Brad Marchand has embraced his role as the NHL’s villain this season. Some of his antics are harmless — blowing kisses as the fans at the All-Star Game booed him, for instance — but he’s also been suspended and fined multiple times for dangerous on-ice incidents.
He’s continued to cross the line in the playoffs against the Toronto Maple Leafs, causing the so-called centre of the hockey universe to wake up to just how obnoxious Marchand can be.
How do they miss these at this point... https://t.co/4i7dgLrQei
— James Mirtle (@mirtle) April 19, 2018
It would be funny if it weren’t so aggravating to see Marchand continue to get away with things. Canucks fans, of course, are well aware of Marchand’s tendencies; long before he was the villain of the NHL, he was a villain in Vancouver.
On Thursday, Marchand published an article on the Players’ Tribune that acts as a sort of villain origin story. The first two sentences of the piece are, “If you like me, you’ll like this story. If you hate me, you’ll love it.”
Honestly, I didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well written. Whichever ghostwriter took Marchand’s words and turned them into that article did a great job. But the article didn’t make me hate Marchand more or give me schadenfreude. Instead, it just made me feel sad for him.
To get into why, I’m going to annotate Marchand’s article. I won’t go sentence-by-sentence — to read the whole thing you should go to the Players’ Tribune — but I want to provide my thoughts on some key elements.
He stopped, and I shoved the kid right out of the front seat. Yoink.
He was on the ground crying, being a real baby about it, like, “Whyyyyyy.”
I went riding off into the cul-de-sac, honking the horn. My mom says I had this little smirk on my face, too.
Marchand says this is his earliest memory: making another child cry when he was three years old. Sounds about right.
He had a little electric truck that was a birthday present. Another kid, one of his friends in the neighbourhood, jumped in it and drove around. Marchand got mad and pulled him out of the truck. That’s it.
What’s odd to me is that Marchand seems to think that his is a unique, funny story. He calls it a “famous story” in his family and follows it up with, “What can I say? I was a little animal.” As a dad with three boys, it just sounds like what three-year-olds are like. You take any toy away from a three-year-old and they’ll wig out. If they happen to make another kid cry in the process of getting their toy back, they won’t care at all.
But that’s three-year-olds. Part of the parenting process is teaching your kids to share and to show empathy to others. You know, growing up.
We’d be out there skating every day in the winter. If we weren’t at school, we were at hockey practice. If we weren’t at hockey practice, we were on the lake. If the lake wasn’t frozen, we were playing ball hockey in the driveway. If it was raining, we were inside beating up my little brother, Jeff.
Hahaha, isn’t it hilarious to beat up someone younger than you?
It’s okay, though, because Marchand said Jeff was an “unbelievable pest.” Apparently it’s okay to beat someone up if they’re an irritating pest. I feel like Marchand should have thought this through a little better before telling the world.
We had to get ourselves pumped up, so we’d always play that song by Sir Mix-a-Lot and sing along. You remember the one. Picture four little kids in full hockey gear and one grown man, all alone on the road at 4:15 in the morning, screaming out, “I LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE. YOU OTHER BROTHERS CAN’T DENY.”
Is there a reason he says “that song” and not “Baby Got Back”? Just asking.
Also, is it just me or is that a really weird choice for a pump-up song for a carful of pre-teens?
My mom likes to say that I came out of the womb “mischievous.” I just liked the feeling of messing with other kids. I liked getting under their skin and making them react. But then that same pee-wee season, something else happened that took my mindset a step further. We were playing against our rivals, Cole Harbor, in some important game, and they had this monster forward on their team who always killed us.
During the game, the kid took a run at my brother, and he smoked him. For as much as we’d mess with one another at home, if you ever hurt my brother, it was like a red light went off inside me. I’d fight you.
My dad was one of our coaches, and he tapped me and my three buddies on the shoulder and said, “Next shift, I want every one of you to take a run at that kid every time he touches the puck.”
So we went out, and every time the kid touched the puck, one of us took a run. He got so pissed off that he took a slashing penalty right at the end of his shift, and we got a power play. We ended up scoring the game-winning goal with him in the box, and I kind of had this realization like, “OK … if I have a 0.01% chance, this might be one way of getting people to notice me.”
Hold up. Peewee hockey is for kids under 13. What coach is telling a bunch of 12-year-olds to take a run at other kids on the ice?
That’s literally what the comically-evil coach in Mighty Ducks tells his kid to do to Adam Banks. Marchand and his dad are Disney villains, the most blatant and obviously-evil villains in the history of fiction.
That last sentence just makes me picture Marchand grinning like the Grinch getting a wonderful, awful idea. But this is also the moment where I started to get sad reading the article.
I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like it, and I will be the first to tell you that it’s a fine line. I have done things that have stepped over that line, and I’ve paid the price for it. But you know what? There’s a lot of people out there in the hockey world who love to say, “Winning is everything. It’s the only thing.”
But do they really mean it? How far are they willing to go? Maybe it was my size, or just the way I was born, but I’ve always felt like you have to be willing to do anything — literally anything — in order to win. Even if that means being hated. Even if it means carrying around some baggage.
If I played the game any other way, you absolutely would not know my name. You wouldn’t care enough to hate me, because I wouldn’t be in the NHL. The way I played the game got me noticed by junior teams, and it got me drafted by the Boston Bruins at 5’9”.
Here’s the thing about Brad Marchand: he’s a really, really good hockey player. He had 34 goals and 85 points in just 65 games this season, good for fourth in the league in points per game.
In his last year of major midget, Marchand had 47 goals and 94 points in 60 games. With scoring like that, there is no way he wasn’t going to get noticed by junior teams.
In the QMJHL, Marchand had a solid 66 points in 68 games in his draft year, good for seventh among under-18 players. Combine that with a fantastic performance at the World Under-17 Hockey Championships the year before and Marchand was definitely going to get drafted by an NHL team.
Did Marchand’s aggravating style on the ice make him more attractive to teams? Of course. When you can combine being a pest with putting up points, that definitely ups your draft stock. But it’s just sad to think that Marchand doesn’t have enough faith in his ability to play hockey to think that he needs to play so close to the line and so frequently cross it.
Also, the famous quote is “Winning isn’t everything: it’s the only thing.”
I was meant to play for this city. I believe that.
Of course Marchand was meant to play for Boston. Marchand and Boston are a perfect fit. These are the fans who cried foul at Marchand’s five-game suspension for elbowing Marcus Johansson in the head, which caused a concussion that took Johansson out of the Devils’ lineup for the remainder of the regular season. Johansson missed 35 regular season games and the first two games of the playoffs, but sure, a five-game suspension for Marchand was “a joke.”
Yes, Marchand and Boston are a perfect fit.
I’m still learning a lot from our captain, Zdeno Chara – Big Zee – about how to maintain my body as I get older. If you’ve seen him in ESPN’s Body Issue, or on his own Instagram lately, the guy is an absolute machine. At 40-years-old, he’s still one of the most physically fit guys in all of sports. What you may not know is how mentally tough Zee is as well. He’s given me such good advice from his experiences in dealing with outside pressure and making sure you don’t get too high or too low. Whatever problems may arise in the future, I know I can count on Zee.
I don’t care how much you hate the Bruins: Zdeno Chara is awesome. On Wednesday he shared a photo of himself with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl on Instagram and talked about listening to Nirvana as a teenager, “Jumping around with long hair and tossing my lengthy skinny body into the walls.”
I dearly want to see Chara moshing with long hair. He must have been terrifying for anyone else in that mosh pit.
Claude basically said, “I want you to look at Patrice and do everything exactly like he does it. You’re not going to be the best player on the ice every single night, because Patrice is going to be the best player on the ice every single night. So I want you to be the second best.”
So I watched Patrice from day one, and I saw the ultimate professional. I don’t have many rules I live by, but one of my rules is: If you say anything bad about my brother, or about Patrice Bergeron, I’ll fight you. The guy is simply unbelievable. I’ve watched him play with broken bones, a punctured lung… a freaking punctured lung.
Except for the part about playing with a punctured lung, I love this. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the glorification of playing through pain, but I really thought it was dumb that Bergeron played with a punctured lung.
But the idea of telling someone they’ll always be second best is a great motivator, particularly when the person they have to compare themselves to constantly proves that no one will be better than him.
Of course, this also gives other teams some ammunition for getting under Marchand’s skin: trash talk Bergeron.
You know, sometimes people ask me what it’s like to be hated by so many other fans. It would be easy to say that it doesn’t bother me at all. But it’s complicated. Obviously, you want people to be able to separate who you are on the ice versus the real person off it.
But you know what? All the heat I feel from fans in Vancouver and Toronto and Montreal means nothing compared to the love I feel from Boston.
Maybe you wouldn’t be hated so much if you didn’t try to hurt other players? Just a thought.
There’s a difference between a pest and someone who is a danger to other players. You can be a pest without elbowing someone in the head, low-bridging them, or slew-footing them. And sure, other players do dirty things too — I’m not excusing anyone — but when you’ve consistently made crossing the line part of your game, you’re going to be hated.
And again: Marchand is good enough as a player that he doesn’t need to cross that line. He says, “If I played the game any other way, you absolutely would not know my name,” but we’re well past that point now. We know your name, Marchand. Maybe you could stop intentionally hurting other players now?
We got to day seven or eight when we got a phone call from someone who shall remain nameless. Every player who was still in town got the same message: “All right, boys, time to go back home. It’s over. Leave the city.”
Marchand tells a story of trying to out-do the Blackhawks’ supposed 16-straight days of partying after winning the Stanley Cup, but being forced to stop after a week.
Do you know how bad you have to get to be kicked out of Boston? I mean, it’s Boston.
You saw it with our team at the beginning of this season. We got off to a slow start, and then the injuries piled up. And we were really feeling the heat for a while. I think two things changed the season. The first thing was the emergence of Danton Heinen and Matt Grzelcyk. They’re probably not the first names you’d think of if you’re outside of Boston, but Bruins fans know just how important these guys have been this season. Charlie McAvoy gets all the attention — because he’s going to be an unreal superstar in this league —but Grizzy is extremely underrated on the blue line. And I can’t say enough about Heino and how his two-way game has added so much depth to our roster. You need guys like Grizzy and Heino to win a Cup.
Hockey nicknames are the worst — you usually just add “ey” or “er” to a guy’s name — but “Heino” is particularly brutal. But I guess they couldn’t go with “Heiney” for obvious reasons.
The thing about hockey is that the cliché is actually real. It’s really a game where a split second changes everything. The difference between winning and losing is so razor thin. If you don’t have a good room, and you’re not all 100% locked-in and willing to do literally anything to win, you are not gonna win.
I don’t care how fast your guys are or how good your system is. Everybody’s guys are fast. Everybody’s system is good. What you need is a room full of guys who are willing to do anything. We had it in 2011. I think we have it again in 2018.
Apparently all it takes to win in the NHL is a “good room” and the willingness to do anything to win.
It also helps when the opposing team’s best defensive centre suffers a freak eye injury, their best defensive defenceman suffers an abdominal injury on a hip check, one of their scoring wingers has his back broken, one of their veteran wingers suffered a sports hernia, their Selke-winning second-line centre is playing through groin and labrum tears, and the rest of the team has numerous other injuries.
No excuses, really — the Bruins won the Cup — but acting like it was only because they had a “good room” and will is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.
Also, it once again sells himself short. Marchand is a good hockey player! The Bruins were a good hockey team! The 2011 Bruins had so much skill to go with their toughness and had one of the greatest playoff performances from a goaltender of all time.
Marchand had 11 goals and 19 points in 25 playoff games that year. To chalk up their Stanley Cup victory as being solely the result of a “good room” belittles his own skill and that of his teammates. Not every team that has a “good room” wins the Stanley Cup, even if they’re willing to do whatever it takes to win.
So, in the end, I weirdly felt sad for Marchand. Sad that his dad told 12-year-olds to go take a run at a kid on the opposing team. Sad that he feels the need to cross the line to be an effective NHL player. Sad that he doesn’t seem to understand how good he and his teammates really are.
