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Marc-André Fleury finds it hard to believe that his home province no longer produces many star hockey players.
During a video conference the other day, Fleury — one of the National Hockey League’s greatest goalies of the past couple of decades — talked about the fact that there are no players from Quebec on the
Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team.
“It’s surprising that we don’t have more players that are coming out in the drafts and in the Olympics,” said Fleury, who won three Stanley Cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins. “It’s our game. I don’t think I’m the only one. We love hockey in Quebec. Yeah, I don’t know.”
Fleury — known to his fans as Flower — was doing interviews in his role as ambassador for Kraft Hockeyville, which gives money to communities across Canada to upgrade their rinks. Fleury is from Sorel, and he played his junior hockey in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
The thing about the lack of Quebecers on the men’s Olympic team is that nobody can accuse Hockey Canada of ignoring Quebec because of some anti-Québécois sentiment. The players simply aren’t there. Who is the top Quebec star in the NHL right now? Exactly. You can’t think of one.
The leading Quebec point-getter as of Tuesday afternoon was the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Anthony Mantha, with the Longueuil winger’s 35 points ranking No. 100 in the NHL! The best Quebec goalie? The Canadiens’ Samuel Montembeault, who is having a brutal season.
Quebec used to be a hotbed for goalies, brewing netminders right, left and centre. At the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, all three goalies for Team Canada were Quebecers — Fleury, Martin Brodeur and Roberto Luongo. Fleury said he is simply mystified by how Quebec no longer produces great goalies like it used to.
“I don’t know if other countries caught up or they came up with different stuff or if they do things differently at a young age to get their goalies there,” said Fleury,
who shut out the Canadiens in his last career start in Montreal
, a 4-0 Minnesota Wild victory on Jan. 30, 2025. “It’s a little sad. I feel like I was lucky, too. Growing up, I had so many French goalies. I always loved Brodeur and Patrick Roy. But there were so many others that I followed, looked at how they played and modelled my game after them.
“Maybe I had more models and that made it more popular to be in nets for kids. I loved Félix Potvin. (Jean-Sébastien) Giguère, Luongo, (Jocelyn) Thibault, who I got to play with. And (Stéphane) Fiset; I liked his style in Quebec City. (Mathieu) Garon was great, I played with him, (José) Theodore. And they all played in the same era and they played against each other. There were a lot of French goalies at the same time.”
Fleury said Roy was undoubtedly one of the key factors in inspiring kids in Quebec to become goalies.
“I was young enough to have watched him play and he brought in the butterfly (style), right?” said Fleury. “He won the Cup. He was so good. I tried to learn from what he was doing. Obviously, he was a big influence for me. He was a great model for young goalies.”
I mentioned to Fleury that TVA Sports host Jean-Charles Lajoie recently wrote a column that noted if NHL players had gone to the Olympics in 1988, Team Canada would’ve included Mario Lemieux, Raymond Bourque, Claude Lemieux, Luc Robitaille, Michel Goulet, Vincent Damphousse, Stéphane Richer, Sylvain and Pierre Turgeon, with Roy in nets.
“It is weird,” said Fleury. “I feel that hockey is our sport, in Canada and in Quebec. I grew up loving it and I’m sure kids do today, too.”
I asked Fleury what he remembered about being part of Team Canada in 2010 in Vancouver.
“Uh, winning,” said Fleury, with a laugh. “The city of Vancouver was buzzing. When you walked around town when there was a hockey game, it was just electric, and in the building. And I got to spend time with Brodeur and Luongo, two guys I look up to. Just to be able to sit with them and watch some sports on TV and have a beer. I thought that it was so cool.”
bkelly@postmedia.com
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