In his career as a hockey coach, Pascal Vincent has already seen a player refuse the title of captain that had just been offered to him. Such a scenario did not come close to repeating itself with the Laval Rocket with Lucas Condotta.

A week after Condotta’s selection, Vincent was invited on Thursday morning to explain in depth the process that led to his decision. And that’s when he told the anecdote that, at first glance, may surprise.

Vincent did so by avoiding giving too many details, including the name of the player or the team in question. He did not even want to identify the year of the anecdote.

“The player] said, ‘I don’t want that responsibility. I appreciate the honor, but I don’t want to have it,'” Vincent said, while resisting urgent requests from reporters surrounding him to reveal more information related to the story.

“That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to make him captain. Because he’s really honest with himself. Basically, he was a captain without wearing the ‘C’. He said ‘I don’t need that to be a leader. Give it to someone else and I’ll help the captain,’” Vincent added, while specifying that the player in question didn’t even wear the letter ‘A’.

In Condotta’s case, the answer – positive – was not long in coming, although Vincent insisted a little that the Ontario forward give himself a day to think about it.

Condotta, who replaces Gabriel Bourque in that role, was still visibly honoured when he was asked about it Thursday at noon, after the Rocket’s off-ice practice at Place Bell.

In fact, he acknowledged that it was a role that appealed to him when he realized it might be available.

“With the season coming up, I knew ‘Bourky’ was gone. I wore an ‘A’ last year and I felt like I was ready to take over as captain. But you don’t know until camp starts. There’s a lot of new players, new elements. Of course, I’ve been here longer than a lot of people,” Condotta said.

“I was so happy when Pascal told me that this was the direction the team was going. I’m definitely very grateful. It’s a great honor.”

Before deciding that Condotta would be his man, Vincent could have put on Columbo’s raincoat or Sherlock Holmes’s hat, so much did he embark on a sort of mini-investigation.

“I asked a lot of questions to a lot of people since the first day I arrived. I talked to the equipment guys, I talked to the medical staff, I talked to the assistant coaches, I talked to people who were here in the past, I talked to some players, I talked to people at the Canadiens who knew the whole team well. There was one name that kept coming up; it was him,” listed Vincent, who says he enjoys announcing “good news” like this.

Vincent said Condotta’s maturity is one of the things about his personality that stood out the most from all the comments he heard. That and the fact that he seems to listen to his teammates.

“He’s a guy who’s very inclusive, so he brings people in, and I’m not just talking about on the ice. He’s someone who’s driven to help people,” said the Rocket head coach, before talking about his work ethic and attention to detail.

Also, the fact that Condotta had already been a captain, first in the Ontario Junior Hockey League (OJHL) and then at the American university level, also weighed heavily in the balance.

“We’ve had people talk to his former coaches, and guys have told me he’s the best captain they’ve ever had in their lives. There’s a bunch of factors that made it so that it was him, and it was really obvious that it was him.”

All that was left for Vincent was to sit down with Condotta and offer him the job. He did so by approaching him with a question.

“The first question I asked him was, ‘If I wanted to make you captain, why would I make you captain?’ And everything I just said, he said the exact same things. He knows himself very, very well as a person,” Vincent mentioned.

“From there, we sat down. I told him, ‘if you want to have it, think about it. If tomorrow you accept the role, you accept it,'” Vincent also recounted.

“He already knows the role pretty well. I don’t need to put a little more on his shoulders,” Vincent added.

Condotta believes that in his role as captain, he must lead by example and always be the one who works the hardest. “Making your teammates better, in a way; I think that’s what good captains do.”

Condotta says he doesn’t have a role model for a captain, although he does say there is a former player he has a lot of respect for.

“I’m fortunate enough to know Darcy Tucker, the way he approaches games,” Condotta said.

And how did the two men meet? “It’s a long story, but he’s actually my wife’s father. He’s fantastic.”