Canadiens’ roller-coaster season wears on players
This Canadiens season is turning into a real-life version of the “Lance et Compte” (“He Shoots, He Scores”) TV series from the mid-1980s.
That soap opera on ice, written by journalist Réjean Tremblay and novelist Louis Caron, focused on the personal and professional life of Pierre Lambert, a player with the fictional Le National NHL team in Quebec City.
The storylines from this Canadiens season could be enough to bring back “Lance et Compte.”
First, the team gets off to a fantastic 7-1-2 start, which has fans dreaming of a 25th Stanley Cup. Then things slowly start to fall apart, resulting in head coach Claude Julien and associate coach Kirk Muller getting fired when the team has a 9-5-4 record. Dominique Ducharme is named interim head coach without getting one full practice before taking over. The star goaltender, Carey Price, continues to struggle, so a week later GM Marc Bergevin fires goalie coach Stéphane Waite during the middle of a game.
The team’s inconsistent play continues, unable to win more than three games in a row. Joël Armia tests positive for COVID-19 and four games are postponed. Brendan Gallagher, the heart-and-soul of the team, then suffers a fractured thumb and the Canadiens take a nosedive with the possibility of missing the playoffs becoming real.
The star goaltender is then sidelined for six games with a lower-body injury. Price returns and sustains a concussion during his second game back and is out indefinitely. The Canadiens have a hot goal-scoring prospect in Cole Caufield, but somehow can’t get him in the lineup because of salary cap constraints.
Jonathan Drouin, the local boy, misses three games in Calgary with a “NON-COVID related illness” and after the team returns home he is placed on the long-term injured reserve list for personal reasons and will be absent indefinitely. The team asks that Drouin’s privacy be respected.
That brings us right up to Wednesday night’s 4-1 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Bell Centre, now with eight games left in the regular season for the Canadiens as they fight for a playoff berth.
Over the years — with every game televised, 24-hour sports TV channels and sports talkradio stations, along with social media — the Canadiens have become a real-life TV show and sometimes people might forget that the players are real people and not actors.
Pro athletes earn a lot of money and they also face a lot of pressure from fans and media. It’s part of their job.
The bigger the market and the more passionate the fan base, the more the pressure can build.
“As a player, we already put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” the Canadiens’ Phillip Danault said. “I would say it gets amplified in Montreal. We so want to do well and wear the jersey with pride. It’s an added pressure we put on our shoulders. Sometimes, it becomes more difficult on the ice and off it. These aren’t the kinds of things we can control.
“Lots of ups and downs. I think there’s ups and downs everywhere, but Montreal’s a little more intense. We know how the fans are passionate. They can love you, they can not like you, too. It’s part of the game, it’s part of the big market of Montreal. That’s why they’re … the best fans in the league.”