Restoring Order in Montreal

Brandon Prust's toughness is just a small part of a newfound toughness in a new look Habs squad. (Credits: Rob Carr/Getty Images)

Today we bring you the NHL’s feel-good team of the Eastern Conference – a team we define as overachieving, critic-defying, and in the best sense of the word, lingering. The Montreal Canadiens, leaders in the Northeast Division, earn the honor in the East.

There are two ways to compare this year’s standings to last year’s. Without the convenience of being able to measure the standings from April 4, 2012 against April 4, 2013 (given the lockout-shortened season), we are left to either judging where teams stood after X number of games played, or with X number of games left. Having played 36 games so far this year, the Montreal Canadiens have racked up 51 points, good for first in the Northeast Division and second in the Eastern Conference. After 36 games last year, the Canadiens had collected a paltry 33 points, burying them in in last place in the Northeast and 12^th in the East. By the other measuring stick, with 12 games to play last year, Les Canadiens were dead last across the board. That is where they finished.

It was a miserable season for Montreal. In any American city, it would have been one of those tortuous campaigns that can’t end soon enough, except this is Montreal we’re talking about, where hockey is held sacred. The darkening of the lights in the Bell Centre is never seen as liberating. So the fans packed the house anytime their team was in town, compelled by their own loyalty, but they were not a happy bunch. To watch their team, winners of 24 Stanley Cups, and members of the NHL’s highest nobility, get pushed around the playground was, above all else, embarrassing. The 2011-2012 Canadiens belonged on the Island of Misfit Toys: an airplane that can’t fly, a boat that can’t float, a hallowed hockey team that can’t win. 

Compound the team’s last-place finish with the haunting fact that they had claimed just one division title in the past 14 years, and indeed, the fans in Montreal were wondering what in Maurice Richard’s name is going on??       

General Manager Marc Bergevin knew he had to appease the masses, and sooner rather than later. Before the curtain had been closed on the 2012 season, he made the first move to right the ship by hiring Michel Therrien as the new head coach. Therrien, who had first presided over the Canadiens from 2000-2003 declared, “My intention is to bring back intensity, pride and discipline. To the fans, when they come back to the Bell Centre, they are going to cheer for a team that works really hard.” After watching their beloved Habs sleepwalk through a listless season, to here Therrian vow more passionate hockey was to hear him break out in a stentorian rendition of “O Canada!”

But the 2011-12 Canadiens were lacking more than “intensity, pride and discipline.” Aside from goaltending, where even Carey Price had an uncharacteristically middling season, Montreal had more shortages than Kevin Dyson and the 1999 Tennessee Titans. (Okay, so one shortage, but one biiiiig shortage.) They were lacking toughness: only one team suffered more Man-Games-Lost than the Canadiens, who saw 22 players miss games due to injury, for a combined 389 games. Some might argue this was no fault of their own, and to a certain extent it wasn’t, but one does get the sense that Montreal didn’t lead the league in playing hurt last year. (On the other hand, the Rangers, under the order of John Tortorella, where an “injury” requires a sawed-off limb, a fractured skull or a negligent pulse, finished in the top-10 in Man-Games-Lost.) They were lacking snarl: The Canadiens ranked 22^ndin the NHL in fighting majors with just 28 scraps on the season. For a team that relies heavily on deft, diminutive forwards, the lack of an established enforcer meant a number of hushed nights on the offensive front. They were lacking leadership: their captain, Brian Gionta, and their assistant captains, Andre Markov and Hall Gill, missed a combined 121 games. The players that tried to step up in their stead were either too green, too taciturn or too Scott Gomez-ey. But most of all, they were lacking offense: The Canadiens ranked 19^thin the NHL in goals per game, 28^th in power play percentage, and were shutout 8 times. Not one player on their team topped the 65-point mark, and their fifth-highest scoring forward, Lars Eller, had just 28 points.

Amazingly though, Bergevin followed the lead of his team’s scorers, and chose to make little noise in the offseason. Aside from naming Therrien head coach in June, the rookie GM’s biggest summer splash was signing stouthearted, gritty forward Brandon Prust to a 4-year, $10 million contract. And the buzz surrounding this move was of dubious, not complimentary, tenor: did we really just commit $10 million to a guy with 24 career goals to his name?? When training camp openedplaytime ended in Europe in mid-January and players reported to their respective teams, the gathering in Montreal was eerily similar to the one in 2011. If the 2011-12 Canadiens were a prep-school junior class, the 2012-13 Canadiens were those juniors turned seniors, plus a couple uninteresting kids from abroad, plus one unexciting postgraduate. So while they expected great things from themselves – c’mon, they’re prep-school seniors – around the league, no one stopped to think twice about Montreal.

But then the Canadiens won 6 of their first 8 games, and 11 of their first 16, averaging just about 3 goals per game in the process. On February 19^th, exactly a month into the season, they were sitting atop the Northeast with 23 points, content and preening like a Cavalier that has taken back its rightful spot on the most comfortable couch in the house. They had won 5 games in a row, culminating in a 3-1 suffocation of the Rangers in Madison Square Garden, and Max Pacioretty, their leading scorer from the year before, had just two goals to date. The guys that had failed to step up last year – Tomas Plekanec, P.K. Subban, David Desharnais, among others – were standing on stilts to make up for it, while Prust was fighting anyone with two fists, and endearing himself to the hometown fans. (Despite missing three weeks in March with a shoulder injury, Prust is still tied for 5^th in the League with 8 fighting majors.) The Habs hadn’t achieved anything yet, but a third of the way into the season, they were making 2011-12 a distant memory.

Of course, hockey folk were still not convinced. They said the Canadiens were beneficiaries of a forgiving opening schedule (6-0 against the lowly Southeast Division), and would crack in due time. I’ll admit outright that I was one of those “hockey folk.” This skepticism wasn’t born of any Canadian bias or cold cynicism, but simply logic. It isn’t often that a team goes from being that bad to this good in one year, much less with largely the same roster. But Therrien, true to his word, had the Canadiens playing tirelessly hard, grinding out wins in that gratifyingly unglamorous kind of way popularized by every New Jersey Devils team you can ever think of. In the aforementioned 3-1 win over the Rangers, the Canadiens threw just 17 shots on goal, nearly put The Garden to sleep, and skated away with 2 points in a game that never really seemed to take place. These Canadiens don’t discriminate against points, and possess both the pride and humility to take them anyway they can get them.

They don’t always sing lullabies though. In fact more often than not, the Canadiens earn wins through a high-scoring offense that ranks 5^thin the NHL with 3.08 goals per game. Just last week in Boston, trailing 4-2 and 5-3 in third, Montreal rallied for a 6-5 shootout victory. Carey Price might bristle at this notion, but inside the game was evidence of what has made the Canadiens so successful this season. First things first, they netted the game’s first goal, something they have done in 25 of their 36 games this season. (18 of those 25 games have resulted in wins.) They got goals from Subban and Markov, two star defensemen who left little imprint on last season. Subban, in particular, has had quite the resurgence in 2013, throwing his name back into the crowded discussion of best young blue-liners. They came back from two goals down, something they have done 3 times this season, the third most in the NHL. And it is this resiliency that seems most distinctive of the 2013 Canadiens. I don’t mean in erasing deficits, but in erasing doubts. We have been waiting for this team to fall back to earth all year long, the words “I told you so” cocked and loaded between our teeth, but the Canadiens have proved us wrong.    

Already this season, they have scored 6 goals three times, 5 goals three times and 4 goals twelve times. In half of their games, then, the Canadiens have scored 4 or more goals. What’s more, they’re not sacrificing defense for offense. After finishing a respectable 11^th place last year with 2.61 goals against per game, the 2013 Canadiens are allowing just 2.42 goals per game, good for 7^thin the NHL. They are led in this domain by the smooth Carey Price, the kind of quiet goaltender who makes his art look so effortless he is sometimes accused of not trying. Think about that for a second: the guy is so fundamentally sound, his grace can be mistaken for apathy.

Au contraire, Price and the rest of this Montreal team care deeply about that famed logo across their chests. Perhaps that’s why Bergevin chose not to blow up this roster in the offseason. After experiencing the lowest of lows in 2011-12, the returning guys seem to have a burning impulse, a furious desire, to make things right again. So far, they have succeeded.