{"id":323241,"date":"2025-12-03T19:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T19:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/323241\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T19:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T19:00:09","slug":"canadiens-righting-a-wrong-by-honouring-andrei-markov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/323241\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadiens righting a wrong by honouring Andrei Markov"},"content":{"rendered":"

MONTREAL \u2014 There were 14 different defencemen who dressed for at least one game of arguably the most forgettable season in Montreal Canadiens<\/a> history, and none of them were named Andrei Markov.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t make sense then, and it still doesn\u2019t make sense now.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d ever played for, but also because the soon-to-be 39-year-old would\u2019ve, at worst, been Montreal\u2019s third-best defenceman that season.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d earned for 10 straight seasons.<\/p>\n

But after Markov failed to gain any traction on those negotiation terms, he finally bent, telling Bergevin he\u2019d take a one-year deal.<\/p>\n

It was never offered, so Markov opted for a two-year deal with the KHL\u2019s AK Bars Kazan to play the remainder of a career that started roughly 900 kilometres away, in Voskresensk, just outside Moscow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Canadiens owner Geoff Molson didn\u2019t feel good about it then, he had to have felt horrible months later \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The rest of Bergevin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Woe, Joe Morrow! And David Schlemko, Brandon Davidson, Rinat Valiev, Brent Lernout, Jakub Jerabek \u2026<\/p>\n

Maybe \u201cforgettable\u201d was too kind an adjective for this group.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Consider what\u2019s being celebrated: 119 goals, 572 points and 16 seasons of serving as the Canadiens\u2019 steadiest defenceman and, arguably, their most reliable player outside of the crease.<\/p>\n

Brendan Gallagher played with many great ones starting in 2013, but he puts Markov in a class of his own.<\/p>\n

\u201cCarey Price and Shea Weber are both Hall of Famers” \u2014 the former is all but guaranteed to one day become one while the latter was inducted in 2024 \u2014 “and Marky\u2019s probably the next guy on my list, to be honest,\u201d Gallagher said Tuesday. \u201cHe was extremely smart. I mean this in a complimentary way: he wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a spell, smack in the middle of Markov\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Those were dark days, as Lars Eller remembers.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first two-and-a-half years, I don\u2019t think I played a game with him,\u201d the former Canadien and current Ottawa Senator said, half-jokingly, Tuesday.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eller was dead serious, though, when he said, \u201cIt\u2019s hard because every day there is a ton of hours and work in the shadows that people don\u2019t see, especially when you\u2019re injured with three surgeries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat players love the most is they want to be on the ice and they want to play games,\u201d Eller continued. \u201cThat\u2019s the joy, that\u2019s 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\u2019s thinking, \u2018I don\u2019t know, can I come back or not?\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what he was thinking. He was certainly determined to make it back, but I don\u2019t know if it was a sure thing at the time that he was going to.\u201d<\/p>\n

It could be considered the greatest accomplishment of Markov\u2019s career that he missed just two games total over the next four seasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The elements of play that made Markov special \u2014 the ones that had the Canadiens take a flyer on him with their sixth-round pick of the 1998 draft \u2014 were still shining through.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it was his ability to create openings for other players without even moving,\u201d said Gallagher. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a money maker for all of Markov\u2019s partners through the years \u2014 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\u2019s brilliant plays and perfect passes on the power play.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was just one thing that made Markov so good defensively, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe 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,\u201d said Eller. \u201cIt could be very annoying as a forward going against him in practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a gift to play with Markov in games.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a teammate, you really wanted to be out there when he was on the ice because he would find the lanes,\u201d Eller said. \u201cHe could speed up the game but slow down the game as well and wait for passing lanes to open. He\u2019d make a great first pass. It was a joy to play with him as a forward and have him on the back end.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Canadiens sure could\u2019ve used Markov over 12 other players they dressed back there in 2017-18.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a shame he didn\u2019t hit 1,000 games in a Canadiens jersey, but it\u2019ll be special to see him wear it one more time on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MONTREAL \u2014 There were 14 different defencemen who dressed for at least one game of arguably the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-323241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}