'Savour Every Moment': St. Louis built NHL career on humility, hard work

An NHL career is defined by many events, players present and past cherishing a single snapshot, a game or a broader body of work. Eight players reflect in our weekly eight-part series "Savour Every Moment" presented by Olymel, sharing a personal slice of what makes hockey a special part of their lives. Today, in the final part of the series, Class of 2018 Hall of Famer Martin St. Louis speaks of his life growth as a player, coach and human being.

Martin St. Louis' crested Hockey Hall of Fame jacket hangs in his closet, worn just once, by his recollection, since his 2018 enshrinement.
"The Lightning honored me at a game after my induction and I think I wore it then," St. Louis said, photos indeed showing him wearing the navy jacket Nov. 21, when Tampa Bay celebrated him nine days after his induction.
"And I don't wear my Hall of Fame ring. It's in my safe, I'm not a big jewelry guy."
St. Louis doesn't broadcast his fame; he wears it comfortably, humbly, discreetly. That his jacket is on a hanger and his ring is locked away speaks volumes about a man who has been concerned his entire life about proving something to himself rather than to others.
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The 46-year-old native of Laval, Quebec, has flown most of his days under the radar, remarkable when you consider his achievements.
The insurmountable challenges viewed by some are seen by St. Louis as inconveniences.
A Hobey Baker Award finalist at the University of Vermont in 1995, 1996 and 1997 as the best player in U.S. college hockey, the forward was cut from a training-camp tryout by the 1997 Ottawa Senators -- just a speed-bump, as it turned out. At 5-foot-8, many thought he was a fine player who unfortunately wasn't robust enough to make an impression as a pro.
St. Louis thought otherwise.
His 2004 Stanley Cup, won with the Lightning, would be the crowning glory in a bejeweled NHL career that began in 1998-99 with the Calgary Flames as an undrafted, unrestricted free agent.

After two seasons with the Flames, St. Louis joined the Lightning as a free agent, spending the next 13 seasons with Tampa Bay. Traded to the New York Rangers on March 5, 2014, where he would finish his NHL career in 2014-15, St. Louis left the Lightning as the all-time leader in regular-season assists (588), points (953) and game-winning goals (64). Add to that his Tampa Bay postseason records at the time for goals (33), assists (35), points (68) and game-winning goals (eight).
His trophy case by then was bulging. In his Stanley Cup-winning season, scoring 24 points (nine goals, 15 assists) in 23 postseason games, St. Louis won the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player, Art Ross Trophy as its leading point-scorer (94 points; 38 goals, 56 assists in 82 games), and was voted the winner of the Lester B. Pearson Award (since 2010 the Ted Lindsay Award), the League's MVP as selected by members of the NHLPA.
He won the Lady Byng Trophy in 2010, 2011 and 2013 for his excellence combined with sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct, and won the Art Ross again in 2013 (60 points; 17 goals, 43 assists in 48 games), becoming the NHL's oldest scoring champion at age 37. The nine-year gap between his Art Ross victories was the longest in the history of the award, introduced in 1947-48.

Martin St. Louis with the 2004 Art Ross Trophy (left) as the NHL's top point-scorer, and the Hart Trophy as the League's most valuable player.
The Stanley Cup remains the summit of a career that had many peaks.
"To be honest, winning the Cup was unbelievable," St. Louis said in reflection. "All the individual trophies were flattering and surreal, the same as the Cup.
"I feel like throughout my career, I had to find a window or a back door. I didn't come in through the front door. To be inducted in the Hall of Fame, first ballot, going through the front door? That was pretty cool, because I never got the front door."
The front door included a red carpet of welcome on Feb. 9, 2022 when St. Louis was named coach of the Montreal Canadiens. He'd been away from professional hockey since his 2015 retirement, coaching his son's peewee team without a single game behind a pro bench when the Canadiens went well outside the proverbial box.
It was just the latest challenge that St. Louis met head-on, replacing Dominique Ducharme to fashion a 14-19-4 record through season's end. He and the Canadiens could officially extend their relationship in advance of the 2022 NHL Draft, to be held at Montreal's Bell Centre.

A month into his new job, St. Louis considered learning on the fly, of viewing the big picture and not just waiting to do his own job when his line hit the ice.
"The mistakes you make behind the bench, sometimes you don't know you've made them until after the game," he said. "You learn later that the decisions you thought were good ones weren't actually great. You don't know that … you get to reflect more. As a player, it was more the instant of the moment. It's definitely different, but I'm learning."
The speed of the game at ice level, after having been away for seven years, was a revelation.
"I liked to watch from as high as I could when I wasn't playing," St. Louis said. "You see everything develop, you can see how players read the game. If I'm evaluating, I want to be as high as I can. Being at ice level now after having been away, I'm amazed at how fast the game is. But it's slowed down to me. The first game was so fast but now it's at the right pace. I'm fine. It's an adjustment."

St. Louis has embraced the challenges of coaching as he did everything he faced as a fleet-footed forward who defied the odds at every turn to play 1,134 NHL regular-season games, scoring 1,033 points (391 goals, 642 assists).
"More than anything, I want to prove things to myself," he said. "I didn't care what other people thought. If you have a mentality of proving to yourself that you can achieve your goals, whatever you do, that's a huge confidence-builder.
"As a human, you grow so much if you achieve some of the goals. I can't say that my goal was to win the Stanley Cup, it was to get into the League. Once you're there, you start setting goals. At some point, my goal was to win a Cup but there was a lot of progression.
"If your goals are too big, you're probably not going to achieve the small ones along the way and never get a chance at the big goals. Short-term goals are so important. I think I was always like that even in college, from freshman to sophomore, moving up. It was a big part of why I grew as a player.

Hockey Hall of Fame chairman Lanny McDonald with Martin St. Louis at his 2018 ring presentation in the shrine's Esso Great Hall, and on Scotiabank Arena ice helping him try on his Hall of Fame jacket.
"As a coach, you can't be so result-driven. That's part of it but it's hard to grow if you don't self-assess well. As a player, I self-assessed pretty well and as a coach, my plan is to do the same -- assess how my team is actually playing, and not just wins and losses. If it's just wins and losses, you get lost going through that process."
It was four games into St. Louis' coaching career before he won his first, a 3-2 home-ice overtime victory against the St. Louis Blues. The joke was that St. Louis was guaranteed a victory on Feb. 17 at Bell Centre -- either the visitor or the coach.
The Blues went up 2-1 with 1:19 to play, leading until forward Cole Caufield tied it with 10 seconds to go and scored again to win it 2:22 into overtime. For the new Canadiens coach, the big picture meant more than his own first victory.
"The Blues are a really well-respected team in this league," he said. "We were playing a pretty good game, got scored on with about a minute to play, then we pulled our goalie and tied it up. The game could have gone two ways but it wouldn't have changed the way I thought we played. I just love the way we did it. It easily could have been, 'Ah, we played good but it's just another game,' but we made a big play to tie it and a big play to win it in OT."

Lessons St. Louis learned as a player are indeed portable, he has learned, to life behind the bench.
"You constantly have to keep getting better," he said. "The answers are everywhere, you just have to find them. As a player, I saw some of my teammates do something better than me and I'd say, 'I have to add that,' or against players on others teams, I had to add that to my game.
"You constantly have to be able to observe things that people do better than you and apply it to yourself. It's not done overnight. You just keep working and adding tools to the toolbox. I think as a coach it's going to be the same."
In his 2018 Hall of Fame induction speech, St. Louis spoke with experience directly to youngsters who see the odds stacked against their success.

"For all the kids out there listening, follow your dream, believe in yourself," he said, wearing a three-piece suit that evening, his Hall of Fame jacket headed for a wardrobe as a symbol of the road he has traveled. "When it seems like all the doors are closing, look for a window and find a way in. The reason that some people don't reach their full potential is because they quit too soon. Maybe most importantly, be a good teammate both on the ice and in life."
These thoughts were more than just St. Louis' closing words upon joining the Hall of Fame. They have been his bedrock principles since the first time he laced up a pair of skates.
"People always ask me if I have a favorite moment in hockey and you know, I don't really have one," he says today. "The whole journey has been good. Playing in the NHL, I had some great moments. The bad moments made me grind it out and search for answers and I loved that. It's hard to pick a single moment. It's the whole. The opportunity to have that experience, that life, has been amazing."
Photos: Hockey Hall of Fame, Matthew Manor; Getty Images