The phrase “In the face of these challenges, Richard must decide who exactly he is playing for” means that he has to decide if he is playing for the Montreal Canadiens or the Francophone population. He would have to think of this because of the way the Anglophone players and coaches treated him and his fellow Francophone teammates.
The Anglophone players such as Lycoe did not get punished as severely as Richard did which made Richard very mad. This, frankly, was unfair. For one of the many fights Lycoe and Richard had, Lycoe had started the brawl and lead Richard into fighting, but, because Richard was French, he got more severely punished than Lycoe. That was a huge issue for Richard as he told Mr. Irvin, his coach, but there was nothing he could do about it because Richard was a Francophone and had no influence on the head of the NHL punishment department.
Mr. Irvin, his coach, also contributed to the discrimination. He only spoke in English to all the players being fully aware that there were quite a few players who were Francophone. This shows favouritism towards the Anglophone players as Irvin almost completely ignore the Francophone players off the ice. At the end of the movie, however, Irvin had read a congratulations speech in both French and English.
In one of Richards’s games, he had gotten into another fight with Lycoe and he had hit an official. When Mr. Campbell, the head of the NHL, had seen this, he suspended Richard for not only 2-3 games, but for the