old, when he was talking the players through one of his systems and Moore stopped him, saying, “Coach, that’s not usually what you tell us.”

“In that moment, you could realize how much he paid attention and how much his attention to detail was on point, because 90 percent of the other kids just nod their heads, like oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, sounds good,” Stevenson said. “Where he was really like, are you sure that’s what you want? And that really opened my eyes on how much he was listening. Those are the kids you want to coach.”

He was competitive, too, a player who went back and forth with Michael Misa, the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft by the San Jose Sharks, as the best on the team for years and years, a player who when it was predicted before the draft that he could potentially go in the first round, did not celebrate his position, instead becoming laser focused on how he could be better than those listed ahead of him.

“That’s who he is,” Stevenson said. “That’s kind of the thing where he got drafted, I think that’s probably the best thing. Because when you get him motivated and angry, he just constantly pushes to be better.”