EDMONTON – As Jake Evans and his wife, Emily Flat, were preparing for the NHL trade deadline coming up Friday, they decided to pack.
Not for a vacation, but for good.
This was a process Evans and Flat did every year at the end of the season. They rented a furnished apartment in Montreal every year because it was just more convenient, but it also spoke to the lack of permanence Evans had with the Montreal Canadiens.
It is a lack of permanence he’s had his entire NHL career. When Evans signed the three-year contract worth $1.7 million a year that expires at the end of this season, he still wasn’t a fully established NHL player. It was not clear if his future was in Montreal or elsewhere. There was a rebuild happening. Players were leaving all the time.
So this was an annual process for Evans and Flat, who met in high school and got married last summer, but it was happening a bit earlier than usual this year because of that lack of permanence.
Up until very recently, Evans was mindful of the opportunity in front of him, hitting unrestricted free agency at age 28 in the midst of a career year offensively and playing an important role in Montreal. This was his opportunity, perhaps his only one, to sign a big contract.
But as they packed up their apartment, ahead of a looming four-game road trip through western Canada and Seattle that ends on the other side of the trade deadline, the reality of the current situation hit both Evans and Flat. The thought of picking up their lives and moving somewhere else became very real, and their priorities changed in kind.
Money’s important, they concluded. But it’s not everything.
“I think there’s a fine line,” Evans said after practice Wednesday. “I play pretty hard and I do want to be respected and get somewhat fair value. But at the end of the day, the last few days our whole apartment was packed up and stuff got real. Stuff picked up quick with management and my wife and I realized that everything is great here, so why try and leave and chase extra dollars? Again, it’s great money, I can’t complain.”
The realization hit very recently and talks with the Canadiens picked up Sunday, finally culminating with Evans signing a four-year contract worth $2.85 million a year after practice Tuesday, just before boarding the flight to Edmonton to kick off this road trip.
“I was about to bring three suitcases on this road trip,” Evans said. “I’m happy I only had to bring one.”
But what stands out about Evans is his notion that it’s great money, because being paid $2.85 million a year in just about any job is objectively great money but that is rarely how hockey players view it. They view salary in comparison to other players like them and what they are paid. When Carey Price signed his big contract with the Canadiens, he openly admitted it was important to him that his AAV at least match the identical eight-year contracts worth $10.5 million a year the Chicago Blackhawks had signed three years earlier with Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews.
That’s exactly what Price got, and the reason why it was important to him was to have the respect of being recognized as one of the best players in the NHL, which he undoubtedly was in 2017.
Evans was viewing his situation in much the same way. But he is a bottom-six player in the NHL and not one of the best players in the league. There is no guarantee the open market would be kinder to him than the Canadiens’ offer. And there was no guarantee being traded to a playoff team would have been beneficial to him either.
“I don’t know if I went to a top team and played 12 minutes a night, and then I could be screwed too,” Evans said. “I could have been scratched.”
Ultimately, it was the unknown that scared both Evans and Flat. Evans said he spoke to many current and particularly former teammates about the decision, and the message he got was straightforward and direct.
“They said take what you can here and go with it,” Evans said, “because it’s working.”
Jake Evans, far right, chose to stick with the organization and teammates with which he produced a career season. (Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
But again, it takes a particular kind of hockey player to do that, one with a proper perspective of things, one that values quality of life and one that understands how hockey teams work. It would have been easy for Evans to see the potential money on the unrestricted free agent market and be driven solely by that, but he wasn’t.
It took a while, but he realized just in time what is important to him.
“I don’t know what I would have gotten (on the open market),” he said. “You see what some guys are getting on different teams, every team’s in a different spot, I don’t know. I don’t know where I would have been, so I don’t know really what I gave up. There’s probably some money I left out, but…”
And then Evans paused to choose his words carefully, and lacking the ability to find a more appropriate term, he finished his sentence.
“… I don’t really give a s—.”
And thus Evans budged. He and his wife love living in Montreal, Evans loves his fit on the Canadiens, he didn’t know if anything else would be better, and he doesn’t see this contract as some sort of wide declaration on who he is as a player.
“Besides the weather and the taxes, I can’t really say a bad thing (about playing in Montreal),” Evans said. “And I don’t really care about taxes. It’s good money.”
So, what does this mean for the Canadiens between now and the Friday trade deadline? It could be a sign that Montreal is out of the pure seller market, that fellow UFAs like Joel Armia, David Savard and Christian Dvorak won’t move and will be kept as own rentals with a critical road trip starting and the Canadiens fully in the mix in March, which was management’s stated goal at the start of the season.
If you’ve met your modest goal, undercutting it by trading away important players for nominal returns would not necessarily be all that coherent, and would be a bad message to send to a group you are hoping is ready to emerge from the rebuild phase and into a more competitive phase.
Evans was probably the one piece that was going to bring in a valuable return. Perhaps Armia could be looped in as a package deal that would have been the most lucrative deal the Canadiens could make, but Armia on his own is likely more valuable to the Canadiens than whatever he would attract on the trade market. Same goes with Savard. Same goes with Dvorak.
It is worth remembering the Canadiens only have one salary retention slot available to them because they’re already retaining salary on Jake Allen and Jeff Petry, and this administration has liked having one slot available to them as an insurance policy heading into the draft so they can use it if necessary for a much more impactful move than an Armia or Savard or Dvorak trade now.
The fact the Canadiens are riding a five-game winning streak entering their game against the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday and are in the thick of the playoff race surely doesn’t hurt in convincing management to look at that race as more valuable than yet another third- or fourth-round draft pick, which they already have in abundance.
“Yeah, I think it helped the way we’ve started since the break,” captain Nick Suzuki said. “(Evans) is a really good player. It would have been tough to lose a guy that plays all the big, hard minutes that he does. I’m happy that he’s here.”
Does he see it as a sign the Canadiens will stand pat at the deadline, that the group will stay together and the team will make a run at a still-unlikely playoff spot?
“I hope so,” Suzuki said. “I love our group, and when we all are playing well, our team’s tough to beat.”
Jake Evans and Joel Armia have built chemistry in their time together in Montreal. (Eric Bolte / Imagn Images)
At practice Wednesday, there was a moment during a transition drill where Armia and Evans were attacking the offensive zone. Armia carried the puck through the neutral zone, crossed over with Evans just before the blue line, carried the puck into the offensive zone with possession, and at the moment he attracted two defenders to him, Armia threw the puck into space. Evans skated right into that space, and the pass was so perfect he was able to simply fire it past Sam Montembeault on his first touch.
After the goal, he skated back to centre ice, where Josh Anderson greeted him with a big hug. Suzuki did the same. They were pumped about the goal he had just scored.
If you want a snapshot of why Evans didn’t “give a s—” about the money he left on the table, that’s it. He has chemistry here. He is comfortable here. And he valued that more than money.
It’s refreshing.
And now, thanks to this contract, Evans can look to build some more permanence in Montreal.
“Part of it is I’m tired of packing stuff up every summer and moving around,” Evans said. “I feel like I’ve earned the right to have some stability in my life, and my wife and I deserve to hopefully get a house somewhere and have our own furniture. So, little things that we thought about a lot. We’re excited.”
As it turns out, perhaps the uncertainty of the last few weeks and months does have an upside.
Evans and Flat have their apartment already packed.
And they are due for an upgrade.
(Photo of Jake Evans: Rick Osentoski / Imagn Images)
