HABS GET STUCK
Florida slips past the Canadiens on a snowy night at the Bell Centre as the CH offence continues to spin, going 1-3 in their last four games.
Canadiens legend Yvan Cournoyer had tickets for Sunday’s Bell Centre game between the Habs and the Florida Panthers, a 2-1 victory for the visitors.
In the end, the Roadrunner chose not to attend, because how much fun can it be getting to the arena from north of Montreal through snowchoked streets if you’re not a frostbitten passenger on the back of Jacques Lemaire’s snowmobile? But we’ll come to that. There was never a suggestion that Sunday’s 6 p.m. game wouldn’t be played, the 20 or so centimetres being a moderate snowfall by the standards of those Montrealers who remember real winter blizzards, not the flurries of today that close schools.
The Canadiens touched down at Trudeau airport just before 2:30 a.m. Sunday from New York’s JFK following Saturday’s 1-0 overtime win against the Islanders, arriving home two hours later than scheduled.
Taking forever to load a charter aircraft before a lengthy, get-in-line trip to the de-icing pad at a major New York airport, rather than at the team’s usual East Farmingdale facility on Long Island (which was down to one runway), will do that to your timetable.
And then there was the journey itself, 40 minutes of largely white-knuckle flying through skies turbulent enough to bounce passengers en route to Montreal.
Not surprisingly, a gameday morning skate in Brossard, an unlikely event at best, was scrubbed altogether; the Panthers, who had arrived during the day Saturday, held an optional skate at the Bell Centre.
The Canadiens spotted the Panthers a 2-0 second-period lead, then tried to claw back into the game with a goal by Alex Galchenyuk early in the third. It revived the arena, as did a late, futile 5-on-3 advantage, but only briefly.
The Habs’ offence has lately been a sight to behold, and not in a good way. Galchenyuk has now scored the team’s last three regulation-time goals in a span of 241 minutes and 53 seconds, giving him the dubious, quite incredible honour of a natural hat trick spaced over 14 periods.
The game will go into the books as the Canadiens’ 380th consecutive ticket sellout of 21,273, but at least several hundred fans couldn’t or chose not to attend given the weather.
The weekend’s first blast of the season reminded Cournoyer of a memorable day nearly 42 years ago. It was on Feb. 19, 1972, that he and fellow Hall of Famerto-be Lemaire arrived at the Forum by snowmobile, barely before the start of their game against the Philadelphia Flyers.
“We got a call in the afternoon from Eddy, telling us we’d better come in early becauseof thestorm,”Cournoyer remembered of trainer Eddy Palchak’s summons.
Cournoyer, then living in Baie-d’Urfé, called Lemaire at his home in Beaconsfield and told his teammate he’d pick him up in his fourwheel drive for the ride to the Forum.
“We got to Dorval on the 2&20 (highway) and then everything stopped, completely,” he said.
As would any self-respecting Quebec driver, Cournoyer made a U-turn in the middle of the highway, bouncing across the median to aim west.
He headed back to Lemaire’s home, dropping him off before returning to his own place, both men suiting up head to toe in snowmobile suits to mount the machines they had in their garages.
Strapped aboard were their overnight bags for the Canadiens’ trip later that night to Buffalo, where, even exhausted, they would blank the Sabres 4-0.
All was fine until Lemaire and Cournoyer got to … Dorval. The latter’s snowmobile died, so he ditched it on the side of the highway, climbing on behind Lemaire.
Finally churning down Ste-Catherine St. to find only hardy pedestrians and cross-country skiers, the pair pulled up to the Forum’s garage door on de Maisonneuve Blvd., honking for access, then drove inside.
“When we arrived, all the others players were already dressed for the game,” Cournoyer said, laughing. “In our snowmobile suits, we looked like we were from outer space.”
The two astronauts did just fine once the game began. For a crowd of 8,065, less than half the Forum’s capacity, Lemaire opened the scoring and Cournoyer, his eyes swollen from the frigid commute, notched the Canadiens’ second, his 30th of the season, after having assisted on Lemaire’s goal in a 3-1 win.
The Gazette’s Tim Burke catalogued the travel adventures of other Habs.
Marc Tardif hiked 90 minutes from St-Laurent and Bellechasse, having abandoned his car. Jacques Laperrière and Ken Dryden walked for miles. Canadiens shareholder Sam Maislin used a tow truck to round up backup goalie Denis DeJordy and defenceman Guy Lapointe in Beloeil.
Habs coach Scotty Bowman waded through thigh-deep drifts just to get to the Dorval train station. “I was so tired that I reached the point where I thought I wouldn’t make it,” Bowman said. “If I were 10 years older (than his 38), I wouldn’t have.”
At least that 1972 game was played (and Cournoyer, indeed, did get his ditched snowmobile back).
A year earlier, Montreal’s so-called Storm of the Century dropped about 50 centimetres of snow on March 4, 1971, causing the postpone- ment of that night’s Forum game between the Canadiens and Vancouver Canucks.
Both clubs had arrived in Montreal in the wee hours from Wednesday losses — the Habs falling 4-0 in Pittsburgh, the Canucks 3-1 in Toronto — but bowed to a city request that they call off their Thursday game with roads hopelessly clogged.
Newspaper reports of the day claimed this was the first game in the NHL’s 54-year history postponed by bad weather.
Not so. In 1924, the defending-champion Ottawa Senators failed to make it to Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena for a Feb. 20 game against the Canadiens.
The Senators’ train finally ran adrift at Cushing Station, near Hawkesbury, Ont., unable to plow through the mountains of snow.
In Montreal, a sell out crowd of 6,000, some fans quite literally hanging from the arena rafters, sang happily until the game was finally called off by referee Art Ross 90 minutes after its scheduled start with no opponent in sight.
“It was a good-humoured gathering,” The Gazette reported the next day. “The band performed valiantly, one selection following another in quick succession as the musicians did their bit to fill the gap.”
Near Hawkesbury, having left Ottawa at 1 p.m. on game day, Senators players disembarked and used shovels in a bid to dig out their locomotive — and can’t you see that happening today? — before finally admitting defeat.
They were shepherded to a local hotel to spend the night, but not before star forward Cy Denneny apparently fell down a shallow well while off in search of a snack; happily, he was uninjured.
The game was played the following evening, an exhausted Senators squad spanked 3-0.
Seventy-four years later, the ice storm that savaged Quebec forced postponement of the Jan. 10, 1998, game against the New York Rangers in the two-year-old Molson Centre.
While Sunday’s storm bared its teeth for awhile, it had largely moved on well before the opening faceoff between the Canadiens and Panthers.
If only someone had told the Habs, who for too much of the night looked as organized as an after-school pickup game on a chippy outdoor rink, firing one puck after another into the snowbank.