Jeff Hackett: Two Autographed Cards

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Montréal Canadiens head coach Claude Julien and associate coach Kirk Muller were fired earlier today, and most of the chatter online has been about focusing blame on goalie Carey Price, with reason. However, a loud minority of the voices were sarcastically asking for the return of another wearer of jersey #31, Jeff Hackett, to replace him. My impression is that these are kids who didn't live through the so-called "Hackett era", because he was by far the best and most important player on that team, a team which, at the time, was seen as one of the worst in Habs history, although the current iteration has to contend for that title as well, or at least qualify as most underachieving.

First things first, the firing: had Julien lost the room? Probably. The players were still giving their effort, but in a roundabout way, kind of like when some players with low production still have a high Corsi score by putting up low-probability shots on the opposing net instead of making quality plays: there were hard-fought battles but too many penalties; there were defensive lapses in the exact areas that make Julien cringe; and the $10.5M goalie's play had his teammates go from "we know we can cheat to try to create scoring chances because we know we have the best goalie in the world out there" in the first ten games of the season to "we really have to help our goalie out more, we can't be caught cheating and giving away two-on-ones and three-on-twos like that"; and said goalie has reverted back to his old self of blaming teammates instead of himself for the goals that go in - better yet, he thinks he's playing well. Julien's Habs have ranked 24th on the powerplay and 26th on the penalty kill since 2016. The Canadiens never actually made the playoffs in any full season of Julien coaching in his second stint in Montréal, and only qualified as the last club in the 24-team tournament last year.

Muller likely wasn't kept around for one or all of the following reasons: he went 2-3 in last year's postseason when Julien suffered a heart attack; he doesn't speak French fluently and many fans would have clamoured to have him be named head coach while GM Marc Bergevin probably has other candidates in mind; he was very close to Julien and may follow him in his/their next job, perhaps on the West Coast.

If interim head coach Dominique Ducharme wins a playoff round, expect him to sign a five-year deal; if the team fails to even qualify for the post-season, expect the usual suspects (Patrick Roy, Guy Boucher, Marc Crawford, Pascal Vincent, Benoit Groulx and Bob Hartley) to get interviews. It's anyone's guess what happens should the team lose in the first round.

Regarding Price himself, he's been way below average since the beginning of Julien's reign and has let in upwards of 25 more goals than expected in those three and a half years, which isn't ideal for the highest-paid netminder in the NHL. The window to trade him ends next Fall.

As for Hackett, he was acquired by the Canadiens from the Chicago Blackhawks with Eric Weinrich and Alain Nasreddine for Jocelyn Thibault, Dave Manson and Brad Brown. The trade gave the Hawks an All-Star goalie who may not have developped into one in Montréal, and the Habs finally got to cleanse their palate of the Roy debacle, whose shoes Thibault had never been able to fill. Hackett was so good that he won the Molson Cup as team MVP in both seasons where he was the starter, until injuries started to derail his career, allowing for José Theodore to take over slide into the starter's job. With a .914 save percentage both years (in a league where Dominik Hasek's .919 was tops) and goals-against averages of 2.25 and 2.40, it was no surprise that Hackett got Vezina Trophy votes; it was also not surprising that he didn't make it as a finalist due to the team being so far out of playoff contention.

Here are two cards that depict his playing style very well, as a former stand-up goalie who leaned into the butterfly technique but kept his "pouncing" reflexes:

On the left is card #88 from Upper Deck's 1999-2000 Wayne Gretzky collection and Leader sub-set, showing him ready to stop a puck headed for his stomach; on the right is card #28 from Topps' 2000-01 Premier Plus set, with a flat butterfly pad and the ability to push the rebound to the corner in a far less dangerous zone for his team, giving his defensemen a chance to battle for and regain control of the puck - a move I put high value in as a goaltending coach.

Both show him wearing the Habs' iconic red jersey and were signed in blue sharpie after his departue from Montréal.

I just felt that the recent discourse had taken a lot of credit away from him and the fact that he was very good, gave his honest best effort, and even acknowledged via his helmet that he knew he was getting into a hockey hotbed that Quebecers are thrown in as youth and get more rabid about with each passing year - particularly those years without Stanely Cups, even more so in years without a playoff berth. Heck, among the sixteen who have worn the number for the Canadiens, he's "my" #31, ahead of Price (2008-21), John Kordic (1986-89), Mark Napier (1979-84), Tom Chorske (1990-91) and Michel "Bunny" Larocque (1974).

Jeff Hackett Autographed Card

It was hard deciding which card to feature in the post that will make my page views pass the 200,000 mark for this blog, but I thought I could go with things that represented me well as a goalie: old-school helmet with a white neck protector, Vaughn Legacy 2000 blocker, black pads, a mix of stand-up and butterfly, usually the best player on an awful team...

Like Jeff Hackett, seen here wearing the San Jose Sharks' inaugural white (home) uniform, on card #308 from Upper Deck's 1992-93 Series 1 set, featuring the NHL's 75th anniversary patch:

He signed it in black sharpie in his time with the Montréal Canadiens. You might recall my encounters with him were not the friendliest...

Still, he overachieved on teams that underwhelmed - throughout his career. Well, he may have run out of gas at the end, in his stints with Habs rivals Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers...

Jeff Hackett Jersey Card

Jeff Hackett wasn't the most affable man, either with fans or the press, but one thing he was very good at was stopping pucks. In his 500-game NHL career, he stopped over 12,500 of them - nearly 4,000 with the Montréal Canadiens alone.

In parts of 5 seasons with the Habs, there were two where he was healthy enough to play the majority of the games; he won the Molson Cup both times as the team's MVP, and even finished in the top-10 in terms of Vezina voting despite the team being dreadful. He finished twice in the league's top-3 for save percentage, another time in the top-5, and once more in the top-10.

Had he played with better teams than the New York Islanders, the expansion San Jose Sharks, the mid-to-late-1990s Chicago Blackhawks, the turn-of-the-millennium Habs and early-2000s goalie cemeteries Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers, he may have boosted his wins record by at least 50%, from 166 to close to 250. As it stands, though, he is still 94th on the all-time wins list; to put it in perspective, at least 75 goalies play in an NHL game each year, and the league has been in operation for 97 years.

I really like this card from In The Game's 2012-13 Forever Rivals set (card #BTP-13 of the Between The Pipes sub-set), as it shows a close-up of his classic Habs mask (two kids with Canadiens toques playing in the snow) and a big white game-used jersey swatch:

Jeff Hackett Autographed Card

Jeff Hackett, to me, was a weird case: he was the best player on the Montréal Canadiens during, arguably, the team's worst seasons ever. He was a bit of a step down from his successor, José Theodore, but much of a step up from his predecessor, Jocelyn Thibault - he was stuck between two JTs.

He was a stand-up goalie who played his angles well and would also use the butterfly technique often, but not as 'a style' - in that regards, I could totally relate: despite my favourite goalie of all time (and the reason why I donned the pads in the first place) being Patrick Roy, I played more like Hackett and another later Habs' goalie, Cristobal Huet. And, quite like them, I was often the most regarded player on terrible teams, and when the team got better, I was on my way out, replaced by someone I felt I could play as well as.

At the time when I met Hackett, though, Huet wasn't even close to being on the radar, so Hackett was, really, the one I identified with the most, which made our encounter that much weirder. It was early September, 2002; Theodore had just won his Hart and Vezina trophies and was the main attraction at the team's Jamboree, held right outside the Bell Centre. Hackett could walk amongst the crowd and barely be disturbed, like the rookies and fourth-liners of the team, while the other 'star' players, namely Theodore, Mike Ribeiro and Saku Koivu had thousands of fans lining up (or, more accurately, ganging up) to seek autographs.

So I approached Hackett with this card, a 2000-01 Stadium Club (by then, Topps had removed the name O-Pee-Chee from most of its products, so while the series had originally begun as O-Pee-Chee Stadium Club, this series was only Stadium Club, with the Topps logo displayed in the back and no mention whatsoever of O-Pee-Chee) card, #19 in the series, showing Hackett drinking water during a break, drops of water flying all around his helmet.

And instead of being happy that he was receiving some kind of attention, he looked angry and gave me a stare that seemed to mean ''now, that fat bastard probably just wants to sell this on Ebay, he doesn't even look like a fan'', which could explain why his autograph seems a bit botched. The only way I can describe the face he made is that he looked exactly the same as if he'd surrendered 7 goals on 15 shots after Theodore had stopped over 40 the night before, and telling a reporter, after the game ''how do you think I feel?'' - he had a temper, and it seemed ignited on that day. Needless to say, I didn't stay around him too long and moved on to someone else, probably Donald Audette.

Regardless, to me, he was the only good thing to come out of the late 90s/early 00s for the Habs. I associate him to the Canadiens just as much as with the Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks; yes, I'm aware he was also an Islander, a Bruin and a Flyer (not to mention a Phantom), but I don't associate him with those teams as much.