Montreal Canadiens winger Brandon Prust runs into Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Ben Bishop during the third period of Game 2 NHL second round playoff hockey action Sunday, May 3, 2015 in Montreal.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
In an increasingly colourless sporting world, the Montreal Canadiens' Brandon Prust is a refreshing tonic – articulate, pithy, trenchant.
He is beloved by his teammates for his toughness and determination, and happens to be a useful player in the postseason because of his tally-ho-and-a-cloud-of-dust penalty killing and willingness to mix it up.
And for the third playoffs in a row he is squarely in the middle of bad blood and controversy.
Two years ago he waded in with a memorable one-liner – "bug-eyed, fat walrus" – to describe then-Ottawa coach Paul MacLean; last year he was briefly suspended for a hit that broke his good friend and former teammate Derek Stepan's jaw in the conference finals in New York, an incident that also sparked a minor war of words.
Now, the spotlight has found him again.
At least on this occasion his performance should take attention away from the Habs' 0-2 second-round series deficit against Tampa Bay, their terrible power play and general inability to score goals despite controlling long stretches of play.
The Habs are a team that displayed frailties in the regular season – goalie Carey Price's play papers over a lot of deep cracks – and now they are being exposed by a talented team. They are also running out of time to make meaningful course corrections, but the narrative will almost certainly be about Prust.
He had a bit of an eventful night Sunday.
In the first period of game two, the 31-year-old winger put Lightning defenceman Braydon Coburn in a headlock, then grabbed the front of his shirt and gave him three or four shots on the chin.
He did this for reasons known only to himself, although there was postgame speculation he did so in retaliation for Coburn spearing a teammate.
Referee Brad Watson raised his arm, and Prust was banished for roughing.
Then, a finger-wagging Watson lectured him at length from the door to the penalty box – and hit him with an additional minor for unsportsmanlike conduct.
What endears Prust to cliché-weary reporters and fans should, at very least, cost him some money.
After the Habs' 6-2 loss, he made no effort to hide his feelings at the call and about Watson; NHL headquarters will doubtless take a dim view of his frankness.
"I thought the original call was kind of soft and I let him know on the way to the penalty box. He kept provoking me. He came to the box and called me every name in the book. He called me a piece of you know what, a [expletive], a coward, said he'd drive me right out of this building," he said. "I kept going, 'Yeah, okay, yeah okay, yeah okay.' He kept on me, he kept on me. I kept saying, 'Yeah, okay.' I wasn't looking at him. He teed me up. That's the ref he is. He tries to play God. He tries to control the game and he did that tonight."
Fighting words from a fighting man, but the dust-up with Watson was only the beginning.
Prust has a long history of conflict and discord with Tampa goalie Ben Bishop – they have clashed several times in the past – and his last act of the evening was to hit the big netminder as he came out to handle a loose puck.
Coburn stepped in, and the two finished what Prust tried to start in the first.
"I barely touched [Bishop]. He flopped like he normally does. I got a piece of him, but it was nothing. Coburn came at me so I dropped them," he said.
As he was shepherded to the Montreal room by the officials, Prust lobbed his elbow pad at the Tampa bench.
It was caught by superstar centre Steven Stamkos, who by that point had put the finishing touches on a three-point night (including his first goal of the playoffs on a breakaway).
"I'm not sure if he got to keep it or not but they were pretty excited about getting a game-used elbow pad, I don't know why," he said.
As for Prust taking a run at Bishop, Stamkos said "you could kind of see it coming from a mile away. It's obviously not the first time he's done something like that. Again, for us, we're staying focused, we're not worried about that … and again that just shows frustration."
We'll he's certainly right about that.
The Habs are clearly frustrated, they're admitting as much.
"I'm thinking we pissed the game away. Great start, our building, got the fans into it, go up 1-0, we pissed the game away," Canadiens winger Max Pacioretty said. "It's frustrating."
Losing's like that.
Montreal now has two days to ruminate over the loss, which should raise plenty of red flags.
The Habs are now 1-for-26 on the power play in the playoffs, and have scored only 15 goals in eight games.
Tampa, conversely, scored four power-play goals in eight opportunities after a 2-for-34 slide to open the playoffs.
And Stamkos is now on the board for the first time in 11 playoff games.
"He's one of the best players in the world, you can only hold him down for so long. You know he's going to break out. He's been working really hard and to see him get that goal, and it was a really nice move, too, he's wanted it for a while," said Bishop. "The team has been winning and he's been doing other things besides scoring which has been helping this team win. To see him on the score sheet I know is a relief but he's been doing a lot of other things, too."
If the Habs felt hard done by after losing game one in overtime, and were buoyed by their opening 15 minutes in game two, on this occasion they were left to rue their inability to make Bishop pay for a few shaky moments early on.
"I think we've made Bishop look a lot better than he's been – there's times when we can expose him a little bit," said defenceman P.K. Subban, who took a momentum-shifting penalty that led to Tampa's equalizer late in the first.
Teams have come back from an 0-2 deficit on 37 occasions in NHL history, the Habs have done it five times, most recently against Boston in 2004.
But no team has managed the feat since 2010, and now Montreal must win in a building where Tampa compiled the best home record in the NHL during the regular season.
Detroit won two games there in the first round to stretch the Lightning to seven games, the Habs will need to do that if they hope to play a winner-takes-all game at home.
They'll need to solve Bishop to have any chance.
It seems fairly clear that taking the direct approach to knocking the Tampa goalie off his game won't work, particularly if the Tampa power play has found a rich new vein of form.
At his postgame news conference, Lightning coach Jon Cooper said he was willing to accept it was an accident when Montreal's Torrey Mitchell bowled Bishop over while driving the net in the third, but wouldn't extend the same benefit of the doubt to Prust.
Then he was asked if he believed in exacting justice in the traditional hockey fashion.
"Oh, the old trap question. Do I believe in an eye for an eye?" he said, "I do, sometimes."
It wasn't really necessary to qualify that statement.
As Stamkos said, "the best revenge is scoring."
It happens Tampa is quite good at that, and Montreal isn't. There isn't a lot Brandon Prust can do about it.