Zak Kassian smashed his truck in front of my home.bloodied and dazed on his way to hospital.get well soon!!!! pic.twitter.com/QHPIZTD1XJ — steve petrenko (@stevenp57) October 4, 2015

The Vancouver Canucks got tired of waiting for Zack Kassian to figure it out maturity wise, which is partly why they paid a small premium – in the form of a fifth-round draft pick – to rid themselves of a headache this past summer.

Now, following an uninspired performance in the preseason, the 24-year-old forward finds himself in yet another spot of hot water in Montreal, this one more serious than anything that occurred during his Canucks tenure, following a car crash this weekend.

The accident left Kassian injured: he sustained a left foot fracture and broke his nose during the accident.

He also caught the ire of his new general manager Marc Bergevin, who explicitly called out Kassian’s character in an extraordinary press conference on Monday.

“I do not have all the information, but it is disappointing to say the least,” said Bergevin, via Sportsnet.ca. “You have to be respectful. You’re lucky to be hockey players.”

“I’m a firm believer in character, and that’s really a lack of character and judgment on his part.”

The line on character is telling, but it’s arguably not even the harshest comment Bergevin had for his new forward.

“Perfection is not part of this world,” Bergevin continued addressing Kassian’s situation, according to CTV Montreal’s Brian Wilde. “but if mistakes keep happening then maybe there’s a pattern here.

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Finally, he dropped this line, which would suggest that Kassian may already be out of rope with the Canadiens:

“I don’t know how many wake up calls you get” – Marc Bergevin when asked if this could be a wake up call for Zack Kassian. — Аrpon Basu (@ArponBasu) October 5, 2015

Montreal police have told the media that Kassian wasn’t driving at the time, but there’s some interesting and ominous tweets out there regarding his situation that leave us wondering what’s really going on here. Like this one, for example, from TSN’s Bob McKenzie:

Kassian’s status in MTL may be more complicated than just the extent of his injuries. But, for now, we will just have to wait and see. — Bob McKenzie (@TSNBobMcKenzie) October 5, 2015

Combine the implication evident from McKenzie’s tweet with Bergevin’s insistence that he’s lacking all of the information, and there’s reason to believe there may be more than meets the eye here, so stay tuned.

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As for Kassian, it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s a troubled young man. The talent is there and it’s evident, it always was for Canucks fans, but we’re at a point where two separate NHL teams have called him out publicly as needing to grow up, and now a third is publicly questioning his character. That has to be extremely concerning.

And it’s not just concerning for his future as an NHL player, it’s concerning for his future as a human person. We don’t know what happened over the weekend in that truck, but it sure seems like a young man put himself in a dangerous situation.

Which is why the applauding of Canucks fans in some corners of the internet – “looks like the Canucks knew what they were doing dealing Kassian this summer, eh?” – at the moment strikes me as a bit distasteful. We don’t know the full situation and we don’t know what sort of mental state Kassian was in at the time, or has been in for a while.

UPDATE: We do, however, know that Kassian has been placed in Stage 2 of the Substance Abuse Program and has been suspended without pay:

NHL/NHLPA announce Zack Kassian placed on Stage 2 of Substance Abuse program. Suspended without pay until cleared by doctors — Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) October 5, 2015

We also know is that professional hockey players, especially those that play a particularly physical, on-the-edge brand, are vulnerable to depression and substance abuse and anxiety issues. Surely we’ve seen too many stories end tragically to be applauding a team for trading a player that seems to have some personal issues…

Let’s show some compassion and let’s look past the laundry a particular player wears. Surely we can all hope that Kassian gets himself sorted out, and not because we want him to succeed as an NHL player or because we want the Canucks to have ‘won’ or ‘lost’ a particular hockey trade, but because he’s a human being who seems to be struggling at the moment.

Clearly the most important thing now is that Kassian gets better. Here’s hoping.





