OFF TO VEGAS
TORONTO — Max Pacioretty is a brooder and, in Montreal, sometimes that was hard. It’s an operatic hockey town, filled with glory and tragedy and escalating farce, and he has always been a boom-and-bust scorer. It’s been a bumpy ride, all in all: The Montreal Canadiens have slid out of the serious hockey conversation, rising and falling with and without Carey Price, and Pacioretty was a 29-year-old winger who will be a free agent next summer.
It wasn’t a happy marriage anymore.
So, early Monday morning, Pacioretty was traded to Vegas for Ontario Hockey League scorer Nick Suzuki, failed experimental acquisition Tomas Tatar and a second-round pick.
Vegas lost in the Stanley Cup final in its first season and replaced James Neal with Pacioretty, and the Habs got a young player and a pick. Vegas immediately signed Pacioretty to a reasonable four-year, US$28-million deal. Everybody wins.
Which, for Montreal, is a small but measurable consolation. For the Golden Knights, it is simple: Vegas is going for it. Pacioretty might brood, but it’ll be for a good reason.
The Canadiens, meanwhile, are stranded between eras right now, which constitutes an era in itself. Whatever acrimony and disagreements linger, this is the kind of deal that looks to the future, which is what Montreal needs. But Price and defenceman Shea Weber, 31 and 33 years old respectively, are under contract until 2026, and the Habs have a roster that is not unlike Vancouver’s a few years back, before The Glorious End Of The Sedins: some vets, not enough promising youth, good enough to finish somewhere between sixth and 12th in the eternal hell of National Hockey League sub-mediocrity.
The real problem, then, is the context. The Senators are a roadside garage sale waiting to happen, but at least Ottawa could still move Erik Karlsson, Mark Stone and Matt Duchene before the trade deadline — Vegas still has cap room — though that would be an easier call if Ottawa still had its own first-round pick. That’s bad. But Montreal’s situation might, if you disregard the ownership factor, actually be worse.
Because what is Montreal trying to be? Competitive? A rebuilder? A contender? The answer is yes, no and hopefully — and it isn’t new. During Pacioretty’s time as a Hab, coaches were fired on game days, a player was traded mid period and two losses into the Randy Cunneyworth saga — when Cunneyworth, who did not speak French, was named interim head coach — the French-language Le Journal de Montréal printed a headline in English: “Another loss for Cunneyworth.”
Pacioretty’s seven good years included three playoff series wins by a franchise riding a generational goalie into deluding itself into thinking it was closer than it was.
And, through it all, Pacioretty was the best forward on a team without enough good forwards.
Since his first 30-goal season in Montreal in 2011-12, Pacioretty is statistically tied for eighth in the NHL in goals per game with Jamie Benn, Patrick Kane, Brad Marchand and … hey, James Neal. He was 18th in points per game, too, without much in the way of good centres to work with. From ’11-12 to ’16-17 — before last year’s bad-luck, nothing-was going-in, injured-and-snakebit campaign — Pacioretty was fourth in the NHL in goals scored.
He had more trouble in the playoffs. He would brood.
“When I first got called up (in 2009), I scored on my first shot, first period, first game and I thought life was the easiest thing in the world,” Pacioretty told me during the 2014 run. “I thought I was never going back to the minors. And you go two games without a point, three games without a point, four or five, and you feel like you’re the worst person ever, the worst player ever. And at that
point of my career I wasn’t mentally strong enough to come out of that.”
He got better at dealing with it, but the Habs drifted into their current eddy, somewhere between the budding hockey royalty in Winnipeg and Toronto and the gravel-scraping in Vancouver and Ottawa. Montreal should have chosen the latter path.
But they won’t. Eric Engels of Sportsnet translated one answer from Habs GM Marc Bergevin Monday on rebuilding.
“We all have a different definition of the word. … I’m not ready to use that word because it would mean we’re changing everything and starting at zero, and I’m not doing that. I don’t want to use that word. We’re doing a reset, where we’re making changes on the fly, and we want to be competitive and make the playoffs this year … you don’t have a way of guaranteeing you can tank and it’ll work out well for you.”