Laval – “Do you want to go?” »
Having known that it was Jeffrey Truchon-Viel who extended this invitation to him, Luke Tuch would have… absolutely nothing changed in his reaction.
“I turned around and he had already taken his gloves off, so I didn’t have much choice. »
It was thus, in his first match of the campaign with the Laval Rocket and his third among professionals, that the American forward made his pugilistic debut on ice last Friday in Providence.
With no experience in the matter after a four-year internship with the Boston University Terriers in the NCAA, where fighting is prohibited, Tuch “did not choose his dance partner,” noted his head coach Pascal Vincent, Wednesday.
Effectively.
Five days after this brawl, Tuch’s face still showed traces of his carelessness when met after his team’s training session at Place Bell. His two black eyes and his two cuts closed with stitches leave no doubt about the identity of the winner of the face-to-face on the judges’ card.
“When I came back into the locker room after the fight, everyone was asking me: ‘Did you know who he was?’ I don’t want to disrespect him, but I had no idea,” confided Tuch, indicating in passing that he was probably not around before the meeting when his teammate and linemate Vincent Arseneau , a regular at this, issued a warning about Truchon-Viel.
“After the match, I went to see [le site] hockeyfights.com and I saw that he had a not worse CV »
Before breaking through Tuch’s defense with a few good rights and uppercuts, Truchon-Viel had 42 fights on his record in the American League and NHL combined.
The Canadian prospect may have received a few lessons this summer from his good friend Patrick Kaleta and Cody McCormick, two former colossi of the Buffalo Sabers – Tuch is originally from New York State – but he could not be ready for the same confrontation.
But he wasn’t going to back down. Because after all, these are only the risks of the job for a player like him who distributes the shoulder blows, he recalls.
“In the NCAA you can hit as hard as you can, fighting is not allowed, so there is a little more freedom there. But in this league and in the NHL, if you’re going to use solid body checking, legal or not, and play physical, you have to expect that someone will probably want to initiate a fight,” Tuch realizes.
A rare specimen
It is therefore not this painful defeat by unanimous decision, suffered while Truchon-Viel tried to wake up his family, which will cool Tuch. If he was able to stretch his presence at the Canadiens’ training camp to three preparatory matches, it is precisely thanks to this slightly rougher style of play, he judges.
“They (the management of the CH) asked me to bring [à Laval] what I did well at camp. They liked my physical play, my rhythm, the fact that I brought the puck to the net with energy, that I played in a straight line rather than spinning, and that I completed each of my checks. »
“There aren’t many like him anymore. He has hands, he can make plays, he goes to the net, and he applies checks,” confirms Pascal Vincent, who is already reserving a place on the second wave of the numerical advantage for his power forward drafted in second round in 2020 (47th).
“Once it has been established [après son combat] that he was correct, I was watching him because I wanted to know if he was going to change the way he played. Zero. He was still on the forecheck, he went to the net and he played a game physique.
“That’s the kind of player you like to have in the playoffs. He’s a player that we can develop and I think that he really has a chance to have an impact with the organization, both here and eventually with the Canadian. »
