MONTREAL — Vincent Lecavalier will be at Game 4 on Tuesday night at the Bell Centre — and more frequently starting next season.
Since Montreal hired him in February 2022, the special adviser of hockey operations has done a lot of his work away from the public eye and away from the team as he tends to a busy household in Tampa, Fla.
Lecavalier’s part-time role has been the perfect balance between dipping his toes into NHL management while largely staying at home, where he’s coached his son in hockey. Starting next season, though, he’ll have more time for the Canadiens because his son, 14, is leaving home to play hockey at Shattuck-St. Mary’s prep school in Faribault, Minn.
“Hopefully I will be more part of the team and going on the road and all that, so I should be with the team a little bit more,” Lecavalier said in an interview with The Athletic.
The reason Lecavalier couldn’t immediately commit full-time to the Habs gig is that he’s got his hands full on the home front; both of his daughters, aged 13 and 16, are fully committed golfers, and he has coached his son in hockey for the last eight years, which is certainly a full-time commitment in itself.
“We’re very busy with all that, it’s a lot, and my wife has been great,” Lecavalier said in pointing out the MVP in his household.
There’s no mistaking Lecavalier’s passion when he talks about what it means to be part of the Canadiens’ ascent. Still, he let out a healthy chuckle before the question was even done when I asked him what his reaction would’ve been 20 years ago in his Tampa Bay Lightning playing days if someone told him he’d one day be part of the Canadiens management team with his longtime agent Kent Hughes as general manager and his teammate and pal Martin St. Louis as head coach.
“Kent was the common denominator that brought it all together,” Lecavalier said. “With him coaching against Marty (in their kids’ hockey leagues for several years) and obviously me being with Kent for so long.
“But yeah, I would have never have thought that. But it’s been amazing. It’s been an amazing run for everybody.”
Fresh off scouting the U18 worlds last month in Slovakia, Lecavalier speaks earnestly of the work Hughes has given him.
“It’s been good. You know, it’s not a full-time job like those guys; obviously, they’re in the thick of things and in the day-to-day part of it with the players,” Lecavalier said. “But working with the draft the last few years has been a lot of fun.”
The role also includes advising the GM on players around the league amidst potential trade discussions. That’s been the case from Day 1 four years ago.
“If he has a question or a decision to make, we’ll talk about it, or I’ll look at guys,” Lecavalier said. “But then after that, he makes those big decisions. I think he’s surrounded himself with people he trusts to make the best decisions possible.”
Lecavalier has filed reports on plenty of NHL players that never see the light of day in actual trades. But that’s the nature of the prep work needed to stay ready.
“Maybe like one-tenth of the things we talked about may happen, but Kent wants to know about guys and wants different opinions before he makes his own decisions,” said Lecavalier. “But I have to do my own homework and look into the player and really look into not just what the player is doing this year but the last couple of years.”
Which is to say, Lecavalier wants to give his boss very in-depth reports on players — and he’s done that from the moment Hughes came on as GM.
“I have known and worked closely with Vinny for close to 30 years,” Hughes told The Athletic. “I trust him implicitly as a person and I trust his hockey mind. He has been a terrific sounding board for me on decisions and has assisted with player evaluations, special assignments, effectively whatever we ask him to do.”
Watching St. Louis thrive as head coach has also been special for Lecavalier, not that he’s surprised one bit. Though the Canadiens hiring St. Louis as interim coach in February 2022 was a stunner to so many, it wasn’t to Lecavalier. He saw a coach in the making more than 20 years ago.
“If you really know him and been around him, you would know that he’s always been a coach at heart,” Lecavalier said. “He almost had a marker in his pants as a player at intermission; he could certainly draw something up on the white board about certain plays. For me, I got a firsthand look at that playing with him.”
Vincent Lecavalier says his Tampa Bay Lightning teammate Martin St. Louis was a coach on the ice well before he became an NHL head coach. (Harry How / Getty Images)
They weren’t immediately linemates in Tampa, but when that eventually did happen, it was like having a coach on his line, Lecavalier said.
“I was like, ‘Wow.’ There was a lot of talking on the bench and a lot of teaching,” Lecavalier recalls. “He was teaching me a lot. The knowledge of the game that he has, he brought me to another level, if you know what I mean. Things that I never even thought about, or plays and how to do things, pushing the pace, he was really a coach at heart. I know he was a Hall of Fame player, but he’s just as good as a coach, if not even better.”
All of which is why, as surprising as it was to the outside world when St. Louis got the Habs coaching nod, it certainly wasn’t stunning to those making that decision.
“Kent and I had been talking a lot about that — was Marty ready to go from peewee to the NHL? — and we know there would be some adjustments, I guess,” Lecavalier said. “There’s a lot of things going on on an NHL bench. Things are a lot quicker. But we knew from Kent knowing him (and coaching against St. Louis with their boys’ hockey) and myself knowing him, that he would adjust. And I think it was the perfect timing. We didn’t have to be a Stanley Cup contender the first month that he was there, you know? We had a little bit of runway of him adapting.”
Lecavalier said they would know after half a year where St. Louis would be. It was clear in a hurry.
“But we knew all along, there’s a lot of good coaches out there, but we knew that Marty could take it to another level,” Lecavalier said. “His ceiling was so high with all the knowledge. You know, when we try to draft a player, we look at their ceiling, right? We knew Marty’s (coaching) ceiling was really high. He just needed time. And obviously, he’s proved everybody (in the Habs organization) right.”
Meanwhile, before all that happened, one month earlier in January 2022, there was also the matter of Lecavalier’s longtime agent informing him he might be the Canadiens’ next GM.
“I was like, ‘You better take it,”‘ Lecavalier, laughing, says he told Hughes. “Obviously, it’s totally different than what he was doing, but at the same time, he knew everything about it because he dealt with GMs every day. He dealt with teams every single day. He knows the business. And for me, Kent is a great hockey mind as well. He could actually be a pretty darn good coach. And overall in the business of things and running a team and letting guys blossom, he’s great at it.
“He puts the right people in the right place for them to be as good as they can be. He’s great at that. That’s what a great GM is. He’s just a smart guy.”
But there’s another trait Lecavalier feels serves Hughes well in his GM role.
“He’s honest. He’s not a salesman,” Lecavalier said. “He’s just an honest guy and he does things the right way, and people really respect that.”
Meanwhile, there’s probably no one more relieved that the first-round series with Tampa Bay is over. Lecavalier is a legacy player in that market, having led the team to its first Stanley Cup win in 2004, and still lives there and is part of that community. So, yeah, that was something else, being part of a series like that.
“When you work for a team and you’re part of something, I just wanted to win, I wanted to win for Montreal, for the fans, for the team, for Kent and Marty, for the players,” Lecavalier said. “Tampa’s a great team. I go to a lot of games there, right? And they treat me so well over there. So, obviously, I have all the respect for that organization.
“But once that series started, obviously I wanted to win, and we did,” he said with a laugh. “Getting texts from buddies (who live in Tampa) nonstop during the series, it made it even more a battle, I guess. But it was one of the best series I’ve seen overall. Like, just great hockey.”
These Canadiens have something special, as Vincent Lecavalier saw in Round 1 against his old team, the Tampa Bay Lightning. (Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
Bigger picture, the sky’s the limit for this young Habs team.
“Last year, we had a little success, but I guess the question was, can we do it again, right?” said Lecavalier. “I remember talking to a lot of people before the season saying, ‘Yeah, we had a great year, but now we have to back it up.’ Are we building bricks, adding to the foundation? We all thought we were, but until you start that next season, you never know where it’s going, right? Young teams can lose confidence. But the team has shown all year how resilient they are. They just battle. They figure out ways to win.”
Seeing a young group figure it out reminds Lecavalier a bit of a young Tampa team from a certain era.
“Building a confidence to win as a team with all the young players, I was part of that in Tampa,” he said. “Two years before we won the Cup, there was no way — like no way I thought we would win a Cup before we made our first playoffs.
“All of a sudden, we won one playoff series (in 2003) against Washington, and then lost to the (eventual Cup champion) Devils, but we built that confidence in ourselves, and then we just kept going.”
A Stanley Cup championship came to fruition in 2004.
“And I really think this team (Montreal), even with how young they are, I think it’s just going to get better every year,” Lecavalier said. “The belief is there, that’s what is so important.”