ROLE REVERSAL FOR LEAFS, HABS
As franchises trend in opposite directions, it’s time to fire up those Canadiens jokes
How do you spot a counterfeit NHL playoff ticket?
It’s printed on thin paper. There’s no bar code. And it contains the word “Montreal.”
The punchline to that joke — there are many, many more — used to be “Toronto.” But it’s not as much fun to pick on the Maple Leafs these days. Twenty games into the season, they are no longer the laughingstock of the NHL.
The team, which won its fifth straight game Thursday night — and its fourth without superstar Auston Matthews in the lineup — has reached the first-quarter mark with the second-most points in the Eastern Conference.
The Canadiens, meanwhile, have sort of resembled the Titanic. They look good until they hit the ice.
That’s another joke that used to be directed at Leafs fans that now seems wildly out of date.
It was on Thursday night, when Montreal lost to an Arizona team that had gone the first six weeks of the season without a regulation win and Toronto won again without their best player in the lineup, that you realized how much things had changed in Canada’s two biggest hockey markets.
The teams, which play one another on Saturday night, have switched spots. For the first time since the early 2000s, it would appear the Leafs are much closer to winning a Stanley Cup than the Habs. It’s not even really close.
Toronto, which snapped a 14-game winless streak against Montreal when the Leafs defeated the Canadiens 4-3 in overtime at the Bell Centre last month, is the far superior team. And it’s bound to remain that way for a while.
Let that sink in for a moment. The days of dysfunction and being the NHL’s whipping boys seem to be over in Toronto, where years of drafting and developing and making smart decisions have brought the Leafs back to prominence. This isn’t a team that creates controversy or negative headlines. There’s not a hotdog joke to be found on Bay Street anymore.
That being said, Toronto might not be a legitimate contender to win this year. The Leafs are not nearly as dynamic as the Tampa Bay Lightning or as complete a team as the Los Angeles Kings. They’re young and have their warts. But unlike the Canadiens, the Leafs are just cracking open the window on their potential.
In 20-year-old Auston Matthews, who might already be on most writers’ Hart Trophy ballots, the Leafs have one of the most electric players in the NHL. But even with him out of the lineup, the Leafs are deep enough to string together wins because of secondary scoring and a defensive mindset that has resulted in just five goals against in their last four games.
The Canadiens, meanwhile, are what the Leafs used to be: a mess in need of a full-scale repair.
They fired their coach last year and their general manager, Marc Bergevin, whose knee-jerk trades and free agent gambles have blown up in his face, could be next. With each passing day, there’s another controversy, another fire to be put out.
Stories are still being written on how the Habs shipped P.K. Subban out of town. A couple of weeks ago, player agent Dan Milstein told Sportsnet’s Eric Engels that head coach Claude Julien “doesn’t like Russians,” which is supposedly why Alex Galchenyuk has struggled this season.
Even Carey Price, the one bright spot on Montreal’s roster, has become a frequent target. Though he is injured, his start to the season was a major disappointment, with a worse record and save percentage than backup Charlie Lindgren. With an eightyear, US$84-million contract that kicks in next season, it could become a deal management soon regrets as it inches closer to an inevitable rebuild. In other words, expect Montreal’s championship drought to reach 25 years — and beyond. It might not get to the 50 years the Leafs have gone without a Cup, but with or without Price in the lineup, this is a team with crater-sized holes in the roster. The Canadiens cannot score with regularity, cannot defend, and cannot even keep up with the 31st-ranked team in the NHL.
As owner Geoff Molson joked at a chamber of commerce event on Friday, the storied franchise might have won 24 Stanley Cups, but “Marc Bergevin and I haven’t won any of them.”
Against the Arizona Coyotes on Thursday night, Montreal coughed up a 2-0 lead in the first period and a 3-2 lead heading into the third period in a 5-4 loss Julien described as “unacceptable” and “embarrassing.”
This doesn’t look like a Stanley Cup contender. With a 28th-ranked offence and the fifth-worst goals-against average (before Friday night’s games), it doesn’t even look like a team that will make the playoffs. The worst part for Habs fans is the future doesn’t look any brighter.
While the Leafs’ farm system is filled with NHL-calibre players who could be playing a top-nine role on most other teams, the Canadiens did not have a single player ranked among the top-50 prospects in the Hockey News’ latest Future Watch magazine. There is no help coming.
Montreal’s previous best prospect, Mikhail Sergachev, was traded last summer to the Tampa Bay Lightning for Jonathan Drouin. Since then, the 19-yearold has led NHL rookie defencemen with five goals and 14 points in 19 games. For those keeping score at home, that’s two more goals than Drouin has scored and more points than any player on the Canadiens.
Add it to the pile of future jokes made at Montreal’s expense. As the Leafs trend one way and the Canadiens the other, there should be plenty more to come.