“We always need to take a toothbrush and toothpaste.”
Those are the last words of episode 3 of Hockey Wives—spoken by Jason and Kodette LaBarbera’s six-year-old son, Ryder—and a perfect encapsulation of how July 1st means something very different for an NHL family than it does for everyone else.
This episode revolves around free agency day, and it’s one of the most real and compelling installments of the show’s two seasons so far. For most Canadians, that day means cooking meat over an open flame and sucking back beers while idly perusing TV and Twitter for trade news until the fireworks start. For NHL players and their families, it means waiting—often with zero control over the outcome—to find out where the next year or two of their lives will unfold. And in many cases, that momentous news arrives with no more warning or fanfare than the rest of us get.
Maripier Morin and Brandon Prust are on the last day of their Italian vacation, still flushed with happiness over their engagement—okay, she’s flushed, he continues to mutter and smirk like a casino-hotel magician—when he sees on Twitter that the Canadiens picked up winger Zack Kassian. When MP asks who that is, Brandon tells her, “He’s a little bit like me” (cue Jaws music of foreboding). Moments later, Brandon’s phone rings. It’s Montreal GM Marc Bergevin, and MP sees the colour drain from her fiancé’s face and he whispers, “Vancouver.”
It’s out of the question for MP to move across the country with him—she’s committed to a TV show filming in Montreal and trying to get her career off the ground—so their relationship instantly becomes long-distance. “I’m still not really realizing that when I go back to Montreal, he won’t be there,” she says, through tears.
Later, at a surprise engagement party Brandon planned at their summer home in London, Ont., Tiffany Parros commiserates with MP over the cruel capriciousness of the hockey market.
When her husband, George, was still playing, they were at lunch when he saw a missed call from a Quebec number on his phone. “I got traded. I know I just got traded,” he told his wife. “It’s like a pit in your stomach, because you feel like you have the next year planned, or however long your contract is, and you just feel like, ‘I have to start all over again,’” Tiffany says. (Also, when MP and Brandon arrive at the party, which you can tell is truly a surprise because MP shows up wearing a grungy white t-shirt with a pair of his workout shorts, Tiffany asks her, “Do you need a shot?” We should all be so blessed as to have a friend like this in our lives.)
Thanks for all ur messages, I'm obviously very sad to see my man leave MTL but excited for this new chapter in our life! xxx
— Maripier Morin (@maripiermorin) July 1, 2015
The free agency stakes are even higher for Kodette and Jason LaBarbera. During the 2014-15 season, their young family was separated by half a continent, because Jason had a contract with Anaheim, but they determined it was best for Ryder, who has autism, if Kodette and the kids stayed in their home base of Calgary, where there were excellent support services available.
This season, they all want to live together wherever Jason is playing, but the other looming question is whether he’ll be forced into retirement if no team makes him an offer. As July 1st crawls along, there are no encouraging calls from Jason’s agent. At one point, we see Kodette reclining on a giant stuffed dog, furiously texting her friends and watching free agency TV coverage through the flap of a small tent set up inside her living room. “As of midnight last night, I guess you could say Jason is jobless,” she says.
Later, Kodette playfully asks her younger son, Easton, where they’re moving, and he grins at her and shrugs. “Yeah, me neither,” Kodette says. She worries, too, that they could end up dispatched to some Podunk town where there will be no autism therapy available for Ryder, and all the hard-won progress he’s made in the last year could be lost.
Finally, Jason’s agent calls: Philadelphia has made him an offer. The couple’s relief is palpable, even as they weather a scene of hilariously relatable domestic chaos: swearing at their malfunctioning printer while they try to print out the contract for Jason to sign and send back immediately, as their kids screech at them like howler monkeys in the background.
Thx everyone! We will all move this yr as Ryder is done his program and can be integrated into a mainstream school! #proudparents
— Kodette LaBarbera (@KodetteLaBarbs) July 2, 2015
“It’s just nice that someone sees some value in Jason,” Kodette says, after celebrating the good news with a cheerleading high-kick at her kitchen counter, as one does.
Of course, we all cope with some sense that we’re essentially trading cards in the eyes of our employers, prized or passed over because of some valuation system that’s only partially visible to us. But that feeling seems ruthlessly prominent in the lives of hockey families when the breadwinner hovers on the bubble between playing one more year or being forced to hang up the skates.
At the end of the episode, Kodette tells Ryder that Daddy is going to play for a new team and asks if he wants to go live there. No, Ryder says, and when his mom asks where he does want to live, he simply says, “Home.”