If this is the watershed—if hockey is about to throw off its self-abnegating instinct for conformity—then May 14, 2014, will surely go down as the first night of the brave, new era. The Montreal Canadiens had just eliminated their hated rivals, the Boston Bruins, in the Stanley Cup quarter-finals, thanks to an astounding performance by the Habs’ star defenceman, P.K. Subban: four goals; three assists; nights during the hard-fought, seven-game series when he never seemed to leave the ice. Other players would have retreated at this point behind a curtain of sham humility. They’d have complimented the efforts of their opponents. They’d have veered from words that might rankle the defeated.
Not Subban. As the semicircle of cameras and reporters formed four ranks deep around his stall in the Canadiens’ dressing room, the 25-year-old issued the verbal equivalent of a mid-ice hip check—to the Bruins, to the Boston media, to the city’s hostile fans who’d spent the past week denouncing him as a pox on all that is good in hockey.
“I really don’t care what people have to say,” he said firmly. “I really don’t care what the other team thinks. I don’t care what their fans think. If they hate me, great. Hate me. We’ll just keep winning, I’ll keep scoring and we’ll move on.”
It was customary Subbanic brashness—the sort of thing that in the past has drawn reproach from the game’s self-appointed arbiters of decorum. Yet the response to Subban’s candour in this year’s playoffs has been strikingly different: Voices that once might have slammed him as a showboat now hailed him as a breath of fresh air.
“He can walk the walk after talking the talk,” declared Adam Proteau of The Hockey News. “Je lève mon chapeau à P.K. Subban (I tip my hat),” enthused Marc Bergevin, the Canadiens general manager, who has previously rationed praise for his young star. Even the Bruins, still seething from their loss, had grudging compliments for him in their post-game laments.
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