Jack Todd: Changes and concerns abound as the Habs approach the new season

The deck is stacked against the Montreal Canadiens as they try to improve last season, but they have surprised us before.

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For the past 19 months, the title of the long war poem by English poet WH Auden “The Age of Anxiety” has been in the back of my mind, like a bell ringing in the distance.

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Like those who endured war, we live in our own Age of Anxiety, compounded by the all-too-genuine threats of fire and flood. the plague and nuclear war and the false threats caused by algorithms and misinformation on social media.

This world is enough to break even the strongest, or perhaps it is the strongest who break first, because they are less likely to bow before the storm.

The massive wave of support that has poured in from around the world in the wake of the news that Canadiens goalkeeper Carey Price had entered the NHL player assistance program represents more than empathy for Price and his family It is a symptom of our growing understanding of the mind and the many ways it reacts to the anxiety that most of us feel.

Would such a reaction to the news about Price or Jonathan Drouin have been the same 10 years ago or even two years ago, before the pandemic? I do not think so.

The times change. We changed. While we admired Price for his brilliance during the race to the Stanley Cup final last summer, while we admired his courage in speaking out on Aboriginal issues, we now admire his courage in seeking help.

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What matters now is that Price gets the help he needs, whether it takes a month or a year. Human first, player second.

The pressure on Price has been there since he was a 15-year goalie, playing a single stint for the Tri-City Americans in 2003. Since then, his life has been a mess of high-pressure situations, from the Olympics to the Stanley Cup Final.

Through it all, the laconic Westerner has been a tower of strength, standing tall in the fold and in his corner of the room, where he faced the crowd of howling reporters like a man enduring novocaine-free root canal. Now he is faced with something completely different, although we do not know what it is exactly.

Price will get all the time you need. The club will start the season without him and there can be no pressure for his return.

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What will happen when the album falls into a new season? The absence of Shea Weber, Phil Danault and Price means that it is as difficult to predict as the direction of the wind. Having scraped the stars with a dizzying playoff run last summer that brought them painfully close to a parade, the Canadiens now face the very real possibility of missing the playoffs altogether.

New faces and lost faces aside, when the Canadiens take the ice against the Maple Leafs in Toronto on Wednesday, it will be 98 days since Tampa goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevskiy topped Price and the Lightning lifted their second straight Stanley Cup. .

If you’re a nurse, a 98-day vacation seems like a ticket to paradise. For professional athletes, a break of less than 100 days (minus another month for the long and tedious training camp) is barely enough time to hit the reset button.

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The Canadiens and Lightning, therefore, will be an extended laboratory experiment for the effects of a short offseason on the minds and bodies of elite athletes, especially those who play contact sports.

The Canadiens have also endured an offseason that has been a prolonged slump, since the departure of Joel Bouchard, Danault’s signing in Los Angeles, the news that Weber would not be playing this season and that his career may be over and the whispers of the General manager Marc Bergevin at Indeed, he would honor his contract balance throughout this season without committing to more.

Then came the biggest mistake of Bergevin’s career, the decision to recruit convicted sex offender Logan Mailloux, followed by Geoff Molson’s clumsy crisis management efforts. However, as disgusting as that episode was, it is unlikely to affect the club on ice in the least. The absence of two key players and their world goalkeeper is another matter.

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Initially, at least, Canadians are likely to have a harder time keeping the puck out of their own network. That’s where the absence of the excellent control center, stud defense, and superstar goalie is going to have the most effect.

They should be able to mount a real offensive threat with Christian Dvorak, an improvement over Jesperi Kotkaniemi, at least in the short term, Drouin coming back in great shape and Mike Hoffman, once he’s healthy, to inject some life into the power play.

It will be enough? Put it this way: We all bet against the Canadiens who would make the playoffs last spring, then confident they couldn’t beat the mighty Maple Leafs, doubtful against the Winnipeg Jets, and confident their career would end against the big, strong and tough Las Vegas Knights. .

In each case, the experts got it wrong, so I’ll take a chance and say that the 2021-2022 Canadiens will make the playoffs.

After? We will burn that bridge when we get to it.

@ jacktodd46

[email protected]

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Reference-montrealgazette.com

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