By Shannon Proudfoot in Montreal

P.K. Subban has already polished off an impressive quantity of high-end sashimi when he finally starts to sound ticked off and refreshingly real. “What have you done?” he asks forcefully. “What puts you in a position where you can take shots at my character? What makes you such a great person?”

The Canadiens defenceman is sitting on the opposite side of a spacious booth in his favourite restaurant in Westmount, a suburb of Montreal, and he sounds so offended I almost assure him that I haven’t criticized him. But Subban isn’t really talking to me. He’s talking to “them”—the ones who pick apart who he is and how he operates, convinced they know the score. Go ahead and criticize his game, how he’s trying to do too much on the ice or whatever—that’s all fine. “But you take a shot at my character, that’s something completely different,” he says. “And I don’t have to listen to that.”

Subban is renowned for being unwilling or unable to turn down his own volume. It’s why the Norris Trophy winner has run afoul, again and again, of the harrumphing defenders of hockey’s honour. The criticism of him basically amounts to him having too much fun chasing down his insatiable goal to be the best, and not choosing his words and thoughts from a list of pre-approved options. And that’s why Subban is exactly what the NHL needs now—badly.

Earlier in the day, at the Habs’ practice rink in suburban Brossard, Subban was in constant, restless motion, noticeably more kinetic than his teammates. He jiggled his glove on his hand waiting for a drill, stretched while the coach talked and conducted a one-man stickhandling clinic at centre ice, his blade so quick and delicately vicious that the puck seemed tethered by an elastic band. When they skated laps, Subban propelled himself past a bunch of teammates then spied an abandoned puck near the point. In one fluid movement, he dropped to his knees, skidded several feet, scooped up the puck in his glove and floated back to his feet to resume skating. It was like watching someone freestyling All-Star Skills Competition events that haven’t been invented yet. In the final moments of practice, he fired a puck over the shoulder of goalie Carey Price. After a victorious fist pump and hoot, Subban circled back to pin Price—one of his closest friends, on and off the ice—against his own net, folding him into an aggressive bro-hug. In that pre-season practice, Subban was the on-ice embodiment of his reputation: ridiculously fun to watch, maddening if you’re the opposition.

But over a leisurely lunch afterward, he isn’t quite what I expect. The player known for never holding back often sounds packaged—but unlike virtually every other player in the league, his personal filter is set to allow only bombastic confidence and showmanship to pass through. He tacitly acknowledges at one point that in order to do the things he does, he’s had to build a sort of suit of armour around his personality. But Subban is at his most astute and charismatic when he drops the game face and says exactly what he really thinks about the things that matter most to him.

When we arrive for lunch, he strolls through the small, bright dining room at Park Restaurant and back to the open kitchen, as casually as if he were walking into his kitchen at home. Which, it turns out, he pretty much is. “I’m here every day, twice a day, for the past two years,” he says. “And on travel days, I come by and pick it up and take it with me on the plane.” He greets Antonio Park, the owner and head chef, effusively, then waves off a guy sitting at the end of the bar, who’s asking if Subban wants his usual seat; the restaurant recently underwent a renovation, and Subban says they added the little half-moon table next to the chef for him. Most of the well-heeled patrons simply go on with their meals when the 26-year-old blueliner walks in, but one young woman stares at him, her mouth half open, as though she’s been paused.

He greets the servers by name, and one ushers us to a sleek booth near the front door. Subban asks about allergies, then orders for both of us without a menu: ice water with lemon, a green salad for him and the Asian salad for me, then a big platter of steak sashimi—no, scratch that, a smaller platter of sashimi, and some of those riceless sushi rolls the chef makes for him. Subban met Park years ago, when Park was cooking at another Montreal restaurant, and they’ve become friends. “In my opinion, he’s probably one of the best—if not the best—in North America,” Subban says. Park’s eponymous establishment has become popular with Habs players as a result of Subban’s evangelism. Just after he orders, forward Alex Galchenyuk calls one of the two Samsung phones Subban is keeping an eye on. “Chucky! What’s up, man? Yeah, I’m here right now. Are you gonna come by here? OK, I’ll make sure they have a table for you.” He flags down a server and politely inquires if there’s a place for his teammate and a couple of guests; of course there is.

Subban has been living at Hotel Le Crystal, a four-minute walk from the Bell Centre, but he’s about to move into a new apartment he bought in Westmount, not far from the restaurant. He says it took him four years to find the right place because he’s “picky”—what he wanted at home was privacy and quiet. Subban figures he’s out and about in the city more than any other player on the team, and people are generally very respectful. Of course, there are moments he wishes he could just fade into the wallpaper—but then he thinks about the alternative. “What happens if you do something that isn’t seen as so nice, and all of a sudden people don’t want your autograph anymore and people are wanting you out of the city?” Subban says. “Now, all of a sudden, you wish, ‘I’d do anything to have people want to see me again.’”

The Toronto native’s already-outsize reputation, and the sense that he now belongs to Montreal and the city to him, blew up in mid-September, when he stood in a towering atrium newly named for him and announced a $10-million donation to Montreal Children’s Hospital. (A member of the Habs’ PR staff says that in 20 years on the job, he hasn’t seen demand like he had for Subban as the season started.) A cause revolving around kids was the natural choice: He grew up with four siblings; his dad, Karl, and two older sisters, Natasha and Nastassia, are all teachers, and he dotes on three little nephews, Legacy, Honor and Epic. But for Subban, the donation was also about going beyond his efforts of the past few years, when he threw his support behind causes dreamed up by other people. “I think now I’m able to do something that you know comes from me—it’s cut from my cloth, not somebody else’s. I wanted to create my own thing and inspire people in my own way and create a legacy for myself.” As we talk, he shovels in his bowl of virtuous greens, then praises my Asian salad like a seasoned food writer. “It’s 21 ingredients, all hand-julienned. They don’t grate anything.”

I ask him to explain how the game looks and sounds to him, how he decides what to do next on the ice: What does hockey look like inside Subban’s head? “Like a walk in the park,” he says, with almost defiant nonchalance. He’s been playing since he was two, he continues, so it’s all just second nature, like getting up and brushing his teeth in the morning. “[With] Michael Jackson, or the best artist in the world, or the best football player in the world, or the best chef in the world,” he points his chopsticks at the kitchen, “you give them structure, but then you just let them do their thing. The moment you try to tell them what to do, now they’re not the best at what they do anymore. What allows me to do some of the things I do is having that mentality—that it’s just a walk in the park.”

If the player going for that walk was a comic-book hero, the defining vignette in his origin montage would be his father coming home from work as a night-school principal to wake six-year-old Subban, who’d gone to bed in his snowsuit, for late-night shinny games on the outdoor rink at Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto. Karl talks often about “loading their GPS at a young age”—how he wanted his kids to have a big goal to reach for. Subban says that wasn’t something his father talked about when they were growing up—he’s just had to come up with an explanation for how it is you get all three of your sons to the NHL (Malcolm, 21, is a goalie in the Bruins system and Jordan, 20, is a defenceman drafted by the Canucks). “Everybody wants to know. You gotta figure out a way to present it to people in a way they can understand,” Subban says. “With his background as a teacher, he finds the best way to do that is through quotes.” His dad is more vocal, but Subban sees himself as being more like his mom, Maria; he talks to her most often these days, and his love of fashion is rooted in her insistence that you should always be put together well.

When I ask how his friendship with Price started, Subban’s face breaks into a warm, relaxed grin. They just clicked, he says, maybe because they both came into the league with the glaring spotlight of big expectations trained on them. Subban was called up to the Habs in 2010, when Price was Jaroslav Halak’s backup, and he was impressed by the goalie’s professionalism while being forced to sit in the back seat. “What I liked about Carey is that everybody thinks he’s just this Western cowboy guy, but he’s not—he’s just not. Not with me, anyway,” Subban says. “He understands life. I don’t just see him as a hockey player.”

I ask Subban if there’s anything no one ever thinks to ask him that he wishes they would. At first, he bats the question away, saying if you have a clue what’s going on as a hockey player, you realize people aren’t there to ask what you want to be asked. But then he says: “I’d love people to ask about the marketing of the NHL and why it’s the fourth-best sport. Because I’ve got a great explanation for that.” Suddenly, Subban launches into an impassioned and quite savvy discourse on branding, fan psychology and how his sport may be shooting itself in the foot.

The way the NHL does business—he uses the word “we” here—restricts it from growing, he says, and the league hasn’t fully embraced that things are changing around it. You hear musicians and rappers reference basketball and football players, even baseball and soccer stars once in a while, he notes—but never a hockey player. And why is that? “If 700 players do an interview on TV, not all 700 players should sound the same,” Subban says, practically pleading. “Guys should feel confident going on TV and giving their two cents. We’re not asking them to go on and say inappropriate things, but just go on and be opinionated.” Instead, hockey is about “taking it one day at a time, one shift at a time”—Subban drops into a faux-hoser drawl as he recites the approved lines—and “it’s boring.” But until the culture of the game changes, he believes players with skin thinner than his are going to worry about ruffling feathers with their teammates and never feel like they can be themselves. As he finishes this thought, Subban suddenly flashes a smile, waves and calls, “Hi, guys!” to a couple of kids who are gaping at him through the glass door of the restaurant.

There’s this prevailing notion in hockey that if you make a big deal out of your goals or you’re outgoing, you’re not a leader, Subban says, sounding exasperated—and that just doesn’t make sense to him. “Bobby Orr didn’t celebrate because that’s the way he was—he just didn’t feel the need to. Great. Tiger Williams used to go down the ice sitting on his stick. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy—that means he gets excited. There’s nothing wrong with that.” To Subban’s mind, hockey is the one pro sport that eats its own. If you listen to basketball coverage, he says, 90 percent of what they’ll say about the game’s biggest stars is positive, but hockey just isn’t like that—for him or anyone else. “Even Sidney Crosby—look at all the heat he’s been taking. This guy’s the best player in the world, and he’s getting the heat he’s been getting? Really?”

So, has Subban ever been surprised by the blowback he’s gotten for his various supposed missteps? At first, he deflects, insisting that nothing bothers him. But then he says, “There are things in the past where I didn’t know I was offending anybody.” Like celebrating after a goal, for example. He gets why the other team would be mad: “Because I scored.” Here Subban pauses, a dripping morsel of sashimi pinned between his chopsticks, his face an open-mouthed smartass emoji, enjoying himself in a way that’s impossible not to like. But then, his opponents should be upset about the goal, not his reaction to it, he argues. “If you’re mad about the celebration, then you just sound like a big suck. If you don’t want me to celebrate, don’t let me score.” And really, there’s some unassailable logic to that.

I ask what people get wrong about him most often. “Cocky,” Subban says, archly. “I don’t think people know the meaning of cocky. If I asked somebody to give me the meanings of cocky and confident, they might give me the same definition.” (For the record, the Merriam-Webster definition of cocky is “having or showing confidence in a way that is annoying to other people.”) Subban tries not to pay attention to his critics, for the simple reason that he doesn’t get to talk back, to refute their claims by pushing them to give an example he’s sure they can’t, to make them look like idiots. “If I ever get to the point where I’m sitting on a [TV] panel, well, I hope God’s on their side that day.”

Hockey is changing—slowly—he concedes, but it still demands the players who should be its public face function like identical widgets stamped out on an assembly line. “The perception is that in order to be a good team player, you need to be like everybody else. And I don’t understand that.” It seems too obvious to ask if he’s talking about himself, so I ask if he thinks the NHL does a poor job of marketing individual players. “The NHL doesn’t market individual players—they market teams,” he says. “The NFL markets players. NBA? Markets players. The Montreal Canadiens don’t really market players. They market the Montreal Canadiens.” The way he looks at it, people can’t become a fan of you or your sport if they don’t know anything about you as a person. Of course you have to be a good player, but fans also need to feel like they know you a little, like they could come up to you on the street and say hi.

From the outside, this moment in Subban’s career appears to be about him just shrugging and forging ahead, introducing himself directly to fans and would-be fans—maybe to spite the league, maybe to show it the possibilities, maybe just to get it done. But he says he wouldn’t put it that way. “I’ve always had an interest in continuing to grow my brand and put myself in a position that there’s more to P.K. Subban than being a hockey player.” His response, ironically, sounds weirdly canned. Subban’s personal website launched in mid-October, and it’s unlike anything you’ve seen from any other NHL player—slick and stylish, all about the “I” and not the team, built around a holistic cult of personality in which Subban’s identity as a hockey player is only one small part. He stars, along with his brothers and dad, in a new campaign for the upscale mall clothing chain RW&CO., and there’s a sexy, fun energy to the ads—like peeking through a window at a party you want to crash.

Now, this whole savvy sports-marketing seminar doesn’t mean Subban wants to burn the temple of hockey to the ground and rebuild it in his own image. He loves the sport—he can just see so much potential being left on the shelf. As he devours a plate of riceless sushi rolls, the final dish in the enormous parade of food from Park’s kitchen to our table, Subban sounds like a devoted but frustrated parent who sees their kid’s star power but worries they’ll flush it away with silly choices. “There is a culture to the sport that I want to see respected and I don’t want to see change,” he says. “You want to respect the jersey, you want to respect the logo, you want to respect your players—but be yourself! Have fun.”

Over the course of lunch, I’ve asked him in a couple of different ways if he ever felt like the criticism he’s gotten has made him hold back at all. While he remains the NHL’s personality-in-residence, it seems as though he’s mellowed a bit, learned to say just a little less. But repeatedly, Subban says no­—he wouldn’t be the player he is if he turned things down when the neighbours complained. “Ultimately, what’s going to keep me here is what’s got me here. And I ain’t changing that for anybody.”

It remains to be seen if the pearl-clutchers of hockey will follow his lead and figure out that fans want to cheer for real, three-dimensional human beings who sometimes say interesting things. But if they keep trying to force Subban to be like the other 699 guys who just want to take it one day at a time and stick to the agreed-upon script—well, good luck to them. Like Subban says: They’ll need God on their side.

This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Photo credits: Francois Lacasse/NHL/Getty; Shayne Laverdere; Laylor Photography; Bruce Bennett/Getty; Minas Panagiotakis/Getty; Scott Audette/NHL/Getty; Tasos Katopodis/Getty