For all his flashiness, Subban professes not to know what “polarizing” means. Illustration by Owen Freeman

In late September, several weeks after signing a long-term deal that gave him the third-highest average annual salary in the National Hockey League, P. K. Subban went shopping for a house. Subban, a twenty-five-year-old defenseman for the Montreal Canadiens, grew up in a diverse Toronto neighborhood called Rexdale. For the first several years of his pro career, he rented apartments, either in the tourist district of Old Montreal or in a hotel downtown, while maintaining a condo back in Toronto, to which he returned each summer for training. Now his mother, Maria, a bank officer, was encouraging him to establish roots in his adoptive city. “It’s too expensive to rent,” she said. Subban’s new contract was for eight years and seventy-two million dollars. He rode shotgun in a gray Honda sedan while his friend Marwan Ismail, a real-estate agent, drove up the hill into Westmount, a former bastion of old Anglo money. “We’re nine minutes away,” Ismail said, alluding to the Bell Centre, where the Canadiens play. “It’s—how you’d call?—a conservative area. They have their own rules, they have their own guidelines, they don’t like people coming in and saying, ‘Yeah, we want to do this. I don’t care about the architecture.’ No, no. They preserve things—out of respect for all the other units.” Subban seemed pleased. “Everything is old, but it’s beautiful,” he said.

Subban is one of the world’s most thrilling athletes, someone who, like Roger Federer, or Kevin Durant, or Yasiel Puig, awes less because of the results he achieves than because of the way he achieves them—kinetic charisma, approaching genius. But a hockey preservationist he is not. Within the context of his sport’s culture, he is more like a gaudy mansion, with a waterslide out back and a cigarette boat parked in the driveway leaking gas. He “craves attention,” as Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie turned author and liberal politician, put it last spring, during a playoff run in which Subban performed brilliantly and was reaffirmed as perhaps the “most polarizing” player in the game, to quote Canada’s National Post. (Earlier in the season, Sports Illustrated had identified him as hockey’s “most hated” player.) He has a reputation for running his mouth—chirping, in rinkspeak—and not long ago he gave an interview on a popular French-language TV show in which he boasted of using pregame café as ammunition for weaponized flatulence on the ice. He peacocks after scoring goals and brings a debatably excessive exuberance to the serious business of bodychecking. He seems to regard the national anthem as an opportunity for limbering up, if not boiling his blood. Sometimes people—even well-meaning people, not intending it as a criticism, exactly—say that he reminds them of a basketball player.

A fair amount of this must be attributed to his appearance. Subban’s parents were born in the Caribbean, and it would be difficult not to notice No. 76 even if he were a middling skater with a case of lockjaw. There are thirty teams in the N.H.L., and eighteen black players. Yet only Subban, among them, is regularly booed by opposing fans when he touches the puck—a shaming honor reserved for a handful of villains in any given hockey season. He is not the sport’s first black star. Grant Fuhr, who is biracial and was raised by adoptive white parents in Alberta, played goalie for the Edmonton Oilers dynasty in the nineteen-eighties. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003. Jarome Iginla, whose father was born in Nigeria, is now playing in his eighteenth N.H.L. season, and has scored five hundred and sixty-four goals, the second-most among active players. A rugged forward, Iginla has the straight-ahead determination of a slot-hockey player, and is typically praised for his classy strain of truculence. Unlike Subban, he has never affected the pose of an archer while on the ice (shooting the lights out), nor given himself a nickname like the Subbanator.

“Look at the stonework on that house!” Subban said, pointing out a stately Victorian, as the Honda proceeded deeper into Westmount, where most of the homes are tightly packed, on small lots, taking advantage of the hillside views. “This is probably the wealthiest neighborhood in Montreal,” he went on. “In Toronto, there’s Post Road, or the Bridle Path, where Prince used to live. You’re talking completely flat land, two acres, and ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air.’ That’s the type of neighborhood you’re looking at in Toronto.” Subban could now afford to live among Molsons and Bronfmans—Montreal Brahmins—and so he would. But, mindful of his middle-class upbringing, he was starting small—“Things change, you never know, maybe you get a girlfriend,” he said—and he’d budgeted about a sixth of his annual salary for his search.

Subban and Ismail parked on a downward slope, outside a two-story brick house that had been built in 1925, and were met by a sales agent named Marie Sicotte. Subban wore dark jeans and a slim-fitting cardigan, which emphasized his stocky build. He is listed at six feet, which seems generous, and two hundred and fourteen pounds, which sounds about right. He has a broad face, and was sprouting a neck beard, a complement to a slightly nerdy demeanor. It’s not hard to imagine how Subban’s chirping might agitate a toothless Saskatchewanian bruiser. His voice remains boyish: nasal and scratchy. There is no trace of menace in it.

“It’s not very big, but it’s got it all,” Sicotte said, leading them inside. “It’s a traditional house.” There were three working fireplaces, and a private garden, with a barbecue connected directly to the gas line. There was even a garage—not a given in Westmount—although Ismail wondered aloud, skeptically, whether it was large enough to accommodate Subban’s truck.

On the second floor, Subban walked into a wood-panelled study, with a Murphy bed and a large flat-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall, and asked, “Is this, like, a man cave, or what?”

“You can make that lighter, paint it, make it more funky,” Sicotte said, referring to the panelling.

“No, I like the wood,” he said, bringing his hand to his chin.

“The gentleman’s room,” Ismail suggested.

Down in the basement, which had been renovated to include a wet bar and a guest bedroom, Sicotte did her best to distract Subban from the low-hanging pipes and gestured with each hand, in succession, at a couple of luxuries: “Here you have your walk-in closet, and then here’s another, you have your cedar closet.”

“Oh, cedar,” Subban said, turning to Ismail, with a wink. “You know why that’s important? For your furs.”

Sicotte flashed a look of amused surprise. “Do you have a lot of fur coats?”

“I got a couple,” Subban said. “I got some fur.”

Subban has spoken in interviews of his conscious emulation of Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan, a list that is notable for its absence of hockey players. He is a good friend of Novak Djokovic, the tennis star, and mentioned to me that they have talked idly about planning a joint vacation trip. Last summer, he visited Monte Carlo, and ran into Magic Johnson, who tweeted a photo of the two of them posing together in front of yachts. When Subban returned to Canada, he appeared onstage at an Alzheimer’s benefit with the actor Seth Rogen, a British Columbian who was hoping to fulfill a lifelong dream of drinking from the Stanley Cup. Subban supplied the pitchers of beer, and even slurped up Rogen’s remains—using a straw, so as not to anger the hockey gods, who are presumed to smite those players who dare to touch the Cup before winning it. This was borderline sacrilege even so, and a columnist for The Hockey News was moved to write a blog post arguing, contra the chuckleheads on Twitter, that this was “a complete nontroversy.” The trophy was a replica.