Captaining the Canadiens: Max Pacioretty knows leading the Habs is a complex task

The Montreal Canadiens' twin inner sanctums – dressing rooms at the club's practice facility and at the Bell Centre – are cavernous oval-shaped spaces which present challenges when it comes to speechifying.

Habs captain Max Pacioretty recently decided he needed to be closer to the action. So after seven years of sitting at the far end of one of the two wooden benches that line the room, he has moved to the middle, literally at the centre of it all.

Beside alternate captain Brendan Gallagher, Pacioretty sits under a photo of Hall of Fame captain Émile (Butch) Bouchard. Directly across on the other long bench are Andrei Markov and the newly arrived Shea Weber, also alternates; the fourth alternate, Tomas Plekanec, is a few feet away from Gallagher.

"When you have to speak and you're at the end of the locker room, you just don't feel as vocal or as powerful, so we made a couple of changes," Pacioretty explained recently.

Pro sports teams fetishize intangibles, it feels particularly true of hockey where they often seem to outweigh skill or talent. The Habs have put a sizable off-season premium on character and leadership, it's clear Pacioretty has also been working on self-improvement in that regard.

Rearranging the seating – something Pacioretty first considered during the lost season of 2015-16 – is just one of the self-appointed tasks the big winger has undertaken in recent weeks, although he says the removal of the oft-ridiculed "No Excuses" slogan from the walls of the Habs' dressing rooms wasn't his handiwork.

When new players arrived in town – Weber, Alex Radulov, Andrew Shaw – Pacioretty made a point of taking them out to dinner and providing advice about life in Montreal.

In training camp, he did the same with a number of the team's prospects; teenaged defenceman Mikhail Sergachev and second-year winger Nikita Scherbak rated a captain's lunch.

If anyone's wondering, yes, he's working diligently on improving his French, but no, it doesn't come all that easily.

As he embarks on his second season as captain, the Connecticut native has a stronger grasp on the subtleties of a role that is part social director, part concierge service, part inspirational leader, and part mediator.

It also involves setting a mood.

"The atmosphere in the room is why there are captains in the NHL," Pacioretty said.

These things are tricky to gauge for the outsider, but there is a "new dawn" vibe about the Habs; new personnel on the ice, subtle but meaningful changes to the physical environment, and adjustments to the club's website and branding – it is no longer "Le club du hockey."

In any case, the captain appears to be in a relentlessly buoyant mood.

Perhaps it has to do with the ruddy good health of goaltender Carey Price – notwithstanding the cold bug that is keeping him out the season-opening game. The Canadiens begin their season in Buffalo on Thursday night against the Sabres.

Price might mean more to his team than any other player in the league. Or maybe it's because Pacioretty himself is finally back to peak fitness after breaking a bone in his leg 14 months ago, an injury that threw off the following summer's conditioning program (doctors also forbade him from doing any leg workouts for most of last season).

It might even be related to the fact the Habs' mix of personalities has been significantly altered with the new arrivals and departure of larger-than-life P.K. Subban – a facet of the story that will be endlessly dissected this season.

Fundamentally, a happy room is a winning room, which is why the Habs' workplace was a glum and ill-tempered place last season. The legendarily self-critical Pacioretty says the team's failings in his first year as captain brought its lot of personal lessons.

"I'm still pretty hard on myself, but I do it privately, and learn to forget about it, which is much easier with a family," said the father of two young children. "I can't be hard on myself and have that rub off on my teammates – then we lose confidence as a group. It's the biggest challenge of being a captain."

The 27-year-old has also read widely about other athletes and how they deal with things such as stardom and slumps. Golfer Tiger Woods and basketball all-timer Michael Jordan hold particular fascination because of their singular, all-consuming focus on competing. (He can relate, he said, but only to an extent.)

He has also perused popular leadership books like The Hard Hat, and found last year that reading up on other athletes' hardships can provide a much-needed distraction.

"It instantly makes you feel better. We're not perfect, last year we were very upset with the way things went. In the moment it was very, very hard to be positive and put that stuff away. But there were times when I could both tune it out and twist it into a positive because of some of these books that I've read," he said.

Leadership is the subject of a voluminous scholarship, it has been dissected at great expense by every institution from the military and multinational companies to governments and their departments – NASA recently concluded a year-long experiment that sought, among other things, to crack the code of team dynamics for an eventual manned mission to Mars.

The term reached buzzword status long ago in the NHL, but it's not as straightforward a concept as the word typically implies.

For one thing, it has little in common with the brand usually associated with rigidly hierarchical organizations or the techniques employed by CEOs or military leaders.

Essentially, when hockey people talk about leadership, what they really mean is credibility.

"You can't be fake. That's the biggest thing, as long as what you're saying is you … it doesn't matter if you say two words or 200. If your teammates trust that you're authentic, that's good enough for us," Pacioretty said.

The word "fraud," conversely, is among the game's most stigmatizing slurs, down there with "selfish."

All sports attach great importance to individual leadership qualities, but the NHL is different. Even the most dominant players in hockey typically log less actual game time than pre-eminent players in football, basketball or even baseball (pitchers being the exception).

"It's not a situation like Jordan – you can't just put the team on your back and go out and score 50," Pacioretty said. "There are 23 guys in here; there's only so much one individual can do."

It's an unenviable position: responsibility with limited authority.

At least Pacioretty can share it with others, including Price, the emotional and spiritual centre of the team who would almost certainly wear the "C" if goalies were permitted by league rules to be named captain (they are not).

Since leadership is an intangible, its effect can only be measured at the margins. And yet the Habs have invested heavily in it this season with the acquisition of Weber and the two-time Stanley Cup-winner Shaw, who identifies holding others to account as a key component of a self-regulating dressing room ecosystem.

"If I'm making the same mistake over and over again, I expect to be called on it, and not just by Patch," he said. "It's what builds the love in the room."

Coincidentally that's one of Weber's fortes – he is a master of the sidelong glance and withering gaze – and helps explain why he enjoys not only immense credibility but actual reverence in hockey circles.

It's a reputation league, and Weber's is golden.

Subban may be a younger, more talented and more exciting player, but no less an authority than Team Canada coach Mike Babcock has praised Weber, the "man-mountain," for having the kind of presence that transforms a room.

Notwithstanding the analytics community objections to this kind of talk, this is not a minor point. Studies have suggested a link between "transformational" sporting leaders – who are driven by strong ideals and both care for and challenge their peers – and their positive effect on motivation. They make people want to try harder.

Gallagher, another player who hockey folk say typifies the leader-of-men archetype, said in a recent interview that "when you're in a team environment, you look across the room and you need someone to lead the way. Some pull guys with them, others lead from behind by encouraging people."

Like many of his peers, Gallagher believes leadership is both innate ("you can't teach it") and widespread ("anyone can step up and be a leader").

Players and managers in the NHL don't generally see a contradiction in that statement. Perhaps it's because notions like character and leadership mean a great deal, until they don't. Every team is a tightly knit unit in October – last fall the Habs were talking about how close the team was. By January, however, the good vibes were just a rumour.

The Habs may well respond to this new infusion of leadership, and to Pacioretty's efforts to inspire his teammates.

Cohesiveness and dressing-room accountability, however, don't help you score on the power play. They won't fix deficiencies in defensive zone coverage.

So teams overvalue these qualities at their peril.