JULIEN TAKES THE ICE WITH HABS
Fans flock to new coach’s first practice
Claude Julien stepped on the ice in Brossard just after 4 p.m. Friday wearing a new Canadiens track suit and ball cap and slowly skated around while fans standing three and four deep behind the glassed-in stands looked on as if the new coach was in a fish bowl. Actually, he is now. RDS and TVA Sports were both televising Julien’s first practice live — only in Montreal — as the coach picked up a puck with his stick, skated toward an empty net and took a shot. He missed. Julien picked up another puck skating in the other direction, took aim at the empty net and missed again.
He picked up a third puck heading the other way again and this time fired it into the top corner of the net.
Canadiens fans watching on TV might have even cheered.
GM Marc Bergevin fired Michel Therrien on Tuesday and hired Julien to put the Canadiens back on track after only one win in the last seven games (1-5-1) while being shut out three times. But Julien won’t be able to put the puck in the net for his players when they face the Winnipeg Jets on Saturday at the Bell Centre (2 p.m., CBC, SN, TVA Sports, TSN Radio 690).
The first step the new coach took toward helping his players do just that was putting Alex Galchenyuk back at centre on the No. 1 line between Max Pacioretty and Alexander Radulov. Phillip Danault, who had been on the No. 1 line, dropped down to the third line between Artturi Lehkonen and Andrew Shaw. The No. 2 line had Tomas Plekanec between Paul Byron and Brendan Gallagher, while the fourth line had Torrey Mitchell between Brian Flynn and Sven Andrighetto. David Desharnais appeared to be the odd man out.
“Guys had to go on the ice today feeling good about themselves and I made sure that happened,” said Julien, who arrived at the practice facility at 7 a.m. “Guys want hope, guys want excitement, guys want positive messages.
“I wanted them to know how good I think the team is,” the coach added. “We’re in first place, so there’s no need to panic. There’s a need to fix. So we’re not panicking. We’re going to fix things so that we can get back on the right track and we’re going to start winning again.” The Canadiens have to. While they remain in first place in the Atlantic Division with a 31-19-8 record, the Ottawa Senators have moved within four points with three games in hand and the Boston Bruins are six points behind. The Canadiens are eight points ahead of the ninth-place New York Islanders in the Eastern Conference with eight teams making the playoffs.
Julien said he didn’t know until afterward Friday’s practice was being televised live and said the fan turnout reinforced the fact “this is a great hockey city that loves their team.”
But the new coach didn’t pay any attention to the fans.
“I don’t mean this in a bad way because I appreciated that they came and watched, but it’s like they didn’t exist when I was running practice,” Julien said. “My whole focus was on the ice.”
Now, Julien needs to get his players focused. Goalie Carey Price said after last Sunday’s 4-0 loss in Boston that the Canadiens had lost their identity.
What will their new identity be under Julien?
“I’d like us to be a hard team to play against,” the coach said. “A hard team doesn’t mean you’re running everybody through the boards, it doesn’t mean you’re feisty. I want teams to compete, I want teams to play a certain way that it’s going to make it hard for other teams to have success. If they’re going to score goals they’re going to have to earn them. We’re going to be a team that’s going to be hard to play … hopefully enough that it frustrates teams at times . ... You can have speed, you can have physicality, you can have all kinds of things. It doesn’t really matter. I think it’s about respecting how we play a certain way that’s going to make the opposition really have to work hard.”
It has been an emotional rollercoaster for Julien since being fired by the Bruins on Feb. 7 and then hired by Bergevin a week later. He insisted there was nothing weird about being back in a Canadiens track suit, admitting the one he kept from his first stint was too tight now. But he still looked good in bleu-blancrouge.
“I was a childhood Montreal Canadiens fan,” Julien said. “Unfortunately, with different jobs (in New Jersey and Boston) I’ve had to kind of get away from it for a little bit. But I’m back into it again.”
Now it’s up to his players to start hitting the back of the net.