ST. LOUIS – Logan Mailloux was dressed in a suit on Saturday instead of in uniform, sitting out his first game [https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/st-louis-blues/latest-news/blues-to-make-logan-mailloux-healthy-scratch] with the St. Louis Blues [http://thn.com/stlouis] since being acquired from the Montreal Canadiens [http://thn.com/montreal] on July 1 for Zack Bolduc. It’s just as Blues coach Jim Montgomery alluded to on Friday after Mailloux’s last game, an 8-3 loss [https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/st-louis-blues/latest-news/observations-from-blues-embarrassing-8-3-loss-vs-blackhawks-falling-to-0-2-at-home] to the Chicago Blackhawks [http://thn.com/chicago] on Wednesday, a game in which the 22-year-old Mailloux, a defenseman, was a minus-4 in 15:49 of ice time. In four games with the Blues, Mailloux has zero points and is a minus-7, prompting the team to sit him and allow him to reset, but it set a fanbase into a panic tizzy. Meanwhile, Bolduc, a forward, was scoring in his first three games with the Canadiens, the seventh player in Montreal franchise history to accomplish the feat. A number of Blues fans are in delirium over letting Bolduc go for an unknown, raw commodity. While Canadiens fans are proclaiming victory as to who “won” the trade. Mailloux has plenty of people in the Blues organization in his corner; he also has a certain someone with a tremendous amount of clout within the organization, a Blues Hall of Famer who has his No. 44 retired in the Enterprise Center rafters, a Hockey Hall of Famer and member of the 100 greatest players in NHL history in his corner: Chris Pronger. In a pointed and direct conversation with The Hockey News, Pronger offered his thoughts on the situation, because if anyone knows – and understands – what Mailloux is feeling and going through about getting traded to St. Louis for a popular player, it’s Pronger, because as many Blues diehards know, and for those that don’t, Pronger went through all of what Mailloux’s dealing with now – and more – after the Blues acquired the No. 2 pick in the 1993 NHL Draft for the polarizing Brendan Shanahan on July 27, 1995. “First off, don’t know him, never met him and as you know, I don’t give a f—k what people think, so I’ll look at a player, I will look at … the issue is people are comparing apples and oranges,” Pronger said of Mailloux. “They’re comparing Bolduc to Mailloux. You’re never going to find a comp there. It’s not why the trade was made. You’re looking at a roster, and I’m not going to speak for the management team either. They saw something, whether it’s the scouts, whether it’s … they’re looking at holes in their roster, they’re looking at holes in their long-term depth and you’re looking at Bolduc as a player that you have a number of top six forwards. Who’s he going to knock out of the lineup in the top six (on the current roster)? Not lineup, period, but top six. Then you have to look at the fact that you’ve got to pay him. There’s a number of pieces to the conversation that frankly are above the fans’ pay grade and so they’re looking at it purely from a hockey perspective and it’s, ‘Whoa, why would they do that? They don’t need the guy.’ Well maybe not this moment. They get an injury, who are they going to bring up? Where are they going to get depth? Somebody watched this kid and goes, ‘Wow, we think we can develop him.’” The message from the 51-year-old Pronger is simple: it takes time, especially in developing a defenseman. He ought to know. “If you look at his stats, he played 100 games in junior, which is not very much in three and a half years,” Pronger said of Mailloux, who played a total of 101 games over three seasons with the London Knights of the Ontario Hockey League, including regular season and playoffs. “That’s not very many games. Then he’s played less than 100 pro games; he’s played now 12 NHL games. Defense is incredibly hard to play, and as we know, to learn. You can go out in practice and look like gangbusters and work on your craft and hone your edgework and work on puck play … nothing replicates game play, in-game action. You have to play. You have to make mistakes, you have to do all these things. “He’s under the gun. They’ve told the fan base that he’s a NHL player, that he’s ready now to be a contributor, whether he’s not the (No.) 6-7, which he would be currently and work his way up into the lineup. People had the same concerns about (Colton) Parayko, people had the same concerns about other trades they’ve made, people had the same concerns about me! And by the way, I am not comparing him to me, I can tell you that. I was second overall, I was a high pick, I played way more than 100 games in junior (165 regular season/playoff games with Peterborough of the OHL) or college or whatever, whatever league you’re coming from with respect to pedigree and all that stuff.” Mailloux has played a grand total of 12 NHL games. Twelve. And another 148 with Laval of the American Hockey League the past two seasons. And that’s why Pronger believes the more games he gets, the more the Blues will come to realize, and understand, just what they have. “Just breaking it down and looking at his stats, he hasn’t played enough to really refine his game,” Pronger said. “You have people going, ‘Well, Matthew Schaefer missed all last year.’ Well, Matthew Schaefer (played 17 games with Erie of the OHL) is different. First overall pick. He’s really good. So don’t compare him to that either. You have to look at what he does.” There are so many similarities between Pronger’s and Mailloux’s situations, but there are so many things that are different. Social media being one. “The biggest concern I would have for him is that he starts listening to the naysayers and listening to all the backlash, good or bad, and get consumed by all of that and not just focus on playing the game, developing, learning, understanding and finding his niche,” Pronger said. “How is he going to play? Is he going to be this hard-nosed, two-way defenseman? Is he going to defend hard, make a good first pass, support the play? Based on what I’m looking at, he’s not like an offensive power-play guy. He can supplement and be on the second unit maybe down the line. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s a defensive-defenseman, he kills penalties, he plays tough and he plays hard. All of that is unknown. We’re looking at an unknown commodity because he hasn’t played. He’s played 12 f--king NHL games! And one season in the AHL. It is all really new. You’re painting with a blank canvas because he hasn’t played in any league very long, so you really don’t know what he can or can’t be because it’s all right there. So really it’s just a matter of blocking out the noise and just put the f--king work boots on and getting to work and start trying to figure out what you want, how good you want to be and what are you going to do to get there.” Pronger said blocking out the noise when he came to St. Louis was hard then, so can you imagine what Mailloux is going through now? That’s why blocking out that noise in today’s society is not an easy chore. “It’s not f--king easy,” Pronger said. “Oh by the way, thank God there was no social media when I played because it would have been f--king way worse. It was already worse and it would have been way worse than what it was. So I think for me, it’s more get off social media, focus on the things you can control: your work ethic, how you can prepare, how disciplined you are, your habits, all these things that are within your control, your dedication, what are you willing to sacrifice and how good do you want to be and then how are you going to get there. It’s a slow progression. Nothing in this league happens overnight, and anybody who thinks that is out of their f--king mind. So it’s just a slow progression of learning, getting better, developing and as you gain a little bit more confidence, you just have to simplify the game. Stop trying to go through four sticks. Throw it off the glass, throw it off the boards. Just keep things simple and make hard plays, hard. Everything has to be hard.” The more he plays, the more he will learn, and there will come a time when Mailloux will understand he belongs. Right now, the process is very raw. “I started to get it, but you’ve also got to remember, it was my third year (in the NHL),” Pronger said. “I already had two full seasons under my belt, well a year and a half because of the lockout, and everybody’s different. And in my third year, I’m frickin getting booed out the ass for three-quarters of the year and I’ve got people challenging me in the parking lot. I almost fought every f--king day … outside the rink, not in the rink, outside the rink! “It’s a grind. He’s got to block all that out. He’s got to be determined and ask himself how bad do you want it? These naysayers and the noise is not going to stop. They’re going to keep, and just because I say don’t, they’re probably going to pile on more. And it’s up to him to A) block it out, and B) just get back to playing the game. And by the way, he might have to go back to the minors. Who knows? I think he’s got two more years of eligibility before waivers. That’s up to them, but they have the ability to do that, and what I also think people need to realize, a big right-shot defensemen that are mobile and that can do what he does, don’t grow on trees. You can see the allure of the trade and why they did it, and they had a lot of forwards do what Bolduc does. But they drafted another one in (Justin) Carbonneau. They have a plethora of depth. They’ve got a dearth of these guys. A) Wingers -- not to downplay it -- but they grow on trees. You can get wingers. Centers and defensemen are harder to get, they’re harder to come by in this league, so when you can trade a winger for a defenseman, that you think has upside, and you’re trying to figure out where these pieces are going to fit, you do it. Somebody liked him, I’m to assume. They made the trade. I’m going to assume somebody liked him. In that regard, you can see the qualities of what they’re looking at. It’s now all up to him to put it all together and refine the package, so to speak, while being engaged to all of the commentary that’s happening right now.” When Montgomery said on Friday that the Blues are viewing Mailloux for the long haul, the responses from a number of fans -- plenty have shown support, too -- were that the 6-foot-3, 212-pound right-handed shot can’t play in the NHL. When told this, Pronger was not amused. “Why? How do they know,” Pronger said. “He’s only played four f--king games this year. How can they already say that? How can they make that statement? By the way, if we’re going off the first four games, we’ve got quite a few non-NHL players in the league now. Again, all of that noise is just that, it’s f--king noise.” The fact that the Blues were embarrassed on home ice Wednesday, and Mailloux’s numbers on the surface say he was a culprit, Pronger said, tell a different tale. “Because you’re the last line of defense. Had the game gone different if (Joel) Hofer doesn’t serve up a pizza, he makes a couple saves, we’re not even talking about this,” Pronger said. “We’re not talking about it, but because they didn’t play well. They got smoked, he was minus-4, everybody’s looking, ‘Oh, he’s minus-7.’ And now everybody’s talking about it. So then it just manifests itself and it just starts growing and spiraling out of control because now we have a built-in excuse. By the way, they’ve got a lot of guys that aren’t playing great. “Expectations change because they made the playoffs (last season). They weren’t supposed to make the playoffs and then they go on this run. People think they remember this run and think how good they were and it’s just going to carry over and they’re going to stay on that same path. It’s not how it works. Every year’s different. They go on that run, great? Did they learn a lot, sure? You now get into the playoffs, but that’s where it ends. Now you’ve got to start a new year, you’ve got new guys, guys are a year older on all matters. The veterans, the mid-guys and then the young guys and they’re developing in different time frames and guys feel better, guys feel worse, guys are in a zone, guys are not in a zone. Getting all of that coming together at the same time like it did the second half is f--king hard and then they had a good run in the playoffs, a disappointing end, that crushes you. There’s just so many things that happen. The expectation from the fan, that’s the expectation now. And that’s the new standard. Well, it’s this. They’ve got to get there. They were at the top of what they were doing at that moment. It doesn’t just start there. The bar is back to here. They’ve got to get to there again and hopefully go past that. It’s putting it all together again.” Pronger, who played 1,167 regular-season NHL games (157 goals, 514 assists) and another 173 in the Stanley Cup playoffs, winning the Cup with the Anaheim Ducks in 2006-07 and reaching the Cup Final three times out of a 18-year career, learned over time himself, even though he was in the NHL the first year he was drafted and how tough it was. “I don’t have a message to the people, it’s patience,” Pronger said. ‘He’s played 12 games. I don’t know very many ... they’re going to point to Matthew Schaefer because, oh by the way, how many games has he played? Five? Oh, he’s got five points. He’s first overall and he’s a f--king incredible skater, and they’re giving him every opportunity to succeed. This kid’s playing 12 minutes, playing third pairing. The St. Louis Blues are going to nurture their top defensive acquisition over the summer, Logan Mailloux (23). Bob Frid-Imagn Images [https://deweb-519a7.b-cdn.net/post-images/dcb22ac4-cf13-4c79-a38e-93488022eb02.jpeg] The St. Louis Blues are going to nurture their top defensive acquisition over the summer, Logan Mailloux (23). Bob Frid-Imagn Images “Again, you’re comparing different things. People want to cherry-pick comparisons. You can’t f--king do that. Oh and by the way, I don’t know if he’s going to be a player. I haven’t seen him play enough. He’s only played four games. I’m not sitting here saying he can or can’t play. I’m saying we’ve seen this time and time again in the National Hockey League. It takes time. You do not know as a defenseman, typically, again there’s outliers, Quinn Hughes, Cale Makar, Matthew Schaefer, there are outliers to the number but typically you do not know what type of defenseman you’re going to be until about game 300. Good and bad. Are you a guy that serves up a pizza every game. In and around 300, you’re going into the middle of your fourth year. You’ve got a good understanding of the game, you’ve got a good understanding of the expectations and experience of the league. He doesn’t know any of these players. He doesn’t know where they like pucks, where they like to go. He doesn’t know where they’re comfortable, where they’re uncomfortable. He doesn’t know any of that. He’s got to figure out the league and figure out who he’s playing against, figure out tendencies. Four f--king games! He hasn’t seen any of these guys. He’s never played against these guys. So how the f-ck is he going to know?” Since Mailloux doesn’t have the experience just yet, Pronger said he needs to keep putting his head down and put in the work, and that the Blues are capable of pulling the best out of him because they are willing to work with him. “I think the hallmark of a true pro and the hallmark of somebody good is their consistency, understanding how you need to play night in, night out to be effective,” Pronger said. “You’re going to make mistakes. The problem for him, again, because he’s under a microscope, every mistake is amplified, every mistake is magnified because it’s him. By the way, Bolduc has barely played himself. Like, what are we f--king talking about? It’s not like he’s a superstar player (like Shanahan) who scored 50 goals. They’re making Bolduc out to be this star player, like, give me a break. He’s on the third line (in St. Louis). Come on! But was he getting it? He was just starting to get it, right? But again, he had already played 100 games. So now we’re comparing a guy who’s played 10 to a guy who’s played 100, plays a totally different position, different skill set, different … I don’t see Zack Bolduc dropping his gloves fighting anybody (like Mailloux tried doing Wednesday). So, what are we f--king doing?”
