When Patrick Sharp and Antoine Roussel started sharing the same locker room with the Stars, the first threw himself into the arms of the second. However, their previous contacts were far from being as warm. Recognized as an excellent agitator, Roussel had gotten into the habit of pecking – we’re using a nice word here! – his old rival when he played for the Blackhawks.
“He said to me: My God, I’m so happy to play with you now!” says Roussel laughing.
This therefore shows to what extent what is commonly called trash talk (insults thrown on the ice) can really disturb the players who receive them.
Archive photo QMI Agency, Martin Chevalier
But in the playoffs? The phenomenon, well anchored in the culture of certain sports, including hockey, does not reach its peak as the stakes increase, believe Roussel and Maxim Lapierre, another player who excelled in this area.
“You don’t want to be the one who is going to put your team in trouble,” say the two analysts to TVA Sports.
“It’s more calculated,” explains the former Canadian, who lost the 2011 final with the Canucks. During the series, the agitators don’t just whine at everyone. They are trying to change the momentum.”
Don’t “wake him up”
However, in this final, some Panthers players would be good at lighting the fire with a few well-placed swear words. Including a certain Matthew Tkachuk… who didn’t really need it until Saturday, given the way this final was going.
Maxim Lapierre
Archive photo, Pierre-Paul Poulin
Lapierre explains that he has the greatest respect for these agitators who are also capable of amassing a lot of points.
He cites the Panthers forward as an example, but also the Bruins captain, Brad Marchand.
This is why Lapierre believes that Tkachuk should not be provoked too much in the final. “You don’t want to be the one to wake up a player like that and make him take control of the game.”
But Lapierre specifies that, personally, he might have tried to disturb his opponents in the third meeting, to “change the momentum“, exactly.
“Loser” or “rotten”
And what do these famous insults look like? “My watchword was that I could always find myself in the same locker room as the guy I attacked one day,” explains Roussel. I wanted to be able to look him in the eye.”
“I liked to say ‘you’re a loser’, or ‘fuck off’. Or you go into threats. The goal is to scare. But some guys had funny ones, which I unfortunately forgot!” he adds.
When we listen to him now on television or radio, it’s hard to imagine the friendly Frenchman annoying his opponents like this.
Roussel imagines, however, that he liked to “spin the wheel of the sound system when he was on the ice,” and that this drooling side that inhabits him took on a whole new dimension on the ice. It worked very well, he assures us.
“It always amused me to see that you can get veterans out of their game because we tell them something like “you’re rotten”,” points out Lapierre.
“But it’s not necessarily when we speak that it angers people. It’s more of a mix of a guy who picks and gives checks. When a player tackles you six times, and the next time he throws something at you and hits you with a stick…”
