Lazar: 'If We Tease You, We Like You' | STALL MATES 

Curtis Lazar considers himself a pretty easy-going teammate to sit next to. He doesn’t have any strange quirks, so he says and isn’t too picky about his space. He, like all players tend to be, has his routine, but it’s nothing too extreme.

“I have my rituals, that I do,” Lazar said, “but honestly nothing over the top where you’re like, you’re a little bit weird.”

He jokes, that when he made his way into an NHL locker room for the first time ‘the TVs were in black and white’, but that just means Lazar has seen some things. He began his career in the 2014-15 season with the Ottawa Senators and played 67 games that season.

“(The locker room) had a good mix of veteran guys and also young guys as well,” shared Lazar, “(Mika) Zibanejad was breaking in, so was (Jean-Gabriel) Pageau, guys like that. So, we had an easy-going group. I think the biggest thing we just experienced was playing in Canada. You hear about it as a 19-year-old kid. You're playing the nation’s capital The Leafs are just down the road, Montreal is close by was pretty cool.”

In his first season, Lazar lived with defenseman Chris Phillips, a legend in Ottawa. Phillips was a family man, 36 at the time, and Lazar was still a teenager at 19. Wide-eyed as a rookie, there was plenty to observe. The first story that stuck out to Lazar was being a 19-year-old, watching 35-year-old tough guy, Chris Neil prepare for a game.

“He’s just a hard-nosed guy, tough as nails, he was my linemate too,” Lazar began. “Just watching him come in, and everything was just kind of to a minute, everything he was doing. His legs are flying in the air, he’s doing aerobics is what it seemed like. Then he’d get on the ice and his game-face would come on.”

And then there was mealtime. There’s a place where, while not in the locker room itself, he made notice of something quite unique, and quite…well, unappealing.

“I think one of the coolest things was like the road spreads, the meals," Lazar began, "Everything that you could possibly imagine. And then there’s Chris Neil, and he’s putting ranch on his pasta. And Erik Karlsson would put ketchup. Really weird stuff like that.

“I was just blown away. You have steak, fish, chicken all right there and then you see a guy putting ranch on his pasta.”

Last season, Lazar, having joined the Devils late in the season, and spending time recovering and rehabbing injuries, was on a different side of the locker room than the one he sits in now. Before, he was closer to the defensemen, at the far end of the locker room entrance. Now, he’s a corner guy, with Dawson Mercer to his left and Tomas Nosek in the perpendicular stall to his right.

“I’m pretty laid back and easygoing,” he said of how he would describe himself as a stall mate. “I like to keep it loose, having fun. I love this spot because you are kind of around everyone. Dawson is great, Nose, I sat next to him in Boston too. He just sticks to himself. I’m easy.”

Lazar is well-traveled in the NHL, with stops between Ottawa, Calgary, Buffalo, Boston, Vancouver and now New Jersey. It means he has a good collection of stories from around the league.

“In Boston, (Patrice) Bergeron, he was like, to a T getting ready,” he said, “He’d stand up and touch everything (in his stall).”

One year, he said, at the Bruins rookie party, Brad Marchand dressed up as Bergeron and imitated his routine. He says that when ‘you really start to notice it’.

In the Devils locker room, he had heard about the way Damon Severson was. The two skate together in the summer back in British Columbia.

“Damon Severson,” Lazar said, “He’d like, everything, he’d go and touch it. I saw it a bit in the summer because we skate together. You hear about it, you’ve got to keep an eye, here and there, and then you’re seeing it full-time here.”

It is all in good fun, to reveal some of these stories and routines from inside the sacred locker room doors. Sure, there are probably plenty we don’t hear about, but, as Lazar explains, it’s all in good fun.

“I think there’s just an understanding in the game of sport, you do whatever you have to," he said, "So, you might get teased about it, but that means we like you.”