Hockey
P.K. Subban was hockey
On September 20, 2022 P.K. Subban retired from the National Hockey League.
Born in 1985 I have lived through two Montreal Canadiens Stanley Cup wins. I don’t remember the 1986 run for obvious reasons but I do remember 1993. I remember the things history has essentially erased. I remember the way media was hard on Patrick Roy and Pat Burns for being swept by the Boston Bruins in the 91-92 playoffs. Roy stayed, Burns left. I remember how the additions of Brian Bellows and Vincent Damphousse that summer was the team getting two other teams best scorers because the feeling was this team wasn’t getting back to the Cup without bailing out Roy. I remember how much criticism Roy got that year, a year which most didn’t believe the Canadiens would even go anywhere due to the dominance of the Pittsburgh Penguins and the emergence of the Quebec Nordiques from the NHL basement. I remember the team being the top of the Adams division and tumbling to third due to a poor March.
I remember how in the first round against the Quebec Nordiques, Patrick Roy once again faltered under pressure. All of the “Trade Roy” talk based on a hockey card promotion no longer felt premature. Roy was almost benched in the Battle of Quebec. I remember Brian Bellows passing to Vincent Damphousse to win in overtime in game three. I remember Patrick Roy temporarily going down in injury in game five and Montreal winning in Quebec 5-4 in overtime.
Why do I bring this up? Because history has erased this in favour of the narrative that Patrick Roy carried an average Montreal Canadiens team to the Stanley Cup. The 1993 Montreal Canadiens are often brought up as one of the weakest teams to win the Stanley Cup, carried by overtime wins and Patrick Roy brilliance. And while Roy did prove to be brilliant by the end of the series against the Los Angeles Kings, history forgets just how much the entire city of Montreal was against him and how much the acquisitions of Brian Bellows and Vincent Damphousse truly meant to that championship run.
I bring it up because I’m worried that since P.K. Subban has now retired, his memories in Montreal will just be the clashing with management over his contract and the way some in the Montreal Canadiens locker room wanted him out. What may survive will be the debates on whether his donation to the Montreal Children’s Hospital was just an ego stroke and a tax writeoff. The Norris trophy during a lockout year will be treated with an asterisk when he was top three in two other seasons for Norris voting. All of the clips when Subban would try to go for it but get burned over the fact nobody would set up a compilation of all the times he went for it and made great defensive plays since that video would go for hours compared to the three minutes of Subban fails.
Roy won the Cup so all of that was erased. P.K. never did. It might remain.
Of course I would worry about these things because P.K. Subban’s career has always been about defending him. For some that’s a sign that maybe he wasn’t good enough for his work to stand on its own. But Subban had detractors before he entered the league. Subban’s best was never good enough for some in both the National Hockey League and in the Montreal Canadiens fanbase. Even as a New Jersey Devil last year Subban wasn’t as bad as some stated he was, but the added weight and lack of mobility did take him from the Norris nominated defenceman he was only a few seasons prior to a third pairing powerplay specialist.
I bring it up because P.K. Subban meant more to me than any other sports athlete I’ve watched in my life. Vincent Damphousse was my first favourite hockey player. People say your favourite as a child is the one you hold above all. Not for me. I liked Subban the day Montreal drafted him in 2007. I loved him in his NHL playoff debut. From that point on it was all about the Subbanator. Between 2010 and 2018 P.K. Subban was hockey for me.
The skating. The confidence on and off the ice. The way he could shadow offensive players better than almost anyone in the league (but rarely get credit for it.) That ridiculous windup blast at the point which was probably a detriment to itself but boy every time you saw it you got up off your feet. That damn infectious smile which made you realize that yes, NHL players from Canada actually enjoy playing hockey and are not programmed robot military soldiers for their coach. The hits. And not just any hit. The bee sting.
I watched the Montreal Canadiens win the Stanley Cup in 1993 and that hit on Brad Marchand means more to me. I never tire watching it. I’ve never seen anything like it since. It defined the Montreal/Boston rivalry of the 2010s. Boston wanted P.K. Subban to fight after a clean hit because they couldn’t accept being humiliated. Marchand crying on the bench because he ran into a brick wall. Subban just one arming a Bruin down to the ice like one of those charlatan martial arts masters taking out multiple opponents at the same time. My love of hockey is for the game, the skill, the passes, the shots, the saves. If I listed all of my favourite moments they would all involve goals and passes and saves. Except number one. The bee sting over all.
The day the Montreal Canadiens traded P.K. Subban broke my heart for hockey. He was one day away from his no movement clause from kicking in. Subban would be traded for Shea Weber, a player I had been making the argument for the Nashville Predators to trade him “for a haul” before he broke down. And a haul they got. I cheered the Nashville Predators as loud as I had cheered the Habs in the past because I wanted Subban to win the Cup with them. A few years later the Montreal Canadiens in a pandemic season would make their own Stanley Cup final run. I cheered against them just as passionately. If Subban can’t win a ring with Montreal or Nashville, Shea Weber damn sure can’t win one with Montreal. Call me selfish I don’t care. I might have grown up a Montreal Canadiens fan but Marc Bergevin represented everything I hated about hockey at that point. The moment he congratulated P.K. Subban for negotiating a higher AAV on his bridge deal instead of signing him to a contract similar to Drew Doughty I knew he was wrong to run the team. That pandemic run made me worried I was wrong all along.
Nope. I was right. And the 2021-2022 NHL season saw that everything Bergevin did in his tenure was a mirage. One of the worst seasons in team history right after making it to the Cup final. On July 7 Marc Bergevin was seen as an evil genius. By November 28 he was out of a job. People can come up with all the reasons why. The mirage scouting which got high marks every summer but barely produced top talent, reveling in how many NHL games they’d get played from fringe NHLers. The over reliance on Carey Price and playing defensive systems around one of the best goalies of his generation instead of stacking the offence up. The wasting of Andrei Markov’s last good years. The awful choice of Michel Therrien as head coach during a pivotal moment in several players careers. The “bargain bin” mentality because he was too conservative (except of course on the trade.)
No general manager is perfect, but it was that bridge extension fight with P.K. Subban which I always go back to on the first sign that Marc Bergevin could never take the Montreal Canadiens to the Stanley Cup. That bridge led to P.K. Subban’s eight year deal at $9 million, which never had to happen if he just didn’t insist on a bridge. That $9 million contract rumoured to have been pressured by team owner Geoff Molson since Bergevin didn’t want to sign it. It all goes back to P.K.
I still follow the Canadiens but I don’t love them the way I used to. I don’t love hockey the way I used to. I’ll always be a fan of the game, but nobody made me a fan like Subban. When a player means that much to you, more than a team, it’s hard to separate. It’s quite possible I’ll find a new favourite player. Or a team that makes me care again. Might be the Montreal Canadiens. Might be the Seattle Kraken with the guy the Montreal Canadiens skipped on. But I don’t think I’ll ever find a hockey player that embodied everything I loved about the game in the way P.K. did. The game of hockey needed passion. It needed energy. It needed someone to break the mold and say that players need to be creative and confident and take risks. It needed a guy like P.K. I hope in retirement he continues to bring that. Subban should read the right narratives written about his career. I hope one day his quote about game seven against Boston gets etched in stone.
76 Forever.
