Lucic opens up about on-ice struggles
Winger opens up about struggles, thoughts of retiring earlier this season
Their on-ice battles are debated, dissected, picked apart and criticized. That much has always been true about players in the National Hockey League.
But it’s never clear, of course, what kind of battles these highlevel athletes are fighting internally. Or the depth of darkness to their struggles that happen during an 82-game season.
Or how much time they really spend wondering about how they are perceived by the public, fretting over their careers and their performance, feeling anxious about their spot in the lineup and over-analyzing their role in it all.
Milan Lucic opened the floodgates for that authentic conversation on Saturday’s After Hours broadcast following the Calgary Flames’ 8-4 loss to the visiting Chicago Blackhawks.
In a 15-minute segment, host Scott Oake asked Lucic if he felt pressure to make the high-profile trade work for the Flames, especially after James Neal’s prolific start to the 2019-20 season for the Edmonton Oilers.
He spoke about the on-ice struggles. He hadn’t produced. His tough, hit-anything-andeverything-that-moves approach to the game wasn’t there.
The team was struggling, too. During the first week of November, then-head coach Bill Peters he had torn a strip off the group and challenged them to be better.
Shortly after, the Flames played the St. Louis Blues on
Nov. 9, losing 3-2 in overtime which was the start of a six-game losing skid for the team and Lucic was benched in the third period. He had played 17 games at that point for the Flames, hadn’t scored a goal, and was a minus four.
“Nothing was said to me by anyone,” Lucic told Oake, fellow host Louie Debrusk and the national TV audience while his seven-year-old daughter, Valentina, sat on his lap.
“And I wasn’t really happy about it. I even started questioning whether I should just hang ’em up, you know? It just wasn’t fun for me anymore. And it had nothing to do with James Neal having success. It was just really hard.”
Thirty-one years old. One Stanley Cup. Over 900 games in the NHL. Was Lucic thinking about retirement? Just over five weeks into his first season with the Flames?
It all correlates to what was happening for the big man, who had come to Calgary for a fresh start. Likely, fans wouldn’t have had much sympathy at the time based on his Us$6-million cap hit, $750,000 of it paid by the Oilers. A guy carrying that price tag, that high profile of a trade, shouldn’t make excuses, right?
But no one knew what was really going on.
Not even the general manager, who, later, would be tackling one of the most difficult situations of his tenure in the city: addressing racial allegations against Peters which surfaced on Nov. 25 when Akim Aliu sent out a tweet that rocked the hockey world.
“You have a sense when things aren’t going well for people, right? That there’s frustration,” Brad Treliving said. “You try to be close to your players to know what’s going on, but you don’t always know what’s happening. You try to be there. I think it’s just important to be there for people.”
Still, Treliving said he and Lucic chatted often.
“At the beginning of the year, there was an adjustment for him coming here,” he said. “It probably didn’t go the way he wanted it to go early on. Him and I talked a lot about it. And in those times, you just support those guys. You give them your feedback and you stay with them.”
A day after his powerful interview on Hockey Night in Canada, Lucic was asked what shifted for him. How was he able to turn things around? How did he start having fun again?
He didn’t mince words. “A coaching change,” he said. “I think the relationship I had from the start with Gio (Mark Giordano) and Monny (Sean Monahan). My family, too; my wife (Brittany) and kids (Valentina, Nikolina and Milan Jr.). All that type of stuff. You kind of look at yourself and you want to leave them with a good memory of hockey, not a bad one, right? Because it is such a positive thing. It’s been such a great, positive thing in my life. But when you’re not having fun and all that type of stuff, it doesn’t matter how much money you make.”
Lucic credited Treliving, then-associate coach, (eventual interim head coach) Geoff Ward, whom Lucic won the Stanley
Cup with in 2011, and assistants Martin Gelinas and Ryan Huska for helping him stick with it.
He’s also grown close to Flames captain Giordano and Monahan who encouraged him to keep going.
“That’s why I give a lot of credit to Wardo and the rest of the coaching staff,” said the Vancouver native who was drafted in the second round (50th overall) in 2006 out of the WHL’S Vancouver Giants. “Ray (Edwards) and Gelly and Husk and even talking to Tree. Him helping me stay with it and stay motivated has been a really good thing. I’m not going to lie: Ever since then, I feel like myself again. I feel happy again. If you even ask my wife, she’ll tell you that she’s noticed a happiness and change in me.”
Playing with 21-year-old Dillon Dube has also helped, along with centre Derek Ryan and, most recently as Ryan has missed two games with an illness, Sam Bennett.
Lucic has also been embraced by the fans in the city, screaming ‘LOOOOCH’ every time he touches the puck. During warmups of Monday’s Family Day matinee game against the Ducks, a group of young boys wore red T-shirts, each donning a letter of his ‘LOOCH’ nickname.
He received criticism for not doing enough physically in a pair of emotional home-and-home games against his former club and, ever since, he’s been somewhat of a force.
At this point in his career, Lucic’s contributions go beyond what he does on the scoresheet, although he has two goals and five assists in 11 games since the NHL all-star break.
You hear of these characters all the time, helping to bring the dressing room together and Lucic does that according to Treliving.
“People gravitate to Milan,” Treliving said. “He’s got that personality to him. He’s such a big presence. He walks into a room and he’s never going to go undetected. But people are drawn to him. He’s been through a lot in the game and he’s not shy about sharing his experiences when he sees someone going through a difficult time.”