FUTURE LOOKS BLEAK AS HABS STAGGER INTO ALL-STAR BREAK
“You win as a team, you lose as a team,” Canadiens coach Claude Julien said after Thursday’s 6-5 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes at the Bell Centre. “But I would expect our players to be ready to play a game and be focused.
“Some of them were, but a lot of them weren’t. That’s what we have to get better at. Pros have to be pros. We don’t babysit, we prepare guys. The other part is that they’ve got to be pros and say we’ve got to be ready to play here. That’s what good teams do.”
The Canadiens aren’t a good team. In fact, they’re a bad team.
The Canadiens head into the all-star break with a 20-23-6 record, 13th in the Eastern Conference, 10 points out of the final wild-card playoff spot, and 26th in the overall NHL standings.
Sportsclubstats.com has their chances of making the playoffs listed at 1.6 per cent, but in reality, they’re at zero.
The Canadiens rank 27th in the NHL in offence, 24th in defence, 17th on the power play, 24th in penalty-killing and 24th in faceoffs.
Captain Max Pacioretty, who leads the Canadiens in scoring with 16-15-31 totals, ranks 98th in the NHL scoring race. Goalie Carey Price has a 14-17-4 record and ranks 36th in the NHL in goals-against average (3.02) and 37th in save percentage (.904). In his last five games at the Bell Centre, Price has a 1-2-2 record with a 3.76 goals-against average and an .861 save percentage.
In previous years, Price could cover up for a lot of the Canadiens’ mistakes, but that hasn’t been the case this season as he has struggled with reported chronic fatigue and a lower-body injury. He simply isn’t the Price Canadiens fans used to know, and he turns 31 on Aug. 16 with an eight-year, US$84-million contract that kicks in next season.
While the official attendance for Thursday’s game was a sellout of 21,302, there were plenty of empty seats, despite some great deals on the StubHub website earlier in the day. Tickets in the blues going for as little as $28 and reds were going for $84 plus service charges.
At this point, the only thing for Canadiens fans to look forward to is the Feb. 26 trade deadline to see who stays and who goes. It certainly looks like general manager Marc Bergevin is the man who will be making those decisions — the same general manager who said at the team’s golf tournament last summer that his rebuilt defence this season could be better than last season and allowed Alexander Radulov to leave as a free agent while expecting Jonathan Drouin to be a No. 1 centre.
Radulov has 20-28-48 totals with the Dallas Stars, ranking 22nd in the NHL scoring race, while Drouin has 7-19-26 totals and ranks 157th. Canadiens fans can only imagine how much better Drouin would be if he could have played with Radulov.
After a 4-1 loss in Boston last week, Julien said his team “laid an egg.”
When asked if his players had thrown in the towel on the season, he said they were the ones who should answer that question. The coach then added: “Well, it certainly looked like that tonight.”
It looked like that again in the first period on Thursday night when the Canadiens were trailing 2-0 eight minutes in and were outshot 13-6 in the first period. The Canadiens fought back to tie it in the second period before allowing two goals in less than a minute for the 13th time this season.
That’s inexcusable.
One Canadiens player who will never throw in the towel is Brendan Gallagher, who scored his team-leading 18th goal Thursday and was there to face the media after the game, unlike captain Pacioretty — who normally is. “Obviously, every shift is important,” Gallagher said. “But you look at a game, first shift of period, the shifts after goals, the last couple of minutes of a period. Those are when you really need to bear down and be good. They’re huge momentum shifts, and we weren’t good enough tonight in those little areas, and that’s why we lost.
“It’s unacceptable,” Gallagher added about allowing two goals within a minute yet again.
“Obviously, you have to understand that’s when you need to bear down, that’s when you need to be better and be smarter with the puck, be smarter in your decision-making. That was a huge problem early on for us. We were better here the last little bit, but it seeped back in and hurt us tonight.”
The Canadiens are back in action on Tuesday night when they face the Blues in St. Louis.
“Obviously, we had higher expectations for us to be where we are right now,” Gallagher said.
“We’re definitely capable of being better than we are. It’s just about us making mistakes and that’s the frustrating part.
“We beat some really good teams, we showed we’re capable of it, and then just have letdowns. We’re just not smart enough at certain times.”
They’re also not good enough.