Article written By Marc Antoine Godin Oct 18, 2019 from the Athletic.com
No player in the Canadiens’ historical annals had endured a longer wait to score his first NHL goal. In his 127th career game, Victor Mete decided the joke just wasn’t funny anymore.
It’s worth dwelling on for a few minutes, no?
Particularly given the fact that, well, who really knows when it’ll happen again?
The wait
“I was as excited as I think anyone’s ever been for anyone scoring a goal,” said Brendan Gallagher after the Canadiens coasted by the Minnesota Wild, 4-0.
For years now, Gallagher has spent part of each offseason working with skills coach Tim Turk, a shot improvement guru. Turk also took Mete under his wing this past summer, which The Athletic’s Arpon Basu documented by donning a pair of skates and joining Mete on the ice for a training session.
When Turk went to Vancouver to meet Gallagher, the latter inquired about his teammate and fellow pupil.
“Gally was like, ‘he’s got to get one because the guys are on him. Turkey, you got to get him to really wheel that puck in the net’,” Turk said.
Turk promised that Mete would get his first goal within the first 10 games. He said it half-jokingly, but look where we are in the schedule: the Canadiens played their seventh game of the season on Thursday.
Let’s not kid anyone, the goal was eating away at Mete a lot more than it showed, and everyone in the Canadiens’ room shares the view he handled the situation like a boss.
When David Hale, a defenceman with the then-Phoenix Coyotes, snapped his record 230-game goalless string on Nov. 26, 2008, in Columbus, he talked about how great it felt to feel like he’d made a meaningful contribution.
Mete, who sits behind Hale and only four other players on the NHL’s all-time list for games without a goal to start a career, spent all that time trying to find other ways to contribute. Not once did he show up at the rink telling himself “tonight’s the night it’s going to happen.”
“I just kind of go into every game the exact same way I do every night, so I don’t lose focus and just focus on playing good, playing hard,” Mete said. “And when opportunity comes like that, if I can kind of pounce on it, then I will. But if not, if I don’t get chances in that game, then I need to play solid. ”
The shot
One of the first things that became apparent to Turk in working with Mete was that he was working with the wrong tool.
“Technically we were working on his stick, trying to see if we needed to make changes to his pattern and his lie and stuff like that, just so the puck came off in a lot tighter spin and the flight path was flying flatter in the air,” he said.
In the end, Mete changed everything up: stick manufacturer, length, flex, lie . . . all in aid of finding something, anything, that would be better suited to him and allow him to accomplish what he did against the Wild.
But it’s not merely a question of equipment. There’s technique to consider, and positioning.
When Turk, who was travelling to Saskatchewan on Thursday, was sent a clip of the goal, he couldn’t help himself from texting Mete to point out he’d scored on a release they had practiced together at least 500 times.
“The video that I saw, I was like holy smokes, we set up those redirect one-timers shots where, you know, when your body drops down like that, it enhances power in your shot because you can put pressure into the puck and into the ice,” he said. “It’s kind of like a lateral one timer that he got in there with an unloaded stick.”
It’s not hard to imagine Mete toiling away in a dark arena on a sunny day, hammering slapshot after slapshot from the blue line. But in truth, the opportunities to get full extension and really lean into one are comparatively rare in the NHL; they require time and space. The better, more suitable play for Mete’s skill set is to choose the opportune moment to dart up the ice in support and to make himself available in the right spot.
In fact, that’s probably what made Turk proudest: not only did Mete get to the area that best plays to his strengths, he applied the lessons that fit the situation.
“He just kept his stick on the ice,” Turk said. “We worked on generating power short distance. I feel so proud that he did that.”
Watching Mete lock his left arm during the pre-shot downswing reminded Turk of the way Gallagher shoots now. He’s been working with the right winger for much longer, and Mete will probably never generate quite as much power, but the two players’ technique is starting to bear a resemblance.
Mete has made dozens of identical forays in the past without being able to quite find an end product (and on the occasions he did, the hockey gods’ cruel side revealed itself – as when Andrew Shaw was called for goalie interference in the Canadiens’ third game last year). This time, Nick Cousins heard his voice from the top of the slot.
Cousins, who was playing his first game in a home uniform at the Bell Centre, hasn’t been around the club long enough to know about all the running gags and inside jokes. All he was thinking was he needed to get back to the bench, but then Nate Thompson got hold of the puck and made a nifty zone entry into the Wild’s end. So he headed behind the net to help out and to be in a position to grab the puck if Thompson was able to sweep it to him.
Thompson did, Cousins quickly slid a pass to Mete, who by this point was all alone in the slot.
“Yeah, I called for it so I was kind of just hanging around there, and he won the battle and I was able to get a clear shot,” Mete said.
The reaction
Judging by sound, there was literally nobody in the Bell Centre who didn’t understand the significance of what had just happened. Well, other than Cousins. Announcer Michel Lacroix took a lengthy, theatrical pause before making it all official, giving the crowd ample time to crank up the volume before giving Mete his due.
“Those fans will remember when they were there for Mete’s first goal,” Gallagher said.
The giddiness on the Canadiens’ bench was easily a match for the joy in the stands. It represented the culmination of months (years?) of friendly chirps and opened the floodgates of sheer delight for a kid who is impossible not to like.
In the middle of the bench, you had Nick Suzuki, who remembered playing against Mete for two years in the Ontario Hockey League and watching as he scored multiple goals against his Owen Sound Attack.
“I was shocked he hadn’t scored yet,” said the 20-year-old rookie.
As the Bell Centre celebrated and stood to cheer for Mete, Suzuki had a single thought.
“I want to be the next one,” he said.
Less than five minutes later, he followed through as a power play expired, moments after Joel Armia got his stick on a Jonathan Drouin pass and roofed a shot past Alex Stalock.
It was the first time two Canadiens’ players scored their first goal in the same game since Chris Higgins and Alexander Perezhogin did it on Oct. 6, 2005. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, it was actually the second time this season two teammates scored their first goal in the same game. Last Saturday, Adam Johnson and Sam Lafferty had their sticks in the air in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ defeat of . . . Minnesota.
Well, well.
The goal drought was long, so maybe that explains why Mete seemed a little bit reluctant to make too much out of it. Anyway, he was humble afterward.
“It was cool. The fans were probably waiting for that for a long time. So kind of to give it to them here, the first goal, is pretty special.”
Come on, Victor. It was your moment!
“He is like that, he downplays everything and I think it comes from within, in his family background,” said Turk. “They’re so modest of a family, I think it runs from his parents to him.”
Even in the moment, his defence partner Shea Weber seemed happier than the guy who’d actually scored. He squeezed Mete in the kind of bear hug only a Man Mountain call pull off then skated off to retrieve the puck
“He was just holding it in better than me,” Weber said.
When the team repaired back to the dressing room at the first intermission, the mood was understandably buoyant.
“Medium cheese, Meat, fucking rights!” Weber yelled in reference to the shot that beat Stalock.
There is no chance that Mete’s text messages weren’t blowing up by then, but he’s not the sort of guy who goes diving for his phone between periods (and thank goodness for that). He was content to just listen to his teammates jibes: if you can score one you can score two, kid.
It was a special moment, it’s not every day a team – and in this case a team that has remained almost entirely intact from a year ago – has that much fun in a first period intermission. That sort of exuberance is usually reserved for postgame. There was a euphoria to it, Mete’s teammates said.
“We were pretty excited so we were just trying to keep our foot on the gas for the next two periods,” Cousins said.
If only the Wild had felt like actually playing, it might actually have mattered.
The aftermath
Remember how we told you at the beginning of this story that Mete refused to let himself be distracted by the idea of scoring his first goal, and that his main concern was playing solid defensive hockey?
After scoring his first goal, he insisted that his defensive work on the night is what gave him the greatest satisfaction. The duo he forms with Weber has been a source of worry in the early part of the season, and Mete couldn’t have found a more effective way of changing the channel on that narrative if he drew it up on a whiteboard. It was also an unequivocal retort to those who doubt the Toronto native’s ability to hang with, and complement, Weber.
“He was good, he was really good’” Weber said. “He was quick, especially on guys who first entered the zone. He was good at shutting the play down quick with led to little chips or dumps, which led to transition for us. He used his skating really well tonight to cut the plays off early, and we didn’t have to chase the puck a lot.”
One game isn’t enough to erase everything we’ve seen from the Weber-Mete pair since the beginning of the season, but you never can tell: perhaps chasing away the slowly darkening cloud that hung over one half of the tandem will allow Mete to play more freely. Who really knows what effect that might have on his game?
We’ll have to wait a while yet to properly evaluate the repercussions, but there is one thing that leaves absolutely no doubt: Nick Cousins expects his younger teammate to pick up the tab at dinner.
“I like my steak medium rare,” he said, “we’ll have to figure that out in St. Louis tomorrow.”
Article written By Marc Antoine Godin Oct 18, 2019 – reprinted with permission from the Athletic.com
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