When hockey takes Louis Leblanc and Pierre Dagenais to China

An arena in a shopping mall, a “soft, holey” ice rink, in a week when the temperature reached 37 degrees Celsius.

At first glance, this is not a description of an idyllic hockey environment. But Louis Leblanc and Pierre Dagenais don’t give a damn.

The two former Canadiens players are returning from China, more precisely from Guangzhou, a megalopolis where they taught their sport for a week.

“I was talking about it with Pierre, hockey has taken us to many places in the world,” Leblanc recalls on the phone.

The former choice of 1^er tour has indeed played in Slovakia and Switzerland, not to mention that he attended Harvard University, in particular thanks to his hockey talents. Dagenais, for his part, had a career in Finland, Russia and Austria after his time in the NHL.

But what they experienced there was nothing like the exotic experience of teaching hockey to 47 Chinese teens and preteens for a week, four hours a day.

When he returned to school six years ago, Leblanc befriended a guy from the Middle Kingdom at Harvard. “We said we wanted to do something with hockey in China,” he tells The PressMonday, a week after he returned home to Boston. We tried six years ago, but it didn’t work out. He called me back six or 12 months ago to say that a school wanted to do a camp.

The school is the ISA International School, an establishment that also offers golf, fencing and tennis programs, all indications that the target clientele is not making baloney sandwiches for dinner.

“It’s an international school, so these players spoke English,” Leblanc describes. “But it was about a third of the players. The others came from local minor hockey, so we had a translator on the ice who explained and demonstrated the exercises. It was pretty special!”

Approximate installations

As you can see from the photos, the arena where our two friends taught their knowledge was not exactly state-of-the-art.

Gilles Thibaudeau’s sport is indeed far down the list of interests in China. The country comes in at 26^e world ranking for men, at 12^e rank among women. Only 10,786 of China’s 1.4 billion people play hockey, according to data from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) for 2022-2023.

The NHL attempted a tentative breakthrough in 2017 and 2018, by presenting four preseason games there. However, the circuit has not returned since. The cancellation of the presence of the circuit players at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, in the middle of a pandemic, obviously did not help develop the market.

That said, Leblanc sees potential for development. “Over time, I think they’ll be able to build arenas. In Guangzhou alone, there are 25 million people, almost the size of Canada! So it’s a matter of time,” says the Montrealer. “Some Chinese people play sports to have an exit door to study in the United States. If they understand that hockey can lead them to a prep school or a Division I college, it will grow.”

Unlikely friendship

The attentive reader will also have noted that Leblanc and Dagenais have little in common in their careers. While they both wore the Canadiens’ colours, they did so five years apart. Dagenais was stretching out his career in the KHL at the time the Tricolore drafted Leblanc.

It was at Canadiens alumni games that they met “two or three years ago,” Leblanc recalls. Then, when Dagenais’ son, Maddox, was hesitating between the QMJHL and the American path, Leblanc offered to be an advisor.

“Obviously, I was pushing him for college!” Leblanc admits. “He came to visit schools, so I helped him with that. And through that, I developed a great friendship with Pierre. He teaches hockey in Ontario, at World Elite. When his players need advice, Pierre refers them to me.”

And for hockey schools, Dagenais was the ideal complement to Leblanc. “I’m not really in the hockey world anymore,” Leblanc concedes. “Playing hockey and teaching it are two different things. Pierre, we saw it with his guy, his recipe works.”

In the history of the NHL, only two players born in China have been drafted: Kevin He last June, and Andong Song in 2015. We will see in a few years if initiatives like those of Leblanc and Dagenais will help increase the contingent.