Kukla's Korner Hockey
Accept Max Pacioretty For What He Is
by Paul on 11/28/16 at 08:24 AM ET
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from Jack Todd at the Montreal Gazette,
Enter Maximillian Kolenda Pacioretty, stage left. “Patches,” to those who love him (and there are plenty who do) is in the throes of what Montreal’s notoriously critical fans consider a difficult season. It started with Team USA, when John Tortorella decided to go Full Jerk on Pacioretty. Tortorella’s tactics, predictably, backfired. Pacioretty wilted under the criticism and Team USA showed less “compete” than you might have expected from Team Latvia.
Then there was the off-season flap when radio reporter Michel Villeneuve claimed coach Michel Therrien had called Pacioretty the “worst captain in Canadiens history” while playing in a golf tournament in June. Villeneuve was fired from 91.9 Sport for the report and Therrien denied he had said any such thing — but no matter what was said in public, the relationship between coach and captain has to be frayed.
Finally, as an indication of just how absurd things get, Pacioretty was raked when he failed to take the full star turn on the ice after scoring the winning goal against the Carolina Hurricanes last Thursday. Only Montreal could turn that into fodder for a couple of news cycles.
There’s a lesson here. Perhaps we need to learn to take our players as they are. Pacioretty is 28, already in his ninth season with the Canadiens. Like everyone else, I’ve been impatient with him at times: he’s a finesse forward in a power forward’s body and it seems he could be so much more.
Filed in: NHL Teams, Montreal Canadiens, | KK Hockey | Permalink
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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.
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