No. 3 on the list of Sportsnet magazine’s reasons the NHL has never been better
Hockey is a game of platitudes. You could say the same of all sports, but hockey is foremost among them on this count. Everyone takes it one cliché at a time and, more to the point, one cliché for a particular time. So those of us who are granted an audience with an 18-year-old just moments after his selection at the NHL Entry Draft can write down the lines in our notebooks a couple of minutes before the sweater-clad kid gives them a nervous reading under the klieg lights. He’s trying to say banal stuff scripted by his agents, thank his parents and beat as hasty a retreat as possible.
P.K. Subban didn’t get the memo.
When the legion of Montreal reporters at the 2007 draft crowded around Subban after the Canadiens selected him midway through the second round, he immediately put to rest any notion that he was your average draftee. Asked about his expectations for the coming season, Subban offered unfiltered truth. “I think I’m ready to play and I’m going to camp with the idea of making the Canadiens and helping them win the Stanley Cup,” he told them full-throatedly.
Veteran reporters’ jaws went slack as they shared one thought bubble with the same sentiments in two languages: Did anyone tell him he’s a second-rounder? Who the hell does he think he is? And then they laughed.
Subban’s words might have read like those of a kid lost in the moment. Some might even have read into them a lack of respect for the veterans on the Canadiens roster, and for that reason if nothing else a lot of hockey fans wanted to watch him have his ass handed to him. No matter. Subban didn’t filter his thoughts, didn’t allow the description of his mindset to be diluted by a sense of propriety and, most of all, didn’t let his brand-new association with hockey’s most storied franchise change him one bit.
Subban didn’t make the Canadiens that following season, to no one’s surprise—not even his own. He knew it was the longest of long shots that the team would rush him into the lineup. But that statement on draft night tells you all you need to know about P.K. Subban. He’s not going to think one thing and say another. He’s going to aim high and is unafraid to announce it.
Some find that admirable. Some don’t.
Subban isn’t the best player in the NHL. He isn’t even the best defenceman. Best player on his team? On a given night, maybe. On others, no. But one superlative can be fairly attached to him: He is doubtlessly the league’s most polarizing player. No one who follows the game could claim not to have an opinion about Subban as a player or personality. It’s a matter of substance and style: the game he plays and the way he carries himself, on and off the ice. He will never fade into the background. That’s not to say he’s less than a team guy or that he doesn’t play well with others. Just that people tend to either really like him as a player or they really don’t. Really. Really really.
Some will ascribe the negativity to race. You see it in chat rooms and comment sections where low-lifes rant with the three-beer courage that comes with the protection of anonymity. Let’s set them aside, having already given them more attention than they deserve.
Fact is, too many don’t like Subban for it to be a matter of race or ethnicity. I remember sitting with NHL scouts watching Subban in Belleville one night during his draft year. I thought he was having a good game; they were unsparing in their criticism. And yeah, they said some things that were particularly racially insensitive, but I want to believe that they were channelling bigots in weak attempts at comedy rather than betraying their own prejudices. They didn’t like the way he played the game. Lots didn’t. NHL Central Scouting had Subban No. 34 among North American skaters, and he ended up going 43rd overall. If you had a do-over, he’d be one of the top 10 players selected—maybe even top five. No defenceman would rank higher. So how did Subban sit behind so many on so many lists?
It wasn’t race. That many teams couldn’t have a racial bias built into their scouting staffs. It wasn’t even a matter of ability. Nobody who had watched Subban doubted that he could skate as well, if not better, than any other blueliner in the draft class. Maybe some graded him down because at (maybe) six feet, he seemed undersized, but others who went before him were no bigger.
No, they didn’t like the way he played the game. If you have watched Subban with the Canadiens a fair bit, you’re familiar with the fact that few could ever accuse him of being tentative with the puck. Or of being a safety-first blueliner. If Subban is out there, he’s trying to make plays. If he’s playing well, he’ll make most of them; if he isn’t, the percentage will come down. It was true when Montreal audaciously called him up from the American Hockey League as a 20-year-old first-year pro during the playoffs in 2010 as the Canadiens upset Washington and Pittsburgh en route to the Eastern Conference final. It has remained so ever since.
This winter, Subban has played his way into the conversation for the Norris Trophy and has ranked among the leaders in points scored by defencemen, even though he’s not in the top 40 blueliners in average ice time. He has worked his way up into positive double-digits in plus-minus. More than that, he has Montreal fans in his thrall. That much was clear when Canadiens fans at the Bell Centre chanted Subban’s name as a not-so-subtle dig at the team’s failure to sign him in time for the home opener, a desultory loss to hated Toronto.
Industry opinion had been dubious of him as a prospect but all doubts seem to have faded away. Said a pro scout for an Eastern Conference rival: “Subban’s a different player than the one who came into the league. He’s physically just so much stronger. He makes better decisions more often. You have to give him credit for making himself a better player.”
Those who didn’t like the attitude he arrived with and hoped he’d fail will shrug and say something like: Fine, on the ice his game has finally caught up to all the talk.
Except it hasn’t.
If you approach Subban on a day between games and ask him about his career goals, hold on to your seat. “To be one of the best ever to play the game,” he says matter-of-factly. “I want to play in this league 20 years, not 10.”
I did something more than a cursory search on a thorough print-media database (with terms “NHL” or “hockey” and “the best ever to play the game”) and could find no matches to a self-referencing quote. I tried it with Bobby Orr. Tried it with 99. With 66. Nada. Not even after the fact. Didn’t see any point in trying it with Crosby. Maybe a pro in another sport might have said something like that. In hockey, though, no. It’s just not done. Further, openly talking about playing to age 40 when you have yet to reach your 24th birthday would be the dictionary definition of getting ahead of yourself. And yet the goal of becoming “one of the best ever” has been the foundation of Subban becoming one of the best right now. If he wanted anything less, he’d almost certainly be something less. He’d have settled.
The game of hockey and its fans demand humility, even if it’s false. Stars are supposed to be soft-spoken, deferential throwbacks to a time before million-dollar contracts. In short, we want them to be Canadians of a certain vintage; if they have nothing else to apologize for, let them apologize to us for their excellence. P.K. Subban is polite and if he spilled soup in your lap he’d say he’s sorry, but he won’t apologize for his ambitions. Thus does he run the risk of scorn in some quarters.
One good question hangs out there: Why should he? In any other game, aspiration is a virtue—not a sin. World records would never be broken if no one ever wanted to be the greatest of all time. The names Jordan and Messi and Woods would not stand out if they had ever set their sights on being as good as everybody else but no better.
When Subban signed a two-year deal worth $5.75 million in the wake of the lockout, it was considered a big win for the Habs and their new GM, Marc Bergevin. It looks that way even more in comparison to other elite defencemen around the league. (Same applies to teammates: Subban’s salary comfortably trails Andrei Markov, Josh Gorges and the waiver-clearing Tomas Kaberle.) For someone who aspires to be one of the best of all time, there’s little value taken away from the fact that he’s one of the best dollar-for-dollar values of his time.
It would have been an opportunity for bitterness and recrimination, even among those who give fairly convincing lip service to humility. Instead, Subban has performed like a player whose contract was expiring with unrestricted free agency looming. “I have a great relationship with the fans, with my teammates and with management,” Subban says, notwithstanding the hassle over his deal and what seemed like a chilly reception from coach Michel Therrien.
In his first season back behind the Canadiens bench, Therrien was looking to make a statement about the way he wanted to conduct business. Before Subban had played a game for him, Therrien banned the triple-low-five, Subban and netminder Carey Price’s trademarked victory celebration. “I always like teams that are humble and it’s a team concept,” said Therrien, who has himself occasionally been accused by some of HHDS, Hockey Humility Deficit Syndrome. “In life you have to be humble. And we have to respect the game. We have to respect the other team. And we have to respect the fans.”
During the last weekend in March Subban played maybe his best game of the season: He set up all three Montreal goals in a shutout victory over the Rangers at the Bell Centre. He earned the game’s second star, second billing to Price, who made 31 saves. Even tougher to earn was a personal citation from Therrien in his post-game comments. “He’s confident,” the coach said. “I like his attitude. He wants to learn.”
He has learned the NHL game on the ice but he’s learning more off it, namely that there’s a time and place for everything. Absent after the game was the triple-low-five. You might have missed that given the team’s centre-ice, raised-stick salute to the fans. More conspicuous was Subban’s manner in a scrum of reporters at his stall. Subban pointedly spoke in the first-person plural and avoided any form of its singular. One reporter asked about his three points against the Rangers and his offensive production this season: “We’re playing well as a team,” he said, looking distractedly to another corner of the room. “We’re doing some great things out there. We’re all playing for the same thing.”
The reporter reset the question about the things he was doing, about the prospect of leading all NHL defencemen in scoring. Subban cut him off. “I’m just going to talk about the game,” he said. “Right now we have 14 games left, just focusing on finishing strong and getting ready for the post-season. As a team it’s one of our best games. It takes five guys on the ice.”
P.K. Subban finally got the memo.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
