Somehow, after all these years, Ron Hainsey remembers with almost exact precision what happened with the Montreal Canadiens – and why he never made it as a top prospect with the organization that drafted him.



“You got two hours?” mused Hainsey before his first trip to Montreal as a member of the Leafs.



Hainsey is now 36 and in the twilight of his NHL career. He’s suited up for more than 900 regular season games, but only 32 of them for the team that made him a first-round pick in the 2000 draft.



The story of his ill-fated Montreal tenure is one of wrong place, wrong time, wrong era. What looked like a drop in the bucket of a long career was actually four years of bouncing around from American Hockey League outposts in Quebec and Hamilton to the NHL and back down again.



Hainsey thought he’d made it with the Habs when he cracked the lineup following his second NHL training camp in 2002. His first camp with the club...