Wolves

     

    Just after Game Seven against the Lighting in the first round of the post-season, the Montreal Canadiens were in their dressing room, happy and exhausted. The Habs had come in as underdogs against the playoff-hardened Bolts and the series was a tight-checking slog. Most of the players were sitting in their stalls getting undressed when coach Martin St.Louis walked in. The room was quiet as he began his postgame speech. That didn't last long. Channeling Leonardo DiCaprio from the Wolf of Wall Street, he injected a dose of his own joy and passion into the guys in the room.

    It was an appropriate choice. 

    "I just feel like they’re a pack, they’re so together," St.Louis said just before the playoffs. "They just love each other. They got each other’s backs. They celebrate everyone. It’s a very selfless group."

    "Marty talks about having a pack mentality, so wolf’s a big theme," says captain Nick Suzuki. That theme inspired him to buy the now-infamous wolf head hat the players award to each win's MVP.

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    Ten years ago, Jeff Gorton was general manager of the New York Rangers. St.Louis was newly retired from the team, but Gorton thought he had the makings of a future coach and wanted to keep him around. He offered St.Louis the head coaching job of the Rangers AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack. St.Louis declined. Hartford didn't appeal to him, but the "wolf pack" idea certainly did. The pack mentality concept underpins his coaching philosophy. 

    Shane Mahoney has been a wildlife biologist for decades, and he knows pack behaviour intimately.

    "So the pack becomes essentially an extended family," he explains. "It's the pups of previous years and the pups of this year and so on that work together as a cooperative unit. So they have this very strong genetic tie but they also have an extraordinary range of cooperative behaviour and communication abilities."

    The pups of previous years...cooperative behaviour...communication. Sound familiar?

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    "This communication allows wolves to capture prey species that are much larger than themselves and which would be just impossible for a single wolf to to kill," Mahoney continues. "The wolf pack is so successful because it is so coordinated. They have enormous intelligence and they have developed these extraordinary behaviors for cohesion, cooperative behavior and also hierarchies."

    Just like a hockey team, the wolf pack has individuals that play different roles within the group.

    "Some of the of the wolves tend to be the individuals that may do more of the hard-on attacking when they finally close in on prey," Mahoney says. "Because with the extended family structure, you have some that are small in that given year, right? They were only born in that year. They don't have the size, the body mass and so on to be the real attack animals. But they can harry. they can chase, they can wear down the prey."

    "You also have the mature animals that are much more capable in terms of dispatching the prey through chokeholds or whatever other kind of particular killing technique that they are actually using. So there's no question that there is a hierarchy of behavior and different roles played by the wolves. The more experienced, larger bodied, more capable wolves are at the front and centre of the actual physical engagement with the prey"

    Wolf packs don't just communicate and cooperate while hunting, either. Just like a hockey team should, they also defend together. 

     "Of course the pack defends itself as a pack and it defends just as importantly, its prey as a pack," Mahoney says. "And there's just not that many other animals that are really capable of stealing prey from a wolf."

    "You have this really quite extraordinary kind of emotional and physical link that we could call loyalty. We could call it many things, but the truth of the matter is they stick together. They work together, they fight together and essentially they live entirely like a little moving community across the landscape. In terms of the big fundamental aspects of behaviour and capacities like intelligence or empathy, wolves are a lot like us."

    And we are a lot like them.

    Shane Mahoney calls the Canadiens a wolf pack on skates. Turns out Marty St.Louis doesn't just know hockey. He understands nature as well.