The 30-year-old winger has made impressive turnaround since starting season with AHL’s Laval Rocket and has five goals in last five games.
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It looked like Joel Armia’s NHL career might be over when the Canadiens sent him down to the AHL’s Laval Rocket to start this season and then again on Nov. 12.
But the 30-year-old winger didn’t believe it was the end of the NHL road for him and neither did Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis.
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The Canadiens called Armia back up from Laval at the end of November and he has been with the team ever since. Armia scored two goals Thursday night as the Canadiens lost 7-4 to the Tampa Bay Lightning at the Bell Centre. In the last five games, Armia has 5-1-6 totals, giving him 16-6-22 totals in 59 games. Despite Armia missing 16 games, only two Canadiens have scored more goals than him — Nick Suzuki (32) and Cole Caufield (22). The 16 goals for Armia match the career high he set with the Canadiens in 2019-20.
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On Friday, Armia was named as the Canadiens’ nominee for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy as voted on by Montreal members of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. The award is presented annually to the NHL player “who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to hockey.” Armia received five of the 13 first-place votes, while David Savard and Mike Matheson finished tied for second after getting two first-place votes each.
Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis always believed it was possible Armia could play the way he has been recently.
“There’s so much there,” St. Louis said after Thursday’s game. “I’m not surprised that he’s doing that. I guess I’m surprised if you look at the whole season because of how it started for him. So I guess in that sense, I’m surprised. But in terms of the talent of the player, I am not surprised.”
Armia went to Laval with a good attitude and responded by posting 6-3-9 totals in eight AHL games.
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“I didn’t see any other way,” he said after Thursday’s game about his attitude in Laval. “It’s the only way I saw it. To be positive and work myself back. A big positive thing was scoring, obviously. I tried to focus every day on the team stuff, to be part of the team. “
Armia also worked with Jean-François Ménard, the Canadiens’ mental-performance coach, and learned not to be so hard on himself. But he said Ménard isn’t the only one who helped him.
“I feel like there’s a lot of people … I don’t feel like I want to say it’s just one guy,” Armia said. “I feel like we have a great staff here, everybody in the locker room, all the guys are great. A lot of things.”
At the end of the day, it was up to Armia to turn his game around and he has done that. He has one more season remaining on his contract with a salary-cap hit of US$3.4 million.
Armia is now playing like he did during the Canadiens’ run to the 2021 Stanley Cup final, which earned him a four-year, US$13.6-million contract from former GM Marc Bergevin.
“I feel like I probably put more pressure on myself than anybody else,” Armia said. “I’ve kind of learned to let that go a little bit. It helps a lot.
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“That’s one more thing I like about this game is you always can learn new things,” he added. “That’s one thing I’ve learned this season.”
Since the Masterton Trophy was first presented in 1968, six Canadiens players have won it: Claude Provost (1967-68), Henri Richard (1973-74), Serge Savard (1978-79), Saku Koivu (2001-02), Max Pacioretty (2011-12) and Carey Price (2021-22).
scowan@postmedia.com
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