New dad Eller happy to be back in Montreal
HABS CENTREMAN stayed sharp during lockout by playing in Finland
“The level of hockey (in Finland) has been good, and it’s been the best possible preparation for me.”
LARS ELLER
Canadiens centreman Lars Eller touched down in Montreal from Finland on Monday night, closing behind him the door he’d planned to leave slightly ajar in the far northern town where he’d just spent most of his past eight locked-out weeks.
Apart from a Christmas break in his native Denmark with his wife, Julie, and the couple’s 11-week-old child, Eller had been living way, way up in the latitude of Yellowknife, N.W.T., riding the buses with JYP Jyvaskyla Oy in Finland’s 14-team SM-Liiga.
Even before the NHL lockout had been settled in the wee hours of Sunday, the 23-year-old was planning to return to North America for a very sound reason: Should the NHL and its players hammer out a last-minute agreement to begin an abbreviated season, the weeklong Canadiens training camp was expected to begin roughly one week later.
We spoke last Saturday, 18 hours before the lockout finally was settled with a tentative agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement.
“In case the NHL starts, I want to be rested,” Eller said that afternoon f rom Jyvaskyla, his clock six hours ahead of Montreal’s, as he laid out the reasons for his return.
“If we start, (camp) is going to be a tough program, right from the get-go, with a lot of players who haven’t been playing, and I expect that to be really hard. And once we start playing, we’ll probably have games every other day.”
When we first connected almost seven weeks ago to talk about his Finnish experience, four games into what would be his 15-game tour with JYP, Eller said, “I don’t have a lot of faith” in negotiations, labour talks that would give the ocean a run for its money for high and low tides.
On Saturday, organizing his family for their challenging voyage back to Montreal from Helsinki through Munich — “lots of baby stuff,” he said — Eller suggested he could well be back in this land of short days and long nights.
“I’ve talked with ( JYP management) and they fully understand the situation,” he said. “If the NHL doesn’t start, I’ll return to play here.”
The developments of the subsequent hours would mean Eller would not have to rebook his ticket; as he left, he expressed his profound thanks to his Finnish team and the fans who supported him, boarding his flight in Helsinki relieved to be returning to at least a shortened NHL season.
Eller’s SM-Liiga career ended with five goals and 10 assists in 15 games, averaging 19:06 ice-time per game. Coach Jyrki Aho used him exclusively at centre, not bouncing him out to the wing as in Montreal, playing him in all situations.
JYP stood fourth at his departure, 10 points out of the league lead with 11 games left on their schedule.
The biggest SM-Liiga news story this side of the pond during the lockout came in mid-December, when Ottawa Senators centre Kyle Turris returned home from his stint with Karpat Oulu and, in a Globe & Mail web story, carved his experience from top to bottom, shredding the food, travel, culture and office boredom in Finland.
Of course, Turris’s agent said the published comments were completely at odds with the player’s genuine feelings; the story blew itself out in North America in a day.
But Eller said it was great fodder for levity among players — and the cause of hurt feelings among many in Finland — for a full week, at least.
“We were cracking jokes about it every day,” he said of his teammates. “Some of the Finnish players said the papers over here made a pretty big deal of it.”
So might Turris expect any ribbing for this from proud Finnish NHLers once the lockout ends?
“Could well be,” Eller said, laughing. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”
The experience an ocean and a land mass away was excellent for the crafty playmaker, who had trained with great vigour during his first fully healthy summer in three years. In fact, his November touchdown was delayed only by the October arrival of his first-born child.
Finland was a natural destination for a player who has lived and skated in Denmark and Sweden. There was nothing, he said, that caused him great surprise — unlike Turris, evidently.
If anything, Eller said, there was less culture shock for his wife in Finland, where English is spoken everywhere, than in Montreal.
“The level of hockey has been good and it’s been the best possible preparation for me,” he said.
“The level has been high enough to help me become a better player here.
“It’s been great for me to play a lot of minutes, to be the go-to guy. It’s helped me a lot, really.”
Every road trip was by luxury bus coach; the longest voyage was three hours and never once did he change time zones.
“It’s not bad at all,” Eller said. “In the NHL, you make the three-hour trip by plane. Here, it’s by bus. But there’s a lot less travel here than in the NHL.”
He believes that those who have played lockout hockey in Europe will have a leg up, for a time, on those who have been only scrimmaging and skating on their own.
“I have absolutely no doubt that playing is going to be a benefit for all the guys who have been playing,” Eller said. “I think the only way you can get in game shape and get the sharpness of game situations is by playing games.
“And I think the guys who have been playing will have a little bit of an edge, at least at the start, over the guys who haven’t.”
But what has most enriched Eller during his time in Finland has been the overall life experience.
“As a person, it’s just good to play in some other countries and get that experience,” he said.
“I think I’m going to appreciate the NHL a lot more if we start. Not that I didn’t appreciate it before, but you just can’t compare the NHL to anything else. The lifestyle, playing in front of 21,000 fans — you appreciate all of that a lot.
“That’s nothing against leagues in Europe,” he added quickly. “You can make a great living here and have a great life, but it’s not really comparable to the NHL.”
Eller flew back to Montreal without a grasp of the Finnish language, a tongue which he’d said “is not remotely close to anything at all.”
“I’ve got a few words, but I couldn’t put together a whole sentence,” he said, laughing again. “I guess ‘thank you’ and ‘how are you doing?’ are pretty much it.”
Eller needn’t have downplayed his thin vocabulary. His attempt at Finnish was greatly appreciated by the locals, who were as sad to see him go as Canadiens fans are happy to have him back.