PSR: On The Clock:
John Chabot

John Chabot was selected by the Montreal Canadiens in the second round of the 1980 NHL Entry Draft, 40th overall. He played his major junior hockey in Hull and Sherbrooke before turning pro. Chabot got his first taste of NHL action in 1983-84, playing 56 games with the Canadiens, scoring 18 goals and 43 points. Midway through the following season, he was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins where he played for three years before joining the Detroit Red Wings. He remained in the Red Wings' organization until 1991 when he joined the Canadian National Team, suiting up for eight games. With his NHL career at a standstill, Chabot wanted to continue playing hockey at an elite level, so he joined the Berlin Prussians of the German League in 1992. He continued to play pro hockey in Germany with the Berlin Polar Bears through the 2000-01 season. Chabot is now an assistant coach with the Gatineau Olympiques of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. PSR’s George Von Benko caught up with Chabot when he returned to Pittsburgh for the first time in 18 years in August for the Penguins Alumni Golf outing.

PSR: Did you enjoy your time playing in Pittsburgh?

Chabot: Very much so. I think you don’t appreciate Pittsburgh unless you’ve played here, unless you’ve spent some time here. Coming in as a visiting player you don’t get a chance to see the suburbs and you don’t get a chance to meet the people, but when you’ve lived here a couple of years and you notice the guys who have lived here and come back and lived after their careers are over. It doesn’t happen very often where a player will leave his hometown and go to an American city, but the people are so friendly and we saw people we hadn’t seen in 18 years and it was like we never left.

PSR: During your career, it seemed as if you were always at the wrong place at the wrong time in the NHL.

JC: It seems that way - I lost four times in the semi-finals and every time I got traded, a couple of years later the team won the Stanley Cup. What I look at more from that is that in Montreal I got traded to come here and Montreal won the cup the next year. Detroit was the same way; we were right on the cusp a couple of times. And I was here just before Lemieux came in. Not so much wrong place wrong time, but just in a situation where when the team was being built I was there, but when it came down to winning and getting over the edge I had left.

PSR: What was it like playing overseas?

JC: I had a fun career. What Europe did for me was re-energize my love for the game. Playing here sometimes is hard on the players. Sometimes if you’re a top eight player on a team you can play the game like it’s supposed to be played. If you’re a bottom eight player you are always worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow. There were a couple of seasons here where I was top eight and a couple of seasons where I wasn’t top eight. The years in the bottom eight tend to sap your love and take away why you’re playing the game, and going overseas to Europe gave me that back. You got paid well, and the way I looked at it you got paid to see the world.

PSR: You’ve coached against Penguins’ number one pick Sidney Crosby. Tell us about Sidney Crosby.

JC: Sidney Crosby is going to be more of a Peter Forsberg type of player. He’s not going to dazzle you with the one-on-one, end-to-end things, but he’s going to do all those small things that make a hockey player a hockey player. It’s not the big things he does, it’s all the small things he does that impressed me so much. As far as his approach to the game and the level he’s playing at, the small things set him apart. I think coming here to Pittsburgh is what is going to make him such a good player.

PSR: What will it mean for Crosby to play with Mario Lemieux?

JC: There is not any better place that he could have come right now. The fact that Mario came in and faced the exact same circumstances that Sidney’s facing - maybe not as extreme when the league was going to take the team away or the team was going to move - but Crosby’s got a guy here to lean on and Mario’s got that expertise to pass on down. I’m sure at some point in time he was looking toward Jagr as that guy, but now he’s got a Canadian kid who lives and dies the game. Just the willingness of him to absorb the information Mario’s going to give him, on and off the ice, is going to be huge. Not just for him, but for the team itself. It will give them that Montreal Canadiens feel where they’re passing the torch down from player to player and you don’t get that chance very often.