MONTREAL — There were 14 different defencemen who dressed for at least one game of arguably the most forgettable season in Montreal Canadiens history, and none of them were named Andrei Markov.
It didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t make sense now.
And not just because Markov was wronged, with then-general manager Marc Bergevin leaving him out in the cold as he was 10 games from hitting a 1,000 with the only franchise he’d ever played for, but also because the soon-to-be 39-year-old would’ve, at worst, been Montreal’s third-best defenceman that season.
Markov had six goals, 36 points and a plus-18 while averaging 21:50 per game to help the Canadiens earn 103 points and an Atlantic Division title in 2016-17, and he felt that armed him to command a two-year deal at the same salary he’d earned for 10 straight seasons.
But after Markov failed to gain any traction on those negotiation terms, he finally bent, telling Bergevin he’d take a one-year deal.
It was never offered, so Markov opted for a two-year deal with the KHL’s AK Bars Kazan to play the remainder of a career that started roughly 900 kilometres away, in Voskresensk, just outside Moscow.
If Canadiens owner Geoff Molson didn’t feel good about it then, he had to have felt horrible months later — after 39-year-old Mark Streit was signed for pennies on the dollar to end up dressing for only two games before having his contract torn up.
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The rest of Bergevin’s decisions that off-season led the Canadiens off a cliff and down to the ravine of the Atlantic Division, with an embarrassing 71 points to show for their efforts.
Woe, Joe Morrow! And David Schlemko, Brandon Davidson, Rinat Valiev, Brent Lernout, Jakub Jerabek …
Maybe “forgettable” was too kind an adjective for this group.
Anyway, that’s all in the past now, and a wrong is being righted Wednesday night with Molson inviting Markov to be honoured by the Canadiens ahead of their game against the Winnipeg Jets.
Consider what’s being celebrated: 119 goals, 572 points and 16 seasons of serving as the Canadiens’ steadiest defenceman and, arguably, their most reliable player outside of the crease.
Brendan Gallagher played with many great ones starting in 2013, but he puts Markov in a class of his own.
“Carey Price and Shea Weber are both Hall of Famers” — the former is all but guaranteed to one day become one while the latter was inducted in 2024 — “and Marky’s probably the next guy on my list, to be honest,” Gallagher said Tuesday. “He was extremely smart. I mean this in a complimentary way: he wasn’t the fastest player, but he rarely got beat because his reads were just so ahead of everyone else on the ice. He knew exactly where the puck was going to be and where he needed to be. You never felt like his skating was an issue, even with the game getting faster and faster. His brain was just working at a different level than any other player on the ice, and he was able to be effective right up until the last game he played.”
That was miraculous.
For a spell, smack in the middle of Markov’s prime, his career was jeopardized by a rash of terrible injuries. He suffered them in succession, appearing in only 66 of the 246 games he was eligible to play in from the beginning of the 2009-10 season through the end of the 2011-12 campaign.
Ankle surgery followed by back-to-back knee surgeries made it improbable Markov would return to any type of prominence, let alone be the player who proved capable of authoring seasons of 46, 49, 58 and 64 points, like he did over the four seasons that immediately preceded his first major injury.
Those were dark days, as Lars Eller remembers.
“For the first two-and-a-half years, I don’t think I played a game with him,” the former Canadien and current Ottawa Senator said, half-jokingly, Tuesday.
Eller was dead serious, though, when he said, “It’s hard because every day there is a ton of hours and work in the shadows that people don’t see, especially when you’re injured with three surgeries.
“What players love the most is they want to be on the ice and they want to play games,” Eller continued. “That’s the joy, that’s what you work towards, and so you sacrifice all this time to get to there and, all of a sudden, the fun part is taken away from you, and maybe even at some point he’s thinking, ‘I don’t know, can I come back or not?’
“I don’t know what he was thinking. He was certainly determined to make it back, but I don’t know if it was a sure thing at the time that he was going to.”
It could be considered the greatest accomplishment of Markov’s career that he missed just two games total over the next four seasons.
Markov roared back triumphantly, posting 10 goals and 30 points in the lockout-abridged, 48-game 2013 season. He followed that up 43 points in 81 games the following year, 50 points in 81 games of 2014-15 and another 44 points in 82 games in 2015-16.
And the six goals and 36 points Markov registered in his final season with the Canadiens came over just 61 games, with a mid-season 19-game absence to heal a lower-body injury barely slowing him down.
The elements of play that made Markov special — the ones that had the Canadiens take a flyer on him with their sixth-round pick of the 1998 draft — were still shining through.
“For me, it was his ability to create openings for other players without even moving,” said Gallagher. “It was limited movement, but he was just able to use his eyes and his stick angle to move defenders and create the openings to move the puck. That poise, and the level that his brain worked at, it was just something else.”
It was a money maker for all of Markov’s partners through the years — from Mike Komisarek to a younger Streit, to Sheldon Souray and P.K. Subban, who banked many goals and millions of dollars thanks to Markov’s brilliant plays and perfect passes on the power play.
He was a maven in that department, a wizard at extending play with almost unparalleled hand-eye coordination enabling him to swat down clearing attempt after clearing attempt.
That was just one thing that made Markov so good defensively, too.
“He was a step ahead of reading the play as a defenceman, so he would break up a lot of plays by seeing what pass was going to come and he would step into that lane,” said Eller. “It could be very annoying as a forward going against him in practice.”
It was a gift to play with Markov in games.
“As a teammate, you really wanted to be out there when he was on the ice because he would find the lanes,” Eller said. “He could speed up the game but slow down the game as well and wait for passing lanes to open. He’d make a great first pass. It was a joy to play with him as a forward and have him on the back end.”
The Canadiens sure could’ve used Markov over 12 other players they dressed back there in 2017-18.
It was a shame he didn’t hit 1,000 games in a Canadiens jersey, but it’ll be special to see him wear it one more time on Wednesday.
