Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (20 page)

They thought he was a “whiner,” perhaps hockey's worst insult. He thought he deserved more ice time, Gilbert thought not; player blamed coach, coach blamed player. “There were some tough times for sure,” Marc Savard says, “especially when I felt I could play in the league at the time. I had some tough situations there, you know, obviously the coach …”

Calgary dealt him to the Thrashers in 2002, where a new coach, Bob Hartley, soon arrived and immediately had a profound effect on Savard. Player and coach lived on a golf course only five houses apart, and Hartley used “idle time”—pitching golf balls (Savard is a scratch player) and playing bubble hockey in Hartley's basement—to get through to the player no one else had been able to penetrate. “If he would listen,” Hartley says, “I told him I would be willing to trade quite a bit of ice time.”

What Savard listened to was a series of lectures on how good he could be if he wanted to be. “ ‘You're going to waste quite a talent,' ” Hartley told him. “ ‘Your talent is a given, but the rest of it is not a gift, you have to make a choice. You have the talent to be a star, but your worst enemy is you.' In Marc's mind, it was everybody's fault, but I give him credit. He took the plan and went with it.”

The plan was simple. Work harder, check harder, be a team player. In return for a new work ethic, Hartley gave him ice time with rising stars Ilya Kovalchuk, Dany Heatley and Marian Hossa. It paid off handsomely for all. Hartley “was like a father figure to me,” Savard says. “He really helped me out.”

When it became clear to Savard and his agent, Ottawa-based Larry Kelly, that Atlanta wouldn't be able to afford the sort of money that might be available once the player became a free agent in 2006, the choice came down to Boston or, surprisingly, Calgary, where Savard's friend, team captain Jarome Iginla, was pressing hard for Savard to return. They chose Boston, in part because it
was seen as a team on the rise, in part out of concern for Savard's experience in Calgary.

Boston coach Claude Julien has carried on where Hartley left off—exchanging ice time for a commitment by Savard to be “more accountable”—and those who may have once doubted his work ethic are now able to turn to YouTube for a clip of Savard throwing up on the bench after a shift. “He's a money player,” Hartley says, “a clutch performer. Give me a minute left in a game and he'll either score the goal or set it up. I just hope he gets a shot at the [2010] Olympics.”

Bob Nicholson, president of Hockey Canada, says Savard's improved play has not gone unnoticed—“he deserves to be on the radar”—but Canada is deep at centre, beginning with Sidney Crosby.

“It's a thought in the back of my mind,” Savard says. “It's something I think about, for sure, but I got business here right now. I think the better our team does this year, the better the chances I'd have to play in those kinds of events.”

On March 7, 2010, Marc Savard suffered a severe concussion when he was hit by Matt Cooke of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Cooke was neither penalized nor suspended for the headshot. Savard returned briefly in the playoffs—the Bruins lost to the Philadelphia Flyers—and began play again in the 2010–11 season, only to suffer a mid-season concussion in a game against the Colorado Avalanche. In February, the Bruins announced that Savard would not be returning to play for the remainder of the year
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MONTREAL, QUEBEC

“J
ust look at that wall over there.”

Carey Price is standing in front of his locker long after Game 1 has ended in his favour, well after the cameras and microphones have left the room and well beyond the call of duty for a goaltender who has just played, and won, a Stanley Cup game that went into overtime.

“It's impossible not to notice,” he says, pointing to the plaque of previous Montreal Canadiens who have been awarded the Vezina Trophy as hockey's best goaltender: Patrick Roy, Ken Dryden, Gump Worsley, Jacques Plante five times in a row, Bill Durnan and a net full of other names, some faded, some forgotten.

He bends a long finger up toward the line from John McCrae's “In Flanders Fields” that graces the Canadiens' dressing room wall (“To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high”) and runs it across faces once distributed across the country by BeeHive Corn Syrup—the Rocket, the Pocket Rocket, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Plante—until he stops at one that it seems no twenty-year-old Aboriginal kid from the isolated northern B.C. community of Anahim Lake could possibly know.

“There's George Hainsworth,” he says. George Hainsworth?

And yet—it is somehow perfect. Hainsworth, who died in 1950, is rarely remembered by those who live in the “new” NHL, yet he was the original winner of the Vezina as the league's top goaltender. He won it three years running and, along the way, established a National Hockey League record—22 shutouts in 44 games—that will never, ever be equalled. He once went for more than 4½ hours of playoff hockey without allowing a goal. He won two Stanley Cups in Montreal and lives on in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Hainsworth is dark, calm and serious in his photograph, much as Carey Price is in real life, though the lanky Price is far taller. Hainsworth was renowned for his calm under pressure, seeming almost bored as he turned aside shots and his frantic teammates attempted to clear threatening pucks from around him. The two Montreal goaltenders are—more than eighty years apart—eerily similar.

“I'm sorry I can't put on a show like some of the other goaltenders,” Hainsworth said in 1931, when he was at the peak of his game. “I can't look excited because I'm not. I can't shout at other players because that's not my style. I can't dive on easy shots and make them look hard. I guess all I can do is stop pucks.”

And so it is with Carey Price. All he does is stop pucks when it seems to count most. Nothing fancy, but everything smooth and relaxed and effective, even when it sometimes appears to others that things are going terribly wrong. Thursday night he fell behind 2–0 when Philadelphia scored on one shot that Price's own defenceman tipped in and another shot where a Canadiens forward missed his check, but there was no panic. It was almost as if he knew his team would come back, and they did, winning 4–3 less than a minute into overtime on a goal by Tom Kostopoulos.

He will admit, though, to a slight case of nerves in his very first playoff game, two weeks ago against the Boston Bruins. He was, after all, the untried rookie, just as Ken Dryden was back in 1971, just as George Hainsworth was in 1926. “The first game of the playoffs is the worst,” Price says. “After that, you kind of settle down.”

How much he settles down and how effective his calm, positional, puck-controlling style is will largely determine how far the last-standing Canadian team goes in the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs. As former Philadelphia Flyers coach Terry Murray once put it, “As far as you go, they're taking you.” Murray found out just what that meant a decade ago when his two goaltenders, Ron Hextall and Garth Snow, came up short in the playoffs and, shortly after, Murray lost his job.

“What pitching is in a short series in baseball,” Detroit general manager Jack Adams said more than a half century ago, “goaltending is in the Stanley Cup playoffs.”

It is, some will even say to the detriment of the game, a position so dominant that comparing it to pitching does not always do goaltending justice. And yet, almost perversely, its value is not reflected in salary. Of the top ten salaries in the game, not one goes to a goaltender. The highest on the list, Nikolai Khabibulin, who makes $6.75 million a year with the Chicago Blackhawks, is a surprising sixteenth on the list. Price, who may one day live up to his name, makes $850,000 as a rookie.

Goaltending in today's NHL often seems even more critical to success than it was in the 1950s when Adams, and everyone else, was in awe of Terry Sawchuk leading the Red Wings to an eight-game sweep of the 1952 playoffs, four of the victories coming from Sawchuk shutouts. Since the Conn Smythe Trophy was introduced in 1965 to honour the best playoff performer, goaltenders have taken the MVP honours fourteen times. Since Patrick Roy led the Canadiens to Canada's last Stanley Cup in 1993, goalies have taken the prize five times, the most recent being Cam Ward of the Carolina Hurricanes.

Ward, in fact, is the perfect example of the surprisingly hot goaltender who, in other times, turns to ordinary, but who in one astonishing spring can decide a Cup. The story of the Stanley Cup finalists for a decade or more has, by and large, been the tale of two hot goaltenders finally meeting to decide matters.

The hope in Montreal, obviously, is that young Carey Price can be as hot as young Ken Dryden was in 1971, as hot as young Patrick Roy was in 1986. If he's not, they will not move on.

It is a remarkable pressure situation for such a young man. “The only job worse,” a great Canadiens goaltender, Gump Worsley, once said, “is a javelin catcher at a track-and-field meet.”

“How would you like it,” Montreal's great Jacques Plante once asked, “if you were sitting in your office and you made one
little mistake—suddenly, a big red light went on and eighteen thousand people jumped up and started screaming at you, calling you a bum and an imbecile and throwing garbage at you?”

Bill Durnan, yet another Montreal great in the nets, once claimed he lost seventeen pounds in a playoff game—and took early retirement from the profession just to escape the annual crush of expectation.

And yet, Carey Price hardly seems to have broken a sweat this first night of Round 2. He has showered and dressed and seems perfectly content to sit here in the dressing room until it is again time to strap on the thick white pads at his stall and head out, once again, into the pressure cooker that is the Bell Centre and the demanding Montreal fans.

Ken Dryden has a different outlook on playoff pressure. And Dryden's credentials—six Stanley Cups, two Vezina trophies, the Calder Trophy as top rookie and the Conn Smythe—are impeccable. “It's the ideal time,” Dryden told me several years ago. The Stanley Cup playoffs, he felt, were “the only time when you've got absolutely everything going for you.”

Dryden's well-considered theory is that a shift takes place between the regular season and the playoffs, a psychological shift among the other players on the team that gives a physical advantage to their goaltender. “In a long season,” he reasoned, “what do you give up first? You're tired, you're hurt, so you give up defence—it's the first to go. In the playoffs, everyone has that extra energy. The players are all coming back. The pucks are cleared. The goalie's in the best shape of the year as far as getting help. And it affects the goalie, too. You start to take the goals very personally. Every one of them.”

“That's definitely true,” says Price. “The players ramp it up. They play harder in front of you, for sure. But you can look at it both ways, as other guys are going to be crashing the net and doing other things to get at you.”

CBC hockey analyst Greg Millen, himself a former NHL
goaltender through fourteen seasons, says Dryden and Price have a point, that “the awareness is so high for everybody” during the playoffs that it can sometimes work to the advantage of the goaltender. “There's a lot of predictability that might not be there otherwise,” he says.

Even so, Millen marvels at Price's calmness under pressure, the sense that if the twenty-year-old's blood pressure were kept on the Bell Centre scoreboard, it wouldn't even measure. “He has such a huge maturity on and off the ice,” Millen says. “Way, way beyond his years. Technically, he's just so good. He has learned at a very young age that ‘less is better.' It took me eight to ten years to find that out—and by then my career was almost over.”

Millen's fascination with Price's technical wizardry—always in position, superb at clearing rebounds and, when necessary, handling the puck—is shared by all who watch the young phenomenon. Price, however, says he has changed his game dramatically in the past couple of years. “I was pretty wild when they drafted me,” he says. “I was more of a flop-around, stop-it-any-way-you-can kind of goaltender.”

He learned the position from his father, Jerry, who, rather coincidentally, was a draft pick thirty years ago of the Philadelphia Flyers his son is up against in Round 2. Father and son would often fly in Jerry's Piper Cherokee from Anahim Lake—where mother Lynda is chief of the Ulkatcho Band of the Carrier Nation—to Williams Lake so that the youngster could make practices and games in the larger centre. His father's teaching and natural ability brought early success, taking the younger Price to junior with the Tri-City Americans and then, at eighteen, he was drafted fifth overall by the Montreal Canadiens.

There were, initially, some doubts raised in Montreal about spending such a high draft pick on a goaltender when many thought the position well covered in Montreal. But soon Price was leading Canada to the world junior championship, where he was named tournament MVP, and last year he won the Calder
Cup with the Hamilton Bulldogs. After some back and forth this year, he was handed the No. 1 position with the Canadiens and told to make of it what he can.

Price credits Montreal goaltending coach Rollie Melanson with turning him into a “hybrid” of two styles, the stand-up and the butterfly. “He really evolved my game into what it is now,” Price says.

What it is now is impressive, though there were two third periods in the Boston series—a 5–1 loss followed by a 5–4 loss—when doubts were flying as high as the twenty-four Stanley Cup banners in the Bell Centre. He answered that with a most impressive 5–0 shutout to win the seventh game and take Montreal's hopes to the second round, where he fell behind 2–0 early but soon had them chanting “Car-ey! Car-ey! Car-ey!” as the plucky Canadiens came back for the overtime win.