Brad Marchand in 2018: “I was never the best kid on my team — anyone will tell you that. My buddies were better players. As we got older, they were getting all the attention from the junior teams. I’ll never forget, when we were 12 years old our coach gave this speech in the locker room before a game, and he said, ‘There’s thousands of kids like you in Canada. There’s thousands more all over the world. You know what the statistics say? The statistics say that only 0.01% of you will make it to the NHL.’ I just always remembered that stat, and I would think to myself, ‘Man, if I’m not even the best kid on my pee-wee team … there’s no chance. How could I ever get noticed?’ That same pee-wee season, something else happened that took my mindset a step further. We were playing against our rivals, Cole Harbor, in some important game, and they had this monster forward on their team who always killed us. During the game, the kid took a run at my brother, and he smoked him. For as much as we’d mess with one another at home, if you ever hurt my brother, it was like a red light went off inside me. I’d fight you. So we went out, and every time the kid touched the puck, one of us took a run. He got so pissed off that he took a slashing penalty right at the end of his shift, and we got a power play. We ended up scoring the game-winning goal with him in the box, and I had this realization like, ‘OK … if I have a 0.01% chance, this might be one way of getting people to notice me.’ I have done things that have stepped over that line, and I’ve paid the price for it.... There’s a lot of people out there in the hockey world who love to say, ‘Winning is everything. It’s the only thing.’ Do they really mean it? How far are they willing to go? Maybe it was my size, or just the way I was born, but I’ve always felt like you have to be willing to do anything — literally anything — in order to win. Even if that means being hated. Even if it means carrying around some baggage. If I played the game any other way, you absolutely would not know my name. You wouldn’t care enough to hate me, because I wouldn’t be in the NHL.” playerstribu.ne/Marchand