Former Golden Knights prospect has come back to haunt them with Canadiens

By Justin Emerson

Thursday, June 24, 2021 | 2 a.m.

A pertinent, “This Day in Hockey History”-type tweet surfaced Wednesday featuring a beaming Nick Suzuki nestled between the two Vegas Golden Knights’ executives who drafted him. Almost exactly four years ago, Suzuki represented the future of the franchise, a player who would help his team one day reach the Stanley Cup Final.

He’s helped get a team to the verge of the Stanley Cup all right, but it’s not the one anyone expected back then. Partly because of Suzuki’s strong play, the Montreal Canadiens are one win away from eliminating the Golden Knights heading into Game 6 at 5 p.m. tonight at Bell Centre.

For Golden Knights’ fans, Suzuki is something like an ex-boyfriend: They say they want what’s best for him, but when they meet face-to-face, they maybe wish he were doing just a little bit worse.

“It worked out for both teams,” Suzuki said before the series of his trade from Vegas. “When (Montreal general manager) Marc (Bergevin) called me and said I was a big piece that they wanted I just wanted to show that Montreal made the right decision in bringing me over. I want to do everything I can for this franchise.”

On Tuesday, that meant tallying three points as part of a 4-1 Canadiens’ win to give them a 3-2 series lead. Pacioretty scored the Golden Knights’ lone goal, which is appropriate considering he was the player traded for Suzuki in June 2018.

The Golden Knights were coming off an appearance in the Stanley Cup Final but saw two of their top forwards, James Neal and David Perron, depart via free agency. The then top line of Jonathan Marchessault, William Karlsson and Reilly Smith was still around, but Vegas needed another scoring threat even after signing Paul Stastny to play center.

With the needs of the club in the moment, trading a 19-year-old Suzuki who was not expected to contribute for another year for one of the decade’s most prolific finishers in Pacioretty made sense.

Pacioretty struggled out of the gate as he adjusted to a new system in Vegas, but turned into a different player once the Golden Knights acquired Mark Stone five months later. Since Stone arrived, Pacioretty has 60 goals and 125 points in 135 regular season games, and 15 goals and 30 points in 35 playoff games.

Suzuki broke in with Montreal in 2019-20, putting up a respectable 13 goals and 41 points in 71 games his rookie year. He boosted that to 15 goals and 41 points in 56 games this year, but he’s really thrived in the playoffs this year with five goals and 13 points in 16 postseason games.

He’s terrorized the Golden Knights, registering five points in the last three games.

“He went to a situation where he got a really good opportunity, that was ready for him, and has flourished,” general manager Kelly McCrimmon said. “We wanted to improve another line and that’s what Max did for us, and the synergy he developed with Mark Stone took them both to another level.”

Putting aside other pieces of the trade (Tomas Tatar and a second-round pick), the swap of Pacioretty for Suzuki netted both teams what they needed at that point in their respective timelines.

Pacioretty has kept the Golden Knights near the top of the NHL while Suzuki has helped pull the Canadiens from the bottom of the league to respectability for near the league minimum salary. That means Suzuki might be right: This could be the rare trade that’s worked for both sides.

Given the chance, both teams would likely sign off on the trade again.

The part that may make the trade sting for the Golden Knights is that they shipped out Suzuki instead of Cody Glass, the other forward alongside Pacioretty who will always be a part of the discussion in hindsight. Glass and Suzuki were the first two draft picks in franchise history with the former going No. 6 overall and the latter No. 13 in the 2017 NHL Entry Draft.

It’s easy to say now that Vegas should have held on to Suzuki, but in 2018, Glass was considered one of the best center prospects in hockey. Suzuki was a slightly lower-ranked prospect.

It’s not fair to slam the Vegas front office for retaining value in a deal that brought them a star winger. But that also doesn’t make it hurt any less for Golden Knights’ fans to watch Suzuki potentially contribute to their team’s demise while Glass toils away on the taxi squad.

Glass has only appeared in one NHL game in the last two and a half months. Suzuki has been one of the driving forces of Montreal’s playoff run and, in a cruel twist to Vegas fans, he’s recently done it in a building where it once looked like he would playing his home games.

On Tuesday, he set up Montreal’s first goal with a perfect cross-ice pass and then set up the third with a takeaway.  It was almost poetic that his third point of the night, an empty-net goal, officially ended a Vegas comeback attempt. 

Suzuki has been everything the Golden Knights imagined when they took him in the first round four years ago. He’s just done it against them instead of for them.