Todd Bertuzzi smiled. And anyone who saw it at Monday’s press conference smiled, too, because it was something no one witnessed during Bertuzzi’s 7½ seasons with the Vancouver Canucks.

This was not the cocky smirk through broken teeth or menacing grin Bertuzzi displayed for the media as a player in Vancouver, where he wore a surly disguise so naturally and for so long he eventually forgot how to remove it.

Asked Monday about coaching 15-year-old son Tag’s minor hockey team in Detroit, Bertuzzi, who as a player was nearly as deficient defensively as he was formidable offensively, responded with an unconscious, eyes-crinkling, dazzling, contagious smile.

“It might shock you, but I’m actually a 200-foot coach,” Bertuzzi said, losing his composure as he sat beside old friends and linemates Markus Naslund and Brendan Morrison. “I even have a tough time saying it.”

In a quiet moment later, when asked about that joyous smile, Bertuzzi tried on another mask.

“Well, I have new teeth,” he quipped.

Then he paused, and said: “I can tell you this: I took it too seriously here in Vancouver. With the amount of pressure, being a Canadian, the amount of scrutiny and amount of everyday work it took to be a professional athlete here, it took a toll on me. We were young. I wasn’t prepared for anything.

“I was just never comfortable with anything. I’ve always been a closed-in person and the only people who really knew me were my teammates and my family. It became an ongoing thing here that I was a certain kind of person, and it took on its own life. Truth be told, it helped me in some ways. But it also took away from me in others.”

Bertuzzi had to be convinced to return to Vancouver for Monday’s ceremony honouring the West Coast Express — the forward line that included Naslund and Morrison and for four years at the start of this century was about the best in the National Hockey League.

Naslund’s No. 19 was retired to the rafters at Rogers Arena in 2010 when he hadn’t yet been passed by Hank and Danny Sedin as the Canucks’ all-time leading scorer. Brendan Morrison, the centre from Pitt Meadows, was one of the most successful B.C. players in a Canuck uniform. But the star on Monday was always going to be Bertuzzi, the 40-year-old from Sudbury, Ont., who is one of the most complicated and provocative figures in Canuck history.

He was both worshipped and reviled, an immensely talented power forward who scored 46 goals in 2002-03 and essentially self-destructed the next season when his sucker-punch ended Steve Moore’s career and did irreparable harm to Bertuzzi’s.

The winger was a pariah by the time former general manager Dave Nonis traded him to the Florida Panthers in 2006 for Roberto Luongo in a spectacularly one-sided deal.

Bertuzzi bounced between four teams in two seasons before stabilizing his career in Detroit, where he finished it with the Red Wings in 2014 after 1,159 NHL games.

His legal battle with Moore, who started low and finished high in his $68-million lawsuit, dragged on for a decade and ensnared the Canucks as co-defendants.