Sure, Shane has been playing a lot of hard hockey for a decade… but now he’s on a team that has a vested interest in rising to the level of their top players. The Centaurs aren’t a team that will coast on the tails of their team’s superstars. These men work, and they work hard.
So, Shane Hollander isn’t carrying a team anymore.
Ilya Rozanov is captaining a team filled with of people who love the game and love each other and don’t want to let each other down, on or off the ice.
So, when Shane Hollander starts racking up points like beating his own high score is his life’s goal, they see it, squint a little, and then jump on board because obviously he’s going to do it, but they can make it easier.
Shane beats his own season point record in half the time it took with the Voyagers. He accepts his Art Ross and Rocket Richard trophies with a heartfelt and extremely emphatic gratitude to his team who rallied and helped him all season long… the Centaur’s table has not a single dry eye at the end.
The Voyagers players present that he used to play with look on with an array of annoyed, shocked, and consternated faces. Hayden Pike just looks proud and grins and applauds with tears in his eyes as he hollers with everyone else as Shane walks back to the Centaur’s table.
The next year, Pike hits free agency and goes straight to the Ottawa Centaurs management, who are pleased to have Shane Hollander’s decade-long winger added to their roster. He folds right into the team, and wins half the room over on the first day by grousing that Shane couldn’t have waited one more year for Hayden to come and help set his records over everything he did at Montreal? But at least he gets to help him get that second Stanley with Ottawa.
And of course, they do. The Centaurs put in all the work so they can support the insane talent of their Captain and their Alternate, and this works to extend their playing longevity, because the whole team can keep up.
Individual players work their game sharper and sharper, because you have to be in order to keep up with Rozanov and Hollander. They shouldn’t have to shoulder all the weight of winning games. They should be able to delegate. When their lines go out, it shouldn’t be to clean up the messes from the last line.
Nobody wants to see Hollander or Rozanov absolutely wiped out at the end of a game because they had to push so much harder because their teammates couldn’t hack it, and it was up to them to make goals happen to take the win.
If they’re going to be wiped from a hard game, the rest of the team is too, because they’re all working as hard as they physically can. Nobody slacks off just because of the sparkly names on the team roster.
The Ottawa Centaurs start setting league records for goals, for win streaks, for awards accumulated, for individual player stats, for point totals, for how quickly their point totals rack up, and on and on.
Every record and statistic Shane Hollander made in Montreal is left to gather dust in the shadow of his achievements in Ottawa.
I’m going to have to come back to this thought later, because it’s too much fun.
