Amerks' singing goalie helping team in push for playoff bid

Before this Rochester Amerks season began, goaltender Malcolm Subban’s most memorable moment since he joined the Buffalo Sabres organization 15 months ago had nothing at all to do with hockey.

On the final day of the Sabres 2021-22 season, Subban was sidelined with a wrist injury, but he still managed to make his way to the ice surface at KeyBank Center wearing his No. 47 jersey. In front of more 16,000 fans, his Sabres teammates and his former Chicago Blackhawks teammates, Subban sang the national anthem.

“Yeah, that was pretty cool,” said Subban, who has spent this entire season as the No. 1 goalie for the Amerks. “Definitely a moment I’ll never forget.”

Facing Tampa Bay Lightning superstars Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos as he did the last time he played in an NHL game for Buffalo back in January 2022 paled in comparison to the nerves he felt before he took the microphone in his hands the night of April 29, 2022.

“Obviously it was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life,” he said Sunday night after he made 19 saves to help lead the Amerks to a 5-2 victory over Cleveland which completed a huge three-win weekend.

Subban has always loved music and he routinely sings whether he’s at home, in his car, or in the locker room. Eventually, after he came to the Sabres in a December 2021 trade from Chicago, his new teammates started egging him on to sing the anthem before a game.

“I was always singing around the room for fun and guys were making jokes about it and then it just started slowly coming to a possibility of me signing the anthem,” he said. “I was really against it the whole time and then got a lot of support from the players and then support from the staff. It wasn’t like planned out for weeks or anything, it was kind of just a last-minute thing.”

What made Subban belting out the anthem that night so special, besides the huge smiling faces of the Sabres and Blackhawks and all of them banging their sticks on the ice or against the boards when he finished, plus the huge roar he received from the fans, was that at one point it would have seemed impossible for it to happen.

Back in 2016 when he was in his fourth season with the AHL’s Providence Bruins, he was struck in the throat by a shot in pregame warmups and both of his vocal cords were badly damaged.

“I lost my voice for like a month and they told me that I’d never … the quote unquote was from the doctor, ‘I hope you don’t have plans on a singing career,’” Subban said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t but I do sing a lot.’ I was happy that it came back enough to be able to sing the anthem.”

It took patience for Subban to recapture his singing voice, the same kind of patience he has needed in his pursuit of becoming an NHL team’s starting goalie.

Subban was Boston’s first-round pick in the 2012 draft, but he wound up playing only one game for the Bruins during his four-year association with the organization. He was a solid AHL goalie, playing 127 games for Providence with a 2.40 goals-against average and a .917 save percentage, but the Bruins waived him in 2017 and the expansion Vegas Golden Knights signed him.

He spent parts of three seasons in the desert, playing a total of 63 NHL games and posting a 2.92 GAA and a .901 save percentage as the primary backup to Marc-Andre Fleury. He welcomed a trade to Chicago in February 2020 because he thought he’d get a legit shot to start, only to have the NHL season shut down by COVID a month later.

He then started 14 games for the Blackhawks in 2020-21 before being dealt to Buffalo where, once again, he envisioned an opportunity on a Sabres team that was having all kinds of difficulty in net. Instead, he played just four games due to injuries.

This year, there’s a goalie crunch in Buffalo with Craig Anderson, Eric Comrie and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen vying for playing time so Subban has been in Rochester for the duration where he emerged as the Amerks top goalie. He has appeared in 33 games - just two fewer than his professional career high of 35 for Providence in 2014-15 - and has a record of 17-13-3, a 2.97 GAA, and a .903 save percentage.

“This is probably his first year being a No. 1, and it’s probably been six, seven, eight years since he’s been a real No. 1,” Amerks coach Seth Appert said. “He’s been either a No. 2 in the NHL or was injured or it was COVID years and his number of games in those years are really limited.”

Now 29, Subban has become a leader in the locker room as well as on the ice and what Appert loves about him is that he’s not a rah-rah guy, he just grinds and lets his work ethic set the example for his teammates, almost all of whom are younger.

“I like that his answer to struggle is work,” Appert said. “It’s not woe is me, it’s not excuses, it’s not ‘I want to know what happened here.’ It’s never the defense. It’s work. He just keeps working. That’s such a great trait to have.”

Thanks to their three straight victories, the Amerks are in an ever-strengthening position to clinch an AHL North Division playoff berth. With nine games remaining they’re in fourth place (the top five teams qualify) with 69 points, seven more than sixth-place Laval and Belleville. Also, they’re just two points behind second-place Utica and after they play fifth-place Cleveland at home Wednesday night, they have a big home-and-home set with Utica Friday and Saturday.

“I’ve said it a couple of times, you have a good week and you’re close to second, you have a bad week and you’re close to seventh,” Appert said. “We had a good week, but let’s just leave it at that. We know that there’s a lot of battle ahead.”

And while Michael Houser has given the Amerks a strong season in net as well, it will be Subban leading the Amerks into that battle to clinch a berth and then hopefully make a run in the Calder Cup playoffs.

“I’ve been finding consistency in my game, and I think it’s felt good,” Subban said. “I haven’t played much in my pro career, this is the most minutes I’ve played so definitely an adjustment, but in a good way. Just learning what it is to be a starter again and play all those minutes and how to maintain my body and stuff like that, trying to get my game where it needs to be and be ready for whenever another (NHL) opportunity comes.”

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana.To subscribe to Sal's newsletter, Bills Blast, which will come out every Friday during the offseason, please follow this link: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Malcolm Subban singing quite a tune as Rochester American goalie