PACIORETTY’S RETURN PROOF CHANGE COMES AT YOU QUICK
Doesn’t seem so long ago that ex-captain was helping Canadiens in 2014 playoff run
The weekend had an elegiac feel. The leaves mostly gone, Sunday devoted to honouring those who fell and those who served in our collective wars — including my father, who was on the Western Front in France when the guns fell silent 100 years ago. The return of former captain Max Pacioretty and the Canadiens’ decision to release Tomas Plekanec marked the end of an era with two of the central figures in the 21st-century history of the CH now gone the way of Andrei Markov, P.K. Subban, David Desharnais, Alexei Emelin, Nathan Beaulieu, Lars Eller, Alex Galchenyuk and so many others. In today’s game, change is fast and fluid. I feel for the 10-yearolds, the kids who get involved, get the jersey with the name of their favourite player on the back — then find that player coming for a visit in the garish colours of the Nashville Predators, the Las Vegas Knights or the Arizona Coyotes. How quickly does it change? We are only four years and change removed from the spring of 2014, but the departure of Plekanec leaves only three players on the roster who were part of that magical run: Jeff Petry, Brendan Gallagher and Carey Price. (If you don’t believe things change quickly in 21st-century hockey, consider Price found himself on the bench against the Knights Saturday, a mere two weeks after he turned in the best game he has played in two years against Boston on the road.) More nostalgia? While Price was a spectator at the Bell Centre, former backup Jaro Halak was shutting down the high-flying Maple Leafs for the Bruins, taking us all the way back to the spring of 2010, a time now so remote it’s like a field trip for archaeologists. With an era slipping away, it’s time to reflect. For me, two players were the gold standard from the time when I was around the club on a regular basis: Saku Koivu and Plekanec. They battled with everything they had, every game. They played hurt without complaint, they were unfailingly gracious after the most bitter losses, they were humble in triumph, they never disgraced the uniform in even the smallest way. As much as I admired Markov on the ice, he could be surly and difficult when he wasn’t playing; Koivu and Plekanec, never. It’s good to know young Jesperi Kotkaniemi was exposed, at least for a time, to Plekanec and his standard of professionalism. Kotkaniemi seems to have been born with class (see his goal celebration after he scored against the Knights), but it can’t hurt for him to be around Plekanec, however briefly. This city’s perpetually cranky fans, meanwhile, have to be soothed at the wide gap between Pacioretty’s numbers this season and those put up here by Tomas Tatar. Pacioretty had nine shots on goal Saturday, but nothing to show for the evening’s work when he desperately wanted to score against the Canadiens, leaving him with two goals and no assists on the season. Tatar has seven goals and eight assists for his new club, including Saturday’s winner to cap a thrilling double comeback. Tatar is younger, more involved, infinitely more inclined to go to the net than Pacioretty was and he costs half as much. In the brutal what-have-you-done-for-me-today world of the NHL, the Canadiens won that trade by a country mile even without Nick Suzuki (theoretically the key player in the deal) and the second-rounder the Knights threw in to get a sniper who might have passed his best-before date. If general manager Marc Bergevin’s 2017 off-season was pure lead, 2018 was platinum with the deal that brought Tatar to town, the drafting of Kotkaniemi and the trade of the enigmatic and erratic Galchenyuk to the Coyotes. In return, the Canadiens got Max Domi, who is merely the straw that stirs the drink. If some of us (guilty as charged, your honour) thought initially the Canadiens lost that trade on the basis of pure talent, we were terribly mistaken. Never mind Domi’s engine revs at about three times the speed of Galchenyuk’s; Domi is a real talent at the centre position, a void for so long. And Domi hustles. There was a play against Washington the last time the two teams met that said it all: Domi skated his way through most of the Capitals defence on a thrilling rush, then dished to Jonathan Drouin at the corner of the net, but Drouin was stopped and the dangerous Caps broke out the other way. There was Domi, busting his butt to get back with an end-to-end sprint to defuse the Washington attack. You could spend hours sifting through film of Galchenyuk’s tenure in Montreal and never find a comparable example. So even as we’re waxing nostalgic, the next bend in the road looks inviting. We suspect the shaky goaltending might suddenly improve when the quiet man they call “Man Mountain” returns to the lineup and that tendency to give up leads late in road games could magically vanish. Meanwhile, we’ll doff our caps to Plekanec and wish him all the best in the Czech Republic. A good man in a sometimes brutal game: if only there were more like him.
If general manager Marc Bergevin’s 2017 off-season was pure lead, 2018 was platinum.