Kadri's more dangerous when he turns the other cheek

The Avalanche star isn't taking the bait and the more he turns down the dance invitations from the undisciplined Blues, the more effective he is to his team

The abuse hurled at Nazem Kadri has rolled off him like water off a duck’s back.

There was a time when Dallas Eakins would stare at the ceiling and be sick with worry about the first-round pick who was supposed to be his star player. The player was expected to be up in the NHL by then, but he wasn’t even having much of an impact in the American Hockey League. As the coach of the Toronto Marlies, Eakins was charged with the task of developing young talents into players who could excel in the best league in the world and this kid simply wasn’t buying into the plan. The harder Eakins pushed, the more stubbornly and harder the kid pushed back. Sometimes it seemed as though this kid was never going to get it and would become another in a long line of Toronto Maple Leaf draft picks who were ruined.

“It’s almost like somebody with a really bad drug addiction,” Eakins told me for a story I wrote in The Hockey News in 2013. “They can just never come out of it. They just can’t change that habit.” Eakins remembers spending an inordinate amount of time on this one player and swears there were times when he could have grabbed him by the neck. Confrontations were intense. “I mean full-on screaming at him,” Eakins said.

That player was Nazem Kadri. And we tell that story to illustrate that with Kadri, you’re always playing the long game. The Leafs drafted him in 2009 and it took them almost five years to find out what they even had in him. Once they did, he turned out to be a terrific player, albeit one who had a penchant for exhibiting moments of a stunning lack of discipline. In his third season with the Colorado Avalanche, Kadri is showing exactly how much of a positive impact he can have on a game and how effective he can be when he plays just barely on the right side of the rulebook. All of this in time for him to become an unrestricted free agent.

David Perron earned a penalty and a fine - ‘the maximum allowable under the collective bargaining agreement’ - for his attack on Kadri in Game 4.

These playoffs have not been the only time Kadri’s patience has been tested. They’ve just been the most prominent. To be sure, it took all the intestinal fortitude he could muster to not go over the edge and into that dark place that has landed him in the bad books of the NHL’s player safety department. After his accidentally-on-purpose collision with St. Louis Blues goalie Jordan Binnington in Game 3, Kadri received so many threats and so much abuse that the police had to be called. Then, once he stepped on the ice, the same Blues players who vowed to concentrate on hockey did nothing of the sort, spending much of the game trying to goad him into trouble.

Of course, the Blues were only following ‘The Code’, whatever the hell that is. But it does state that any transgression – real or imagined, physical or verbal, large or small – must be met with immediate, decisive and impactful retribution. At the age of 31, Kadri has been the one skating away. A proud Muslim who was the president of the Muslim Student Association in his high school, Kadri managed to set aside the white noise all the racists were hurling at him online. “Racial, threatening, all that good stuff,” Kadri said. Similarly, he brushed off the Blues, who went to the penalty box, while he stayed on the ice and scored a hat trick. And in doing so, Kadri has turned a series that was never really going to be that close into a rout.

Kadri, who came into this season with six suspensions totalling 27 regular-season and playoff games, appears to have tamed the beast. You probably will always have to say ‘appears’ when it comes to Kadri, but his work this season and in these playoffs has been impressive. Not only did he record a career-high in points in the regular season, he managed to play a robust game without getting suspended. He kept his discipline in check, even when others around him could not. There was a time when Kadri could not be counted on to control his emotions, sometimes to the extreme detriment of his team. But when he does, it makes him even more dangerous than when he’s at risk of going over the edge.

Of course, that does not mean that Kadri doesn’t revel in driving his opponents to distraction. Or as Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson put it after Game 4: “Imagine being in his situation. It can’t be a fun thing. No human being should have to receive that type of treatment…it’s just insane. But that being said, I think he liked being the villain tonight.” For his part, Kadri acknowledged that he “wanted to come out tonight and really put a mark on this game, especially after what happened.” Kadri even appeared to wave goodbye to Robert Thomas when the two collided on the empty-net goal that sealed the Colorado win. “Hey, I’ve got to rub it in,” Kadri said.

Nazem Kadri is definitely doing that right now as the Avalanche head home to try to close out this series in five games. If they stick to the plan of using their speed and skill to counteract the Blues’ heavy game, they should be able to get out of this one in five games. It hasn’t been close and Kadri’s performance, along with the Blues’ response to it, has only served to widen that gap.