The Canadiens have come a long way — and they have a long way to go.
Rarely does one brief stretch in a long season sum up a team’s current standing like the trip from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas to Denver last week, when Martin St. Louis’s fun bunch went from kings of the road to roadkill between Wednesday and Saturday.
First, a tight, tough 4-3 win over the Utah Mammoth to get the trip off to a good start. Then a thoroughly surprising 4-1 thumping of the Vegas Golden Knights, theoretically one of the genuine Stanley Cup contenders this season, in what was easily Samuel Montembeault’s best game since last spring.
And just when the delusions of grandeur start to set in, a royal butt-kicking at the hands of the Colorado Avalanche, possibly the best team of the salary-cap era.
Utah and Vegas: Where they are today.
Colorado: Where they want to be two years from now.
It may be useful to remember where they were as well: By the time head coach Dominique Ducharme (whom you may have noticed behind the bench with the Vegas Knights) was fired and replaced by St. Louis on Feb. 9, 2022, the Canadiens were dead last in the league with an 8-30-7 record.
Colorado was the perfect test. The Canadiens failed it, but it’s a useful exercise nonetheless, a marker on the road to success.
Nothing would please me more than to see the Avs win another Stanley Cup, partly for the sake of nostalgia and the Nordiques, but more for the impact on the league itself because NHL coaches are nothing if not copycats.
Look back to the mid-1990s, when Jacques Lemaire came back from Switzerland to infect the league with the neutral-zone trap and the NHL ground to a halt. By the 1999-2000 season, Jaromir Jagr was winning the scoring title with 96 points after missing 15 games with injury — a mere four seasons after teammate Mario Lemieux took the Art Ross with 69 goals and 92 assists for 161 points.
The last thing we need is more teams following the Paul Maurice “pound their ******* D” formula that has helped the terminally boring Florida Panthers win two Stanley Cups. With the league’s best player in Nathan MacKinnon and the best defenceman in Cale Makar, the Avalanche is about as high-skill as you can get.
If the Avs can win it again, we’ll get more teams trying to copy their model, which is all to the good. 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 will take patience. The Canadiens are still down four key regulars in Patrik Laine, Kaiden Guhle, Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach, all missing with long-term injuries.
Meanwhile, keep your eye on Slafkovsky. The big guy is doing things all over the ice that he didn’t do last season or the season before. Watching a young player find himself and blossom into a star?
It’s why we do this — isn’t it?
Canadiens winger Juraj Slafkovsky fights for control of the puck against Colorado Avalanche’s Martin Necas in Denver on Saturday.
One more in the fold: The signing of Mike Matheson to a five-year, $30-million contract extension is yet another deal with the Kent Hughes imprint all over it.
No fuss, no muss and a bilingual local guy, solid citizen and a key part of the plan signed to a team-friendly contract.
Since the early days of free agency, I’ve been hoping that players would begin to realize that there’s a great deal more to it than numbers on a contract. There’s a fit with the team and community and, above all, a shot at winning the Stanley Cup.
All those things have value. Hughes understands that — and so do the players he signs with such painstaking care.
Caught between a rock and a fool: Everyone knows that McGill University is in a tough spot. It isn’t easy to be scapegoat No. 1 in the eyes of an authoritarian bent on bringing anglo institutions to their knees.
Look, accountants are always — always — going to say the only way forward is to cut expenditures. They are never going to point to the possible benefits of an investment, which range from the Canadian Olympic team to the general fitness of an increasingly sedentary population.
McGill made no apparent effort to spare the sports in which the expense is somewhere between minimal and nonexistent and no effort at all to enlist the teams involved, the alumni and the community at large in a broad-based effort to save the sports from the axe.
All in all, McGill’s handling of the entire affair has been so bumbling and tone-deaf that I had to check to be certain that Pablo Rodriguez wasn’t doubling up as McGill president and leader of the Liberal Party.
Heroes: Colleen Jones, Mike Matheson, Juraj Slafkovsky, Ivan Demidov, Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Zachary Bolduc, Jakub Dobes, Courtney Sarault, Kent Hughes &&&& last but 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 &&&& last but not least, Jeffrey Loria.
Now and forever.