Source : Montrealgazette.com
Brian Gionta will turn the corner into his fifth season with the Canadiens this September, and he knows no better than the rest of us whether he’ll be in Montreal for a sixth.
“How I’ve always dealt with it, including the last years of my deal in New Jersey, is I just go out and play,” Gionta said this week at the Habs’ Brossard training facility for a daily session of biceps tendon surgery rehab treatment.
“I don’t worry about it, I let my agent take care of it. That’s just my personality. I’m not the guy who’s going to get caught up in stuff and worry about it. Things work out for a reason. They happen the way they’re supposed to.”
Of any contact to this point with Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin:
“No, there’s been none,” Gionta replied, not that there’s anything whatsoever revealing about that.
Gionta, 34, signed with Montreal on July 1, 2009, his five-year, $25-million contract bringing him to town as part of the free-agent armada that docked in then-GM Bob Gainey’s massive Habs retooling.
Gionta was named the club’s 28th captain on Sept. 29, 2010, the position having historically sat fallow for a season as team management and head coach Jacques Martin had the dressing room led by committee through 2009-10.
Two hundred and 22 games played with the Canadiens since his arrival, an even 250 counting the postseason, Gionta well knows the business of hockey.
He’s worn just two NHL jerseys — that of New Jersey for 473 games, beginning as a 23-year-old rookie in 2001-02, and then the Canadiens. It was with the Devils in his sophomore season that he won his Stanley Cup.
For 170 games with Montreal, regular-season and playoffs, Gionta has been captain both by the letter on his jersey and his actions on the ice, where he has played much taller and heavier than his advertised 5-foot-7, 175 pounds.
“I don’t think things will change too much,” Gionta told a media crowd upon being introduced as captain. “I’m a leader by example on the ice. There’s a good group of core guys on this team who can do a majority of the leading. That’s still going to be the case.”
Much of that core has changed in the nearly three years since Gionta spoke those words. But veterans who departed for elsewhere have been replaced. And Gionta still leads by example.
“I love the captaincy. I’m very honoured to have it and I try to do what I can,” he said this week. “I try to leave everything on the ice every night.
“I’m not a ‘show’ person. I don’t have to prove things. I don’t do things to say, ‘Hey, this is why I’m doing it.’ I am who I am. I don’t need to go down the bench and whisper in someone’s ear to prove it to a camera. I play and that’s it.”
Gionta has ridden the roller coaster that is hockey in Montreal. He went three rounds deep into the 2009-10 playoffs; lost a seven-game, overtime-decided series the following year to Boston, the eventual Cup champion; endured the 2010-11 disaster of dented bodies and dysfunction; then was part of the remarkable turnaround of this season, which ended on a personal low when he tore a biceps tendon in the first postseason game against Ottawa.
If Gionta is surprised by the dramatic about-face of this season, following the world’s longest funeral of 2010-11, he’s not letting on.
“It started when Mr. Molson made changes,” he said of owner Geoff Molson’s bold hiring of Bergevin as GM last summer. “(Molson) made decisions that I’m sure are really tough in the business. He put people in place who were great, and it trickled down from management.
“Marc has been great right from the start. He has a player’s perspective, he played the game for a long time. He understands what guys you need in the room.
“Michel was great,” Gionta added of head coach Michel Therrien. “He brought in a system that everybody bought into and played. That’s why you saw the success we had. It doesn’t matter what system we had — as long as everybody’s doing it, it’s going to pay off.”
Gionta described 2010-11 as “a bad year, an off year,” the season that was called a lot worse by many.
“But we always believed in the guys in the room,” he said. “Everybody kind of wrote us off (this season) and didn’t expect much from us, but we expected what we achieved.
“That’s why I was so disappointed at the end of the year (falling in five games to Ottawa). We’re a last-place team last year, then we finish on top of our division and go to the playoffs. People said,
‘That should be a good year.’ Well, it was disappointing. We should have gone further.
“The success starts with leadership at the top. Mr. Molson has invested in having a great team and Marc is the guy who will do that.
“I’m confident that this is just the start of it. It’s not a fluke thing that we bounced back. It’s getting the right guys in that room. It’s character guys. You see the transformation and it will only continue.”
Time will tell whether Gionta, having been a part of this team’s recent checkered past, will be here for what seems to be a promising future.
Hockey, this captain has learned, is too rugged a game to be played with a crystal ball.
Aucun commentaire:
Publier un commentaire