MONTREAL — Rafaël Harvey-Pinard and Nick Suzuki are not the same age, yet.
Harvey-Pinard just turned 24 on Jan. 6, Suzuki will turn 24 in August, but had they attended the same school as kids, they would have been in the same grade.
In any other sphere of life, they would be seen as being the same age. But in hockey, sharing a birth year is not the only factor in determining age.
Suzuki played his 260th career NHL game Tuesday night against the Ottawa Senators. Harvey-Pinard played his 11th. One is a first-round draft pick, the other went undrafted for two years before the Canadiens grabbed him in the seventh round, 201st in 2019. And yet here they were Tuesday night, linemates in an NHL game, with Suzuki finding him once in the second period to draw a power play and again in the third period to tie the game 3-3.
The two linking up in this game — a 5-4 Senators win on a Brady Tkachuk goal with 1:18 left in regulation — gave Suzuki the opportunity to remind everyone he has a history with Harvey-Pinard dating back to the Vegas Golden Knights rookie. camp in 2018, one year after Suzuki was drafted, one year before Harvey-Pinard was drafted. Suzuki was only there for a few days because he would be traded to the Canadiens right in the middle of that camp.
Here they are at that rookie camp. Suzuki is no. 17 in black early in the video, chatting with fellow 2017 first-round pick Cody Glass, and Harvey-Pinard shows up moments later, No. 83 in black.
Helllllloooooooo rookies 👋 pic.twitter.com/JSjbfA2u4e
— Vegas Golden Knights (@GoldenKnights) September 7, 2018
“I don’t know if people know that, but me and him were at rookie camp together and had a little bond there,” Suzuki said. “He plays the right way, you know where he’s going to be all the time, he just plays hard.
“You love to see that out of a guy proving himself.”
Harvey-Pinard got some help to earn an invite to that Golden Knights rookie camp. The son of his coach at Rouyn-Noranda, Mario Pouliot, was and still is an amateur scout for the Golden Knights. Raphaël Pouliot pushed hard for Harvey-Pinard to get an invite, and that allowed him to meet Suzuki for the first time.
They would cross paths again at the 2019 Memorial Cup, when Suzuki’s Guelph Storm and Harvey-Pinard’s Huskies faced each other. Guelph won the game in the preliminary round, but Rouyn-Noranda beat Guelph in the semifinal — with Harvey-Pinard collecting a goal and two assists — and the Huskies won the Memorial Cup in the end.
Now here they are again, linked by circumstance a bit like they were at that Vegas rookie camp where an amateur scout’s insistence created that chance meeting. This time, the circumstance is all the injuries the Canadiens are managing, allowing Harvey-Pinard to be called up, and his strong play forcing coach Martin St. Louis to trust his gut and put him on Suzuki’s line in the second period.
“It just gives a lot of guys opportunities,” Suzuki said. “HP’s playing really well, and he might not have been able to establish himself in the NHL without those injuries.”
The disparity in their games played, and the disparity in their paths is what leads to each of their games being viewed through a different lens. Harvey-Pinard’s sudden success — he scored twice Tuesday to give him five goals in seven games this season — is viewed as a great success story, someone scratching and clawing his way to the NHL, someone who has beaten the odds.
Suzuki’s recent lack of production was seen differently, to put it mildly. He spent several minutes Monday after practice answering questions about his recent play, about the injuries, about Cole Caufield no longer being by his side, and about how working on both special teams units and playing massive minutes might be draining him. Essentially, Suzuki was being handed excuses to try and explain the points drying up after a torrid start to the season. He is the captain of this team, he is expected to produce, and he knows it.
But Suzuki didn’t bite. He didn’t take the excuses being handed to him because he didn’t feel he needed excuses. He found he was playing well, just not producing. Then, one night later, he proved it.
“I think I’ve been playing pretty well, it just hasn’t been going in for me,” Suzuki said after his two-assist night. “It was nice to just get in front of the net, dig out a puck and (Kirby) Dacher finding it and putting it in the net. Just one of those bounces to get you going a little more.”
Suzuki leaves Wednesday for the All-Star Game in Florida as the Canadiens’ lone representative. He was also their lone representative last year. He was their representative at the NHL’s preseason media tour. He is, in many ways, becoming the face of the franchise.
That comes with the scrutiny Suzuki’s game has been under of late, and it provided Suzuki with an opportunity to demonstrate the temperament that convinced Canadiens management that he was ready to become captain. It would have been easy for Suzuki to become defensive, or annoyed, or even angry at the line of questioning Monday after practice, and maybe he was feeling a mix of all those things. But he didn’t show it. He patiently answered the questions, defended himself in a very polite, self-assured way, and went on with going about his business.
“If you look at him under (the) microscope all the time, you’re going to say he looks different here and there,” St. Louis said after the game. “It’s just the season. So I’m trying to be careful with doing that, give him some breathing room, give him an opportunity to correct himself. Sometimes you want to overcoach, and sometimes you’ve got to let him correct himself.
“I thought he played a good game tonight, and I think to go into the break like that, I think it’s good for him. But I try not to watch Suzy under a microscope all the time. I know there’s a lot of pressure on him, but if you look from the beginning of the season until now, there’s way more good than bad. I’m not worried about Suzy.”
This is a microscope Harvey-Pinard will likely never face, no matter how well his career goes. He and Suzuki are the same age, but they’re not. Not in hockey terms. They come from different worlds, worlds that have intertwined a few times, yes, but worlds that remain separate.
“With the guys we have in the room, my games played is probably one of the higher ones with all the young guys that haven’t had much experience,” Suzuki said. “I’m kind of in the middle, but I think I’m a good bridge to connect the young guys to the older guys.”
That is part of what makes Suzuki a valuable player for the Canadiens. He will face pressure in this market. He will face scrutiny and criticism and 20,000-plus microscopes every night.
But he seems well-equipped to handle it.
(Photo of Rafael Harvey-Pinard and Nick Suzuki: Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press via AP)
.