HERO'S RETURN
Canadiens legend Roy on being back in Montreal: 'I don't want it to be about me'
MONTREAL — The Islanders were on the ice Wednesday so that they could avoid being on the ice Thursday morning, because Patrick Roy knows what awaits him at the Bell Centre.
In this city on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where hockey is as much part of the lifeblood as the French language, the newly installed Islanders coach is something like a folk hero. His return to the NHL was such a big deal around these parts that rather than wait for the Islanders to come up to Montreal just three games into Roy’s tenure, a slew of French-Canadian reporters made the trip to Long Island for his debut on Sunday.
Roy knows as well as anyone, he is going to be walking into a madhouse on Thursday night.
“We just don’t want to have distractions,” he said Wednesday. “No morning skate in Montreal, the guys are gonna stay at the hotel, they’re gonna be focused. And I don’t want it to be about me. I want it to be about the Islanders.
“We’re going there to win a hockey game. We’re not going there to win for the coach, it’s for our team. That’s the reason why I don’t want us to go to the skate. They’re gonna ask questions about me, they’re gonna say this and that. I don’t need this and [the team doesn’t] need that.”
Admirable sentiment. But the chances of Wednesday not being about Roy are approximately equal to the chances of the Expos winning the 2024 World Series. C’est la vie. “He’s the king,” Jean-Gabriel
Pageau told The Post of Roy’s status in Montreal, where he was the 1986 and 1993 Conn Smythe Trophy winner with championship Canadiens teams. “Everywhere he goes, I’m sure there’s a red carpet rolled out for him. A lot of my friends, my parents — he’s the hero of a generation.
“He’s won, he’s a competitor, he’s a Hall of Famer. He deserves all the attention that he’s getting right now and I’m sure when we play Montreal, it’s gonna be a cool moment to play on the bench.”
Samuel Bolduc, from nearby Laval, is too young to have seen Roy play. But you can bet he’s heard the stories and seen the highlights enough to internalize what Roy means in the city. All he ever had to do was look up in the Bell Centre rafters, where Roy’s No. 33 hangs.
When the news broke Sunday that he was taking the Islanders job, Bolduc fielded texts from “pretty much all my friends and family” asking if it was true.
“People there, they just love him,” Bolduc told The Post. “My dad just talked about him so much, how good he was.” There are two points to worry about against a Montreal team that, on paper, the Islanders should beat — though they’ve lost at the Bell Centre already this season. The Isles entered Wednesday in a tie with the Devils for fourth in the Metropolitan and two points back of the first wildcard spot.
Roy would love to fast-forward until after the All-Star break, when the craze around his hire will start to subside. But for now — and never more than Thursday — he’ll be coaching amid a circus.
“We have to find a way as a group and with our leaders to make sure we step up,” Roy said. “We’re using that goal to make us a better hockey team. We came into the dressing room after the second period [of Tuesday’s 3-2 loss to Vegas] and now have to regroup and talk about it and then we’re going back to our game. Because there was a point in that game we were starting to fly the zone, we were no longer working as a unit of five to stay in our zone.
“These are the things that I honestly think that’s the next step. And obviously we’re gonna start slowly talking about it and hopefully after the All-Star break we can work harder on this and have our structure set and also our mindset.”