Canadiens like odds heading to Vegas
the Manitoba prairie to the Mojave Desert, from largely empty arenas to a capacity crowd: not a lot about Monday’s Stanley Cup semifinal opener in Las Vegas will be familiar to the Montreal Canadiens.
That includes the Vegas Golden Knights themselves, a team the Canadiens have yet to face in the 2020-21 season as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which until now kept all but one of Canada’s teams north of the partially closed border.
They’ve also been idle for more than a week, dispatching the Winnipeg Jets in four games while the Knights battled the hardy Colorado Avalanche in a thrilling six-game series that made No. 1-seeded Vegas the odds-on favourite to make the final.
On Monday night, they’ll see something else that’s been largely missing this year: 18,000 mostly hostile fans in the stands at T-Mobile Arena, which only began allowing all the seats to be sold at the start of the month.
While Canadians are only just beginning to emerge from their forced hibernation — Ontario only began allowing patios and non-essential businesses to reopen Friday — Vegas is looking like its old self, the streets and blackjack tables jammed with tourists utterly unfazed by a weeklong heat wave expected to top 45 C.
But the Habs know one thing, and that’s each other.
“We know what type of team that we are, we know how we have to play to have success,” forward Brendan Gallagher told a news conference Sunday in Vegas.
So if the Sin City bookmakers want to call the Canadiens the underdogs, so be it, Gallagher said.
“People may have doubted us, but for us in the locker room, we had belief in each other,” he said. “As of now, we have a lot of belief and hopefully that continues going forward.”
Injured defencemen Jeff Petry and Jon Merrill are all in Vegas, along with concussed forward Jake Evans, although Ducharme couldn’t exactly say when they are expected to rejoin the lineup.