Pierre Gauthier’s press conference this week highlighted “team stability” and the “core strengths” of the Montreal Canadiens. Gauthier is telling the media that the current roster, which looks a lot like last year’s roster, will be the same roster for the foreseeable future. Yet there a number of players who, if they don’t play to expectations, will likely not return. It’s a long enough list that the entire organization may undergo a large overhaul in the summer of 2011. Perhaps not as big as the one the Canadiens underwent in 2009, but an overhaul nonetheless.
For instance, take Andrei Kostitsyn, Benoit Pouiliot, Ryan O’Byrne, Maxim Lapierre and Mathieu Darche: It is IMPOSSIBLE to see how any of these players come back next year if they do not produce this year.
There is an excellent piece of writing by Mike Wise of the Washington Post describing what it felt like to be an outsider at the Bell Center during last night’s 4-1 Habs stolen victory over Washington. The goods are here.
The golden nugget I want to talk about:
…if you could hear this unbelievably charged building at this very moment — the symphony of sound, some 20,000 screaming raucously as Halak was announced as the game’s No. 1 star — only one emotion could be felt by an authentic fan who followed the Washington Capitals’ record-setting, ridiculously good season thus far: Panic.
Montreal Canadiens / Bell Center fans have plenty to be embarrassed about this season. They’ve booed the American anthem, arrived in blackface (okay just two fans did, but….really???), whined incessantly over calls the refs made against the Habs. They’ve booed their own players as early as the first period, not to mention their coaching staff and general manager. Just last week, Sal the Angry Habs Fan went on a guido- tirade on Team 990, sounding both stoopid and remarkably cogent at the same time.
In truth, I feel like most sports fans just aren’t as classy as they used to be – if they really ever were. But somehow, in the eyes of the mainstream Canadian and American media, Montreal Canadiens fans are still depicted as classy, knowledgeable and accommodating fans who support their team to the final whistle no matter what. “The best fans in the league” is what we hear over and over, with apologies to Minnesota, Toronto, Edmonton or Detroit.
Well, rose-colored glasses aside, last night the Habs fans were SENSATIONAL.They were so good that I tivo’d the game and I am going to keep it saved just so I can show my American friends how awesome a real hockey game can be. They were so good that after I finished watching the game, I had a caffeine-buzz running through my veins that kept me awake all night. They were so good my own neighbors in Los Angeles were shaking in their apartments.
They were so good I was practically clutching my Habs Jersey and Expos cap in unison, sobbing tears of nostalgia, grateful like a stranded Israelite after getting manna from heaven.
No, I don’t think I am getting carried away here, because THAT, people, is the power of the Seventh Man!
Seriously, watching the game last night, it was clear that the Habs ran out of steam at about, oh… say, fifteen minutes into it (except for Halak, and a handful of skaters).The fans didn’t boo their own players, they didn’t whine, they didn’t despair. Not once.
Instead, the were LOUD.
Instead, they actually cheered for their team.
Instead, they gave Jaroslav Halak a standing ovation AFTER HE GAVE UP A GOAL.
“Hey – we got your back because you are amazing” they were telling him. And amazing Halak remained, turning away a barrage of Ovechkins and Backstroms as the rest of the Habs underwent cardiac arrest right there on the ice. The fans (and Halak) willed their team to victory. There’s no other way to look at it.
And they gave the Habs all the encouragement they need to go to Washington and steal this damn series.
