It was just a warm-up. Pretty sure Lemieux thought nothing of the moment as he fired the puck at the net.
But it meant something to Fleury who made a glove stop on one of the greatest players of all time. He took the puck from his glove and hid it in his net. At the end of the practice he picked that puck up and put it in his bag.
It’s now somewhere in his basement in his Montreal area home.
He laughs at the memory.
In between then and now, Fleury has won three Stanley Cups, been to two other finals, was part of a gold medal-winning team at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and won a Vezina Trophy for being the NHL’s best netminder and the William M. Jennings Trophy for the NHL’s netminder with the fewest goals against in the regular season. He’s also been to the playoffs every year since 2006 including the last two seasons with the Minnesota Wild.
When he’s done, he’ll go to the Hall of Fame. Guaranteed.
When he’s done.
There is still so much joie de vivre in Fleury even if he admits he’s a little more conscious of the aches and pains than he was 20 years ago and feels like maybe he’s lost a little of the rambunctiousness that has led to epic pranks over the years.
“I think I used to be always very energetic and a lot of fun, a lot of jump, you know? Now I don’t have it every day,” he said with a laugh. “Some days I feel like a kid, some days you’re sore, some days you’re tired more than I used to be.”
Still, it doesn’t look much different to us.
During a captain’s skate prior to the start of training camp, the veteran netminder flung himself to the ice to do pushups after a puck trickled through him and into the net.
“I had to, I let in a bad goal,” Fleury said during a chat with Wild.com.
The first overall pick of the 2003 draft, Fleury arrived in Pittsburgh in the fall of that same year just hoping to make a good impression. There were some French players on the team including netminders J.S. Aubin and Sebastien Caron who helped smooth the transition.
“They were both great to me, encouraging me, helping me around,” Fleury said.
“I was a little nervous. I didn’t expect to stay. I just wanted to enjoy it and do the best I could to leave a good impression,” he said. “I think there’s lots to come with being picked first you want to do well and not make them regret it.”
“All that together I still remember having a lot of fun. The game, the pace was so fast and everybody was good and shooting hard. I thought I really loved the challenge every day,” Fleury said.
Fleury stuck with the big club for some games during that rookie season – “we weren’t winning many games,” Fleury recalled - and then went to the World Junior Championships with Canada in Finland. He went back to his team in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and he played in the AHL playoffs.
The NHL lockout was the following season and then post-lockout in 2005-06 he was teamed up with veteran Jocelyn Thibault in goal for a Penguins team on the cusp of something special including back-to-back runs to the Stanley Cup final in 2008 and 2009.
Fleury remembers Thibault as the consummate teammate and pro. Even as Fleury began to play more and more games, Thibault’s support of Fleury, his friendship, never wavered.
It is a dynamic that came full circle last season as Filip Gustavsson arrived in Minnesota and turned in a spectacular season and was the starter for five of the six games against Dallas in the first round.
Thibault, who is currently the executive director of Hockey Quebec, isn’t surprised at Fleury’s career arc. From the very beginning Fleury was always about the team.
”Marc-Andre is one of the greatest people you could meet. We’ll start with that,” Thibault said. “He’s always been so humble.”
“He’s a competitor. He wouldn’t have accomplished everything he has if he wasn’t a great competitor,” Thibault said. “He was just a great kid. Just a great person. So talented. He had all the tools.”
Those tools, both physical and mental, remain very much part of the present.
“As a goaltender, one of the greatest things you have to learn and you have to understand, you have to be a good teammate,” Thibault said. “Marc-Andre has been a very good teammate, an outstanding teammate, from the very beginning.”
So much time has passed. Yet in so many ways so little has changed. That’s why this training camp in St. Paul, two decades after that first one, isn’t about nostalgia or reminiscing or anything that smacks of a swan song.
He’ll turn 39 in November. He’s in the final year of his current deal. At some point early in the season he’ll pass iconic netminder Patrick Roy and move into second all-time in wins in the NHL.
With Gustavsson’s successes last season and a new three-year deal, plus the presence of elite goaltending prospect Jesper Wallstedt learning the craft in Iowa with the Wild’s American Hockey League affiliate, the future in goal looks rosy for the Wild.
But that’s the future. And in many ways the future is now for a Wild team hungry for a long playoff run.
Fleury hopes very much to be part of that future, of that ascension. Now.
The rest, the future beyond April or May or even June, well, that’s another story.
“I’m very aware that it could be it,” Fleury said. “And I think I’ll try to enjoy it as much as I can if it is.”
“But I don’t want to speculate,” he adds quickly. “I don’t know. Honestly, right? I don’t know what will happen. That’s why I want to give it time.”
The relationship between GM Bill Guerin and Fleury is among the most unique in hockey.
Guerin joined the Penguins for their playoff run in 2009 and won his second Stanley Cup as a player with Fleury sealing the win with a spectacular save on Nicklas Lidstrom in the waning seconds of Game 7. Guerin would go on to win two more as an executive with the Penguins in 2016 and 2017. Fleury was part of those teams.
Then, as GM of the Wild, Guerin acquired Fleury and extended him with a two-year deal that will expire at the end of this season.
When Guerin joined the Penguins, he was at or near the point in his career that Fleury is at in his. So Guerin gets it. And he doesn’t need to know what Fleury’s plans are.
“You know what? Right now I want him to continue to do what he’s doing. Just be a player and play. And just perform to the highest level that he can,” Guerin said. “We’ll cross those bridges when we get to them. Just be you. He’s been that for 20 years now in this league. And it’s paid off for him. I don’t want him to stop now. That’s all I expect.”
Fleury is a foundational part of the team Guerin has built in Minnesota. He added another in three-time Stanley Cup winner Pat Maroon in the off-season. Others have been to finals and won internationally. Those are important pieces in Guerin’s mind.
“They’ve got something serious to offer,” Guerin said.
“He’s still competitive,” the GM said of Fleury. “He still keeps himself in great shape so he can play. All these things. It’s all part of why we brought him here.”
It’s natural to wonder about Fleury’s future and part of it is that he is so well-regarded that if this is ‘it’ then it feels like there should be a sense of occasion about all of it.
But, there’s no blueprint for how you exit a game you have loved and that has loved you back, for the most part, for two decades.
Some players do the farewell tour, announce the end before the end and savor it that way.
Fleury’s plan is to play as much as he can and savor the moments he has known so well, the wins, the competition, the challenge.
“I feel like I’m still playing. I still want to do good and win games,” he said. “My goal is always trying to win the next game, win the next one. Once I’m done then maybe I’ll look back a bit more and see where things fall.”
And make no mistake that quest for the next win, the next stop, remains foremost in Fleury’s mind.
“Yeah. Definitely. It’s always why I played for. I don’t think I’ve had the best stats throughout my career compared to other guys. But always in my head it was always about the win, it didn’t matter how many go in just stop the next one, try to get the win,” he said.
He grins as he describes that feeling of getting a win in a league that has become increasingly competitive.
“I do compete. I love the challenge. Every night. Every team is good, the parity is so good around the league. There’s no walk in the park. Maybe earlier in my career sometimes there was a little gap between the bottom and the top,” he said. “Every night it’s hard fought two points it feels good. It feels good inside when you get those.”
So, no farewell tour. No sentimental glide through the next 82 games and whatever the playoffs bring.
Nope, same grind, same grin, same Marc-Andre Fleury.
“I told myself just I’ll wait to the end of the season. I want to go through the season and see how it feels, see how mentally I am,” he said. “See if I still stop the puck. I don’t know. I just want to give myself the season and make the decision at the end so that way I don’t question every goal that goes in and say ah, am I too old, too slow. I don’t want to be thinking that way or people asking me all the time.”
