If the Montreal Canadiens don't step up their hockey game tonight, they will be working on their golf games tomorrow.
The eighth-seeded Canadiens lost to the Boston Bruins 4-2 on Monday night, giving the Bruins a commanding 3-0 series lead. Boston is now poised to move past Montreal in the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 1994.
The series is especially bitter for Canadiens fans since the 2009 season marks the 100th anniversary of the world's oldest professional hockey team. After last season's first-place finish in the Eastern Conference, expectations were extraordinarily high for the centennial. As often happens, the high expectations were not met. The team struggled on and off the ice, and head coach Guy Carbonneau was fired. The Canadiens barely limped into the eighth spot in the East, where they faced their archrivals from Massachusetts.
The playoff series has gone mostly as everyone would have expected. The Bruins are better in every single aspect of hockey, from forwards to defense to goaltending, through special teams and on to physicality. They were far and away the best team in the conference and dominated the Canadiens in regular-season play, a fact that has so far carried over into the postseason.
But this is Boston, land of hypersensitive scrutiny mixed with sports pessimism. And this is Boston, home of one of only three teams in pro sports history to go down 3-0 in a series and come back to win it. (That's the 2004 Red Sox, for any of you who just awoke from a coma.) Combine those two factors with Montreal's healthy historic domination of the Black and Gold, and some Bruins fans are a little bit nervous.
For no reason. The Canadiens are a flawed hockey team beset by injuries, poor individual play and a lack of confidence. Alex Tanguay, Robert Lang, Andrei Markov and Mathieu Schneider are all injured, and all of those absences hurt.
Markov is the Canadiens' best player. He logs top pairing minutes, led the team in points before his injury in the regular season and is an effective weapon on both the power play and penalty kill. His absence has forced an already-weak defensive corps to be stretched even further, and although Josh Gorges has played well and Ryan O'Byrne has been a pleasant surprise, they are unable to fill Markov's skates.
Schneider makes things happen on the power play. He is weaker in his own end, but his acquisition from the Atlanta Thrashers saw a listless Canadiens power play find its groove. His presence or absence in the playoffs has been a good indicator of exactly which power play is going to show up. On Monday, he did not dress, and the Canadiens went down 0-3 and looked bad doing it.
Injuries are a convenient excuse, but Montreal's problems have also been related to poor play. Canadiens forward Tomas Plekanec made headlines last season following Montreal's series against Boston when he said that he had played like a little girl. Unfortunately, he was unable to alter his game for this year's series -- no goals, one shot in two games. He was bad enough in the first game that coach Bob Gainey scratched him for the second, hoping to elevate his play. It didn't work.
Similarly, supposed future superstar Carey Price has looked like Andrew Raycroft and not the 2004 Andrew Raycroft. He has had trouble controlling rebounds, has played the puck lackadaisically and has not been the difference-maker that the Canadiens need. Last year's playoffs were supposed to be a learning experience for him, but it doesn't seem like he drew any of the right lessons.
Mike Komisarek has had the worst season of his young career. The No. 1 shutdown defenseman has played poorly in his own zone, which is a kiss of death for a man with no offensive upside to speak of. He should have been credited with the secondary assist on Phil Kessel's game-tying goal at the end of the first period Monday night since he put a nice pass right on Bruins' defenseman Dennis Wideman's stick. It's not an isolated incident, as he has played poorly all year.
Other youngsters have been conspicuously absent as well. The Brothers Kostitsyn, once viewed as 2/3 of a scoring line, have been pedestrian. Andrei has regressed from his first full season's 53 points. Sergei, the younger of the two, was even sent to Hamilton during the season to punish his poor play and his youthful indiscretion in choosing his associates.
In fact, one of the problems for the Canadiens is youth. Montreal is a city known for three things: the French language, the beautiful women and the excellent nightclubs. For youngsters from Antrim Lake, British Columbia or Novopolotsk, Belarus, the allure of the big city might be a little too much to handle. It happened previously, with budding stars Jose Theodore and Mike Ribero. It could easily happen again with this crop of young players. In fact, the early playoff embarrassment to an old rival might just provide the incentive for Gainey to destroy the team as it currently stands and start from scratch. The way the Canadiens have played this season, it wouldn't be a bad idea.
