It was February in Calgary, it was cold, and Max Pacioretty was already talking about the playoffs.
He and John Tavares had just been huddled shoulder to shoulder at their stalls in the old-school visitors’ dressing room at Scotiabank Saddledome, an arena that’s been around for over 40 years.
Pacioretty, 36, and Tavares, 34, were talking like, well, old-school guys — the “right” way to play the game kind of stuff.
“I guess in our opinion,” Pacioretty said, “the old-school way of give-and-go hockey, not hanging onto (the puck) for too long is the way we both came into the league and how (the game) was played. It seems like it’s a bit of a lost art amongst some of the young guys. But not really our team.”
A conversation that was initially about the brewing connection between Pacioretty and Tavares, on the ice and off it, became something different.
After everything that he went through — three Achilles surgeries in eight months, multiple trips to Germany to see a doctor named Hans-Wilhelm Müller Wohlfahrt who had treated everyone from Kobe Bryant to Bono, the possible end of his NHL career — all Pacioretty seemed to want to talk about was the playoffs, what the playoffs were about for him, what he had learned about the playoffs, and what it would take for him, and the Leafs, to finally win a Stanley Cup.
It’s why, at least in part, he was so emotional after scoring the game-winning — and series-clinching — goal in Game 6 against the Ottawa Senators on Thursday night. His chase, the Leafs’ chase, would continue.
MAX PACIORETTY FOR THE LEAD!!! WHAT A GAME pic.twitter.com/ajpDySIJWY
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 2, 2025
“Who knows how long you have?” Pacioretty said back in February. “The one thing I’ll say is it’s crept up on me pretty quick. After not playing for a little bit, you come in and think it’s just gonna be the same as it was before. I don’t want to sit here and sulk about that. But I will say that I try and remind the guys that it creeps up on you quick, so enjoy it while you’ve got it.”
Pacioretty likes to remind, or feels he has to remind, some of his younger teammates that he used to be a pretty good player — one of the better goal scorers in the NHL.
“Sometimes I wonder if people even realize that I used to score a lot of goals,” he said, grinning. “I’ve reminded Kniesy a few times.”
He was talking, of course, about 22-year-old Matthew Knies. He wanted teammates like Knies to know not just that he was once a high-powered scorer, but that it all went by quick, that every chance to chase the Cup was precious.
Pacioretty has reached the conference finals three times — once with the Montreal Canadiens in 2014 and twice more with the Vegas Golden Knights in 2020 and 2021 — but has never won it all in a career that started in 2009. He now has 26 goals in exactly 82 playoff games.
As someone who many teammates believe will coach or manage after his playing days, Pacioretty has many thoughts on the playoffs. What they demanded of players. Which players thrive in postseason play.
“So I have a theory that slower guys are normally better in the playoffs because they’re used to not having time and space,” he said. “They’re used to always having to have their head up to survive and make a play rather than just being able to burn someone.”
He didn’t say so. But he was, pretty clearly, talking about himself.
After all his years in the league, playing nearly 1,000 games in the regular season, Pacioretty has developed many beliefs on the way the game should be played. He and Tavares talk about it often.
“Every older guy talks like that,” Pacioretty said. “It’s almost like, not to say in a bad way, but you have an internal timer when you have the puck on your stick — someone is probably open if you have it for long enough. That doesn’t seem to be the case as much now with guys coming into the league.”
When Pacioretty came into the league, he said, very few players held onto the puck as much as the younger stars of today. He mentioned Alexei Kovalev, the exceptionally gifted, if mercurial, former Canadiens star.
In Pacioretty’s eyes, playing the right way, the way that won, took something more than skill.
“Until someone proves me wrong, I feel like that’s how you win,” he continued. “It’s like when you get to the conference finals, it is impossible to hang onto the puck. Guys will literally die out there on the ice before getting beat one-on-one by another player. I don’t know if other sports feel the same way. We talk about that, like the difference between the game in the playoffs … compared to the regular season is just so different in our league. The longer you go, the more you realize that.”
The Leafs, Pacioretty felt, were built to play the right way —”the way that Chief (coach Craig Berube) has mentioned how we want to play.”
“That’s the winning style,” he said of Berube’s way. “That’s how teams have won. It’s really hard to go out there and bring pucks back, and wind it up, and pick your way through the neutral zone in the playoffs. I don’t know if I’ve seen it in the conference finals or finals. So the longer you go in the playoffs, the harder and harder it all gets, so you need to use your teammates more and more. Guys are closing much quicker, they’re competing much harder, you’re playing against much better players — the top-end players in the league. So that’s where the give-and-go hockey, the old-school mentality kicks in.
“Our team has that, yeah.”
Marc DesRosiers-Imagn Images
It’s something that often takes time to understand, Pacioretty said.
“A lot of young superstars haven’t had to play that style of hockey ever, because they’ve never been challenged enough,” Pacioretty said. “They were so much more physically gifted than everyone they’ve played against up until the NHL, and even getting away with it in the NHL regular season.”
Skill alone doesn’t cut it, he said, unless you’re Connor McDavid, “because he’s the best to ever do it physically.”
Without saying so, or perhaps even knowing it, Pacioretty seemed to be talking about the Leafs of earlier years. “That’s why you see guys struggle when it gets to the playoffs,” he said, “because that really doesn’t work.”
Pacioretty said he still hears Pete DeBoer, his coach with the Golden Knights, in his head repeating the same thing year after year: Rush chances dry up the deeper you go in the playoffs. “I don’t have a statistic on that,” Pacioretty said. “I’m sure he was telling the truth. I always felt that way.”
It’s all an endorsement of the brand of hockey the Leafs, under Berube’s watch, decided they needed to play this season. The goal Pacioretty scored in Game 6 was off his stick in moments. There wasn’t time to wait.
It’s easy to forget now just how elite Pacioretty once was as a scorer.
From the start of the 2012-13 season to the end of 2016-17 — the first season in the careers of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander — Pacioretty scored about as much as anyone not named Alex Ovechkin.
Most goals, 2012-13 to 2016-17
As recently as the 2021-22 season, when he was 33, Pacioretty buried 19 goals in 39 games.
Then came the injuries and that two-year odyssey when he believed, many times, his career might be over.
“I thought that I was done playing a number of times,” said Pacioretty, eyes watering, after Game 6 against the Sens. “Everyone always supported me to keep going.”
Though he ended up scoring what is, for now, the biggest goal of the Leafs season, Pacioretty joined the Leafs knowing he couldn’t always be that player anymore. He couldn’t score goals like he once did. He came to Toronto determined to help in any way he could, grateful simply for the chance to play after two injury-plagued seasons that saw him suit up in just 52 games.
That didn’t mean it was easy. Not the rehab. Not even the opportunity to prove he could still be useful, prove he could still play.
In Pacioretty’s estimation, NHL teams were more willing to hand opportunities to younger players in the summer. “But then obviously by trade deadline or playoffs, it seems like teams are always trading for veterans because they realize how important it is,” he said.
Veterans like him. Guys who know what it takes in the playoffs.
Pacioretty signed a professional tryout with the Leafs on Sept. 12 before agreeing to a one-year deal worth just under $900,000.
It was a difficult season, especially the second half when Pacioretty was forced to sit and watch for two and half months because of the team’s salary-cap limitations. He was a scratch in Games 1 and 2 of the first round series against the Senators and wasn’t happy about it.
Once a star and captain, Pacioretty felt he was perfectly suited to play a supporting role, especially when he got the chance to roll with Tavares and Nylander, the third-most used line for the Leafs during the regular season and one that Berube unleashed again, to great effect, in the series-clincher in Ottawa.
On Thursday night, he played more than a supporting role, helping in the chase for the Cup he craves.
“I just feel like there’s dirty work on the line that I feel I can help in. It doesn’t always translate to points. But I’m OK with that,” Pacioretty said. “I’m just happy to be in this room and get another chance to win.”
(Top photo: Reuben Polansky-Shapiro / NHLI via Getty Images)