BOSTON — It’s becoming more and more clear that P.K. Subban is someone who relishes the opportunity to be the bad guy in opposing rinks, especially if that rink is TD Garden.
When he’s in town with the Canadiens to play the Bruins, Subban turns into the NHL’s version of the bad guy in a professional wrestling match, or a heel as it’s called in the business.
And while Subban wasn’t grabbing a steel chair from underneath the rink Sunday night, the Montreal defenseman was once again under the skin of Bruins forward Brad Marchand. The two actually dropped the gloves last season on Oct. 27 at the Garden, and they came close again Sunday night. They got tangled up in the neutral zone in the second period of the Canadiens’ 4-3 win, and they looked ready to drop the gloves and go again. But nothing came of it.
Apparently it wasn’t the only time Subban came close to getting into it with a Bruins player.
“Three or four guys asked to fight him, and he’s running scared from [Nathan Horton],” Marchand said after the game. “But he comes after the smallest guy on the team. It just shows you what kind of character they have there.”
Marchand wasn’t alone in his criticism of Subban. Bruins coach Claude Julien went on a tirade during his postgame news conference, blasting the Canadiens for “embellishing,” and he mentioned Subban by name.
“It’s about the game and the embellishment embarrasses our game and we need to be better,” Julien said, before turning his focus solely to Subban. “It’s pretty obvious when P.K. gets hit and throws himself into the glass and hold his head. You know what? If we start calling those for embellishment, maybe teams stop doing it. Until we take charge of that, it’s going to be an issue.”
