The Canadiens have come a good distance — they usually have an extended strategy to go.
Not often does one temporary stretch in an extended season sum up a workforce’s present standing just like the journey from Salt Lake Metropolis to Las Vegas to Denver final week, when Martin St. Louis’s enjoyable bunch went from kings of the highway to roadkill between Wednesday and Saturday.
First, a good,
powerful 4-3 win over the Utah Mammoth
to get the journey off to a superb begin. Then a totally shocking 4-1 thumping of the Vegas Golden Knights, theoretically one of many real Stanley Cup contenders this season, in what was simply Samuel Montembeault’s finest recreation since final spring.
And simply when the delusions of grandeur begin to set in, a royal butt-kicking by the hands of the Colorado Avalanche, presumably the very best workforce of the salary-cap period.
Utah and Vegas: The place they’re in the present day.
Colorado: The place they need to be two years from now.
It could be helpful to recollect the place they have been as properly: By the point
head coach Dominique Ducharme
(whom you’ll have observed behind the bench with the Vegas Knights) was fired and changed by St. Louis on Feb. 9, 2022, the Canadiens have been useless final within the league with an 8-30-7 file.
Colorado was the proper check.
The Canadiens failed it, but it surely’s a helpful train nonetheless, a marker on the highway to success.
Nothing would please me greater than to see the Avs win one other Stanley Cup, partly for the sake of nostalgia and the Nordiques, however extra for the influence on the league itself as a result of NHL coaches are nothing if not copycats.
Look again to the mid-Nineties, when Jacques Lemaire got here again from Switzerland to contaminate the league with the neutral-zone lure and the NHL floor to a halt. By the 1999-2000 season, Jaromir Jagr was profitable the scoring title with 96 factors after lacking 15 video games with harm — a mere 4 seasons after teammate Mario Lemieux took the Artwork Ross with 69 targets and 92 assists for 161 factors.
The very last thing we want is extra groups following the Paul Maurice “pound their ******* D” method that has helped the terminally boring Florida Panthers win two Stanley Cups. With the league’s finest participant in Nathan MacKinnon and the very best defenceman in Cale Makar, the Avalanche is about as high-skill as you may get.
If the Avs can win it once more, we’ll get extra groups attempting to repeat their mannequin, which is all to the nice. The Canadiens, with a core of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Ivan Demidov, Lane Hutson, Noah Dobson, Mike Matheson and Juraj Slafkovsky, are on that path.
It should take endurance. The Canadiens are nonetheless down 4 key regulars in Patrik Laine, Kaiden Guhle, Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach, all lacking with long-term accidents.
In the meantime, maintain your eye on Slafkovsky. The massive man is doing issues everywhere in the ice that he didn’t do final season or the season earlier than. Watching a younger participant discover himself and blossom right into a star?
It’s why we do that — isn’t it?
Yet another within the fold:
The signing of Mike Matheson
to a five-year, $30-million contract extension is yet one more cope with the Kent Hughes imprint throughout it.
No fuss, no muss and a bilingual native man, stable citizen and a key a part of the plan signed to a team-friendly contract.
For the reason that early days of free company, I’ve been hoping that gamers would start to appreciate that there’s an incredible deal extra to it than numbers on a contract. There’s a match with the workforce and group and, above all, a shot at profitable the Stanley Cup.
All these issues have worth. Hughes understands that — and so do the gamers he indicators with such painstaking care.
Caught between a rock and a idiot:
Everybody is aware of that McGill College is in a troublesome spot. It isn’t simple to be scapegoat No. 1 within the eyes of an authoritarian bent on bringing anglo establishments to their knees.
Look, accountants are at all times —
at all times
— going to say the one manner ahead is to chop expenditures. They’re by no means going to level to the attainable advantages of an funding, which vary from the Canadian Olympic workforce to the final health of an more and more sedentary inhabitants.
McGill made no obvious effort
to spare the sports activities
wherein the expense is someplace between minimal and nonexistent and no effort in any respect to enlist the groups concerned, the alumni and the group at giant in a broad-based effort to avoid wasting the sports activities from the axe.
All in all, McGill’s dealing with of the complete affair has been so bumbling and tone-deaf that I needed to test to make certain that Pablo Rodriguez wasn’t doubling up as McGill president and chief of the Liberal Celebration.
Heroes:
Colleen Jones, Mike Matheson, Juraj Slafkovsky, Ivan Demidov, Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Zachary Bolduc, Jakub Dobes, Courtney Sarault, Kent Hughes &&&& final however not least, Samuel Montembeault.
Zeros:
François Legault, Deep Saini, McGill, Alexey Toropchenko, Mark Stone, Jack Eichel, Wayne Gretzky, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& final however not least, Jeffrey Loria.
Now and without end.
@jacktodd.bsky.social
jacktodd46@yahoo.com
