Jack Todd: Not over yet, but the Habs are tired and that's hard to fix
It’s not yet time to write the obituary, but the Montreal Canadiens have that hangdog look about them — as though they know they’re beaten and they’re just waiting for it to become official before they start booking tee times.
The natives, predictably, are restless. The Canadiens are three points out of the final wild-card berth in the Eastern Conference (and they’d be securely in possession of a berth out west) but already the #FireBergevin and #FireJulien crowds are out in force.
Saturday night, it looked as though the team had come up with a novel strategy to get everyone off the back of the frequently disinterested Jonathan Drouin. “OK guys, here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to go out there and stink out the Bell Centre together so they’ll stop picking on poor Jonathan!”
Against the Chicago Blackhawks, it looked as though Thomas Vanek, René Bourque, Nathan Beaulieu, Alex Galchenyuk, Vladimir Malakhov, Max Pacioretty and the bad Alex Kovalev had all decided to join Drouin and hold a slacker’s reunion on Bell Centre ice.
Canadiens’ Jonathan Drouin skates the puck against Dylan Strome of the Chicago Blackhawks at the Bell Centre on Saturday, March 16, 2019.
The usual suspects still had some jump: Andrew Shaw, Tomas Tatar, Paul Byron, Brendan Gallagher. As for the rest, the less said the better, although Claude Julien seemed to detect something in Jordan Weal that wasn’t visible to the naked eye, because the former Lehigh Valley Phantom got more ice time than Mario Lemieux in the days of the two-minute shift.
It would appear the kindly old coach is getting desperate — and who could blame him? It’s one of those stretches where nothing is working and the increasingly weird line combinations are backfiring like 1958 Edsels. Drouin has joined the milk-carton brigade and it seems not to have occurred to Julien to put him back with Max Domi, where both players had their best games early in the season.
More than anything, the Canadiens simply look tired. It’s not surprising. They began the season using a system that required a lot of jump from the opening whistle and now the jump simply isn’t there.
Then there’s the power play. The power play isn’t simply bad, it’s rancid. It’s a powerless play. It’s so bad, you want to see them decline the penalty. Why it’s bad is another matter. How is it a team that can score 5-on-5 (or could, at least) can’t score with the man advantage? Why is it assistant coaches Kirk Muller and Dominique Ducharme can’t find a solution?
Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price, secnod right, receives a signed jersey from teammates Brendan Gallagher, left, and Shea Weber as Price’s wife, Angela, and children look on prior to an NHL hockey game against the Chicago Blackhawks in Montreal on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Price surpassed Jacques Plante’s record of most wins by a Montreal Canadiens goalie earlier in the week.
Whatever, the Canadiens were so bad last week, they even managed to taint Carey Price’s feat, breaking Jacques Plante’s team record with his 315th win as a goalie. The Canadiens looked bad beating Detroit for Price’s big win and they looked worse losing to the Islanders and Chicago.
There are all sorts of complicated solutions floating around, but it’s hard to fix tired. When the legs feel like rubber and the body just won’t go, no amount of line juggling is going to help.
At least the best of them are still trying. Drouin, as the team’s biggest talent at the forward position, has come in for particular scrutiny because he hasn’t scored a goal in 16 games, but more because he looks as though he’d rather be admiring his curly locks in a dressing-room mirror than out on the ice trying to score.
Drouin will be 24 on March 28, an age when a hockey player is supposed to be hitting full maturity, and instead he seems to be going in the opposite direction.
So are the Canadiens. A couple of wins and they’re still close enough to strike, but that surprising high-energy bunch that played so well early on has gone the way of the annual parade along the usual route.
The impact of the Impact
On a significantly happier note, the Montreal Impact had a terrific showing in a 3-1 road win over Orlando City on Saturday. The Impact got two quick goals and added a third in the second half before conceding one to spoil Evan Bush’s clean sheet, but they cemented what has been a strong start to the season despite the string of road games.
Unfortunately, the match was spoiled by a disgraceful incident in garbage time. With players jawing on the sidelines, Orlando’s Dom Dwyer got up in the kitchen of big Montreal defender Zakaria Diallo. Diallo lost it and gave Dwyer a shove.
You couldn’t have knocked Mike Ribeiro down with that shove, but Dwyer dove like Alexandre Despatie. He spun away and hurled himself face down on the pitch, where he remained for long minutes, doing his best impression of a battlefield casualty, while Diallo was issued a red card that will cost him his next match.
Look, Diallo deserved the red card and the one-game suspension that means he will miss a tough assignment at Sporting KC. Dwyer deserves a good deal more. His dive was, like Neymar Jr.’s infamous roll at the World Cup, one of those moments that is an embarrassment to the player, the team, the sport itself.
Dwyer should get three games, minimum. After which, he should have to apologize to soccer fans around the world for disrespecting the game.