Laval Rocket forward Joshua Roy had just been checked into the boards illegally. By the time he got up and turned around, Brandon Gignac had already dropped the gloves with Providence Bruins forward Tyler Pitlick.
While Pitlick was penalized for boarding on the play, it showed that the Rocket have each other’s back. Gignac is not a usual fighter either, with just 74 penalty minutes in 164 games with Laval prior to Saturday, but he saw a teammate get hit and took exception.
“It’s a great teammate move,” Roy said. “Gignac is a great leader, he’s there for everybody. He’s not the guy whose job it is to drop the gloves but he didn’t hesitate and he has my respect for that.”
That type of pack mentality is common in Laval right now. And that’s not a term that came out of nowhere, it’s one they use themselves. If you want to mess with anyone on the team, there will be someone else there ready to take you on.
“The biggest asset we have is how they support each other, why they play for each other and how they play for each other,” said Rocket head coach Pascal Vincent. “It’s that pack mentality that we have and to see Gignac doing that, protecting Josh, tells you everything about our team.”
“We’re a family here,” said Rocket forward Vincent Arseneau, who to extend his metaphor about family is the team’s father’s childhood friend who everyone in town knows not to mess with. “We stick together and it will take us far.”
I had asked the team’s coach about team identity a few weeks ago, and after Saturday’s game he brought it up again on a question about the team’s start.
“What you want to do early in the season is to create a team identity. Our focus is on team identity right now, how we’re going to play, what’s going to be our game,” Vincent said. “When people talk about us, they need to define us with just a few words. To me right now, the way you can define us is that pack mentality and work ethic. We never give up. Even when they make mistakes, they work hard.”
The Rocket are a young team, but even with some new younger additions there is a core of players who are a year older than they were a year ago, and even though Vincent wasn’t with the team, they have used lessons from that season. And they have dealt with experiences they don’t want to repeat.
“What did we start 0-5 last year? Something like that?” Logan Mailloux asked the media. [Editor’s note: It was actually 1-6-1.] “It’s different and there are still a bunch of us from last year who dealt with that. I feel like we learned from that. Guys are coming in, playing the right way, every single shift and every game so it’s fun to be around for sure.”
The Rocket are now 8-1-0 through nine games, leading the North Division, tied for top spot in the league by point percentage, and on a franchise-high seven-game winning streak. As they head to Belleville for two games on Friday and Saturday, they will do so looking to continue winning the same way they have done it since the beginning of the season: together.
