I believe the Senators are now officially the Canadiens’ No. 1 rival.

Did you see that ridiculous exhibition game in Quebec City on Tuesday? There were more fights than highlight-reel goals during a match that had the good guys crushing the Sens 5-0 and it was definitely more like Slap Shot than anything resembling a good hockey game.

That said, you gotta love a team that now has two Xhekaj brothers who can be called upon any time the Habs need to remind the other squad that you can no longer beat up on the Habs’ best players with no fear of punishment. This really is a new era after years in which so many players wearing the bleu-blanc-rouge scurried away to the bench at the slightest suggestion there might be a little fisticuffs in the offing.

You could see Tuesday that these two teams really hate each other and that’s great. You need great rivalries in sports and this is going to be a good one. Montreal and Ottawa are two young teams in a roughly similar state of their rebuild and chances are they’re going to be battling mano à mano often in the years to come in the post-season. That’s fun.

I asked on social media if the Sens-Habs rivalry was the “Lite” version of the classic Nordiques-Canadiens conflict from the 1980s and I was, probably quite correctly, dressed down on this point by my old friend Mitch Melnick, when I appeared on his TSN-690 radio show Wednesday. Melnick told me the Ottawa-Montreal tensions doesn’t hold a candle to what we called The Battle of Quebec, and he’s right.

That was a war. Serge Savard, who was general manager of the Canadiens in that era, once told me that he and Ronald Corey, the Canadiens’ president at the time, would meet every morning to discuss how they would react to the latest Nordiques moves. Hell, it was even a battle of the breweries, with Molson in the Habs camp and Carling O’Keefe siding with the Nords.

But this Sens-Habs turf war is a real thing and it’s good news that Canadiens fans have a team to hate. It’s about time. People always say Montreal’s ultimate rival is the Boston Bruins, but that one has been on the back-burner for a while now, in large part because the Canadiens don’t play the Bruins enough and they never meet in the playoffs.

In reality, Boston’s biggest rival in recent years has been the Toronto Maple Leafs because they’ve often had hard-fought playoff series. Last year’s season of the very-good Amazon documentary series Faceoff led off with a show called The Rivals and it was about Toronto and Boston.

Hockey Night in Canada does its best to convince us that the real rivalry is Toronto-Montreal, but that hasn’t been true since the ’60s. First-off, the Leafs completely sucked for much of the time from the ’70s until the Auston Matthews era and you can’t be rivals with losers. Now they’re a better team, at least in the regular season, but most Montreal fans can’t even muster real hatred of the Maple Leafs. It was great to see the CH humiliate them in the 2021 playoffs by coming back from a 3-1 deficit, but even that was kind of too easy. The Leafs are just too skilled at losing playoff series.

At McLean’s Pub Wednesday, Canadiens fan Kate Kilganan said the Sens are indeed the Habs’ new enemy.

“Yes because they make it easy to have a fun rivalry,” Kilganan said. “They’re so close, their tickets are cheap, you can get there quickly, we’re not going to the U.S., so Ottawa makes for a fun Canadian rivalry.”

Kilganan said she doesn’t really dislike the Sens.

“I’m a Nordiques fan at heart,” she said. “I grew up an anglophone in Quebec City, one of the six. So I’m a Nordiques girl. But I do like to see a rivalry that’s accessible.”

She said the Nords-Habs thing was more intense “because it had the anglo-French also mixed into it.”

Luc Marion, also at McLean’s Wednesday, doesn’t buy into the concept of this new rivalry.

“They’re not tried and true, we haven’t had enough playoff series with them,” Marion said. “It hasn’t built over the time. They don’t have history. Our fathers hated the Bruins, you know what I mean? (The Senators) are bland. I’m completely indifferent.”

Here are some of the comments from Facebook after I asked the question about whether or not the Sens are now the Habs’ main rival.

Andrew Caddell: In Ottawa, they hate the Leafs wayyyyyy more.

Derek Christie: Leafs. There is not one more hate-worthy team in this league as far as the Habs are concerned. This goes back decades.

David Halkett: No, Senators are irrelevant.

Paul Starke: Almost … but not quite. For some reason it just doesn’t have quite the romance of Habs/Nords, Habs/Bruins, Habs/Leafs. To me it feels more like Habs/Flyers circa 87-89. A lot of bad blood and memorable clashes.

Nicolas Maranda: How could anybody be interested in a team called the Senators? What’s next, the Accountants?

On X:

Andrew Zadarnowski: Like any youngest child, the Senators are still trying to carve their niche, stuck in between two older, louder and more successful brothers who take up a lot of space around them.

And on Bluesky:

Eminence grise: Possibly, both teams are projected to be very good for the next 7 or 8 years, so I expect this is just the start.

bkelly@postmedia.com

Related