“It hasn’t been a long, calm river and at times, it felt like we were living on a television show,” general manager Marc Bergevin said after being fired.
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What trip!
That’s the best way to describe what happened to the Canadiens in 2021.
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Due to COVID-19, training camp only started on January 3 and lasted only 10 days with no preseason games. That didn’t bode well for the Canadiens after general manager Marc Bergevin made several offseason additions, including goalie Jake Allen, forwards Josh Anderson, Tyler Toffoli and Corey Perry, along with defender Joel Edmundson.
There wasn’t long for new players to bond with the team and find their roles, but the Canadiens were off to a great start. They opened the season with a 5-4 overtime loss to the Maple Leafs in Toronto on January 13, but after 10 games they had an impressive 7-1-2 record and things were looking great.
But that’s when it started to fall apart.
The Canadiens were 2-4-2 in their next eight games and Bergevin decided to fire head coach Claude Julien and associate coach Kirk Muller on February 24, replacing them with Dominique Ducharme and Alex Burrows, respectively.
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“We believe our team can achieve high standards and the time has come to make those changes,” Bergevin said at the time.
Carey Price was also struggling with a 5-3-3 record, an average of 2.95 goals against and a .893 save percentage at the time of the layoffs.
Ducharme, who was in his third season as an assistant coach with the Canadiens, didn’t even have a full practice before his first head coaching game, a 6-3 loss to the Jets in Winnipeg on February 25.
The Canadiens and Price continued to fight, and Bergevin fired goalkeeping coach Stéphane Waite during the second half of a 3-1 victory over the Senators at the Bell Center on March 2.
Ducharme tried to install his system on the fly without much practice time and it didn’t help when Joël Armia and Jesperi Kotkaniemi were included on the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol list on March 22, shutting down the Canadiens for a week and forcing the postponement. of four sets. What was already a condensed schedule became even more difficult with the Canadiens forced to play their last 25 games in 44 days.
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The Canadiens limped into the playoffs, going 15-16-7 with Ducharme as head coach and finishing fourth in the All-Canadian North Division with a 24-21-11 record.
The Canadiens would meet the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round of the playoffs, marking the first time the two rivals from the Original Six met in the postseason since 1979. The Canadiens swept the Maple Leafs in their quarterfinal series in 1979 on his way to winning his fourth consecutive Stanley Cup.
This time, the Canadiens won Game 1 2-1 in Toronto, but then lost the next three and it looked like their season was over. But Price had found his game at the time and the Canadiens won the next two games in overtime with scores of 4-3 and 3-2 with Nick Suzuki and Jesperi Kotkaniemi, respectively, scoring the winning goals. In Game 6 at the Bell Center, the Leafs outshot the Canadiens 13-2 in overtime, but couldn’t beat Price. The Leafs outshot Montreal 31-23 in Game 7 at Toronto, but Price again excelled and the Canadiens won 3-1.
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Either from the momentum or the Ducharme system starting to click, or a combination of both, the Canadiens went on a streak and swept the Winnipeg Jets in their second-round series before beating the Vegas Golden Knights in six games, advancing to the final of the Stanley Cup. for the first time since his last championship in 1993. Ducharme tested positive for COVID-19 before Game 3 of the series against Las Vegas with assistant Luke Richardson taking over as head coach for the remainder of that series and for the first two Stanley games. Cup final against the Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Game 6 victory over Las Vegas was very special because it came on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day and sparked a wild party outside the Bell Center, which had a limited capacity of 3,500 inside due to COVID-19 guidelines. Bergevin, dressed in his lucky red suit, celebrated by hugging the players as they came off the ice and even giving Price a kiss on top of his mask.
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But the wild ride was about to come to an end against the Lightning, who were simply too good for the Canadiens and won the series in five games on July 7 to take the Stanley Cup for the second consecutive season.
After a short offseason, the Canadiens opened training camp for the 2021-22 season on September 22 minus several key players from their playoff careers who either moved to other teams or were injured. The list included Price, Captain Shea Weber, Edmundson, Perry, Phillip Danault, Paul Byron, and Kotkaniemi.
After starting 6-15-2, owner / president Geoff Molson decided to fire Bergevin and hire Jeff Gorton as the new executive vice president of hockey operations.
In a statement after being fired during his 10th season on the job, Bergevin said: “You won’t be surprised to hear me say that it hasn’t been a long, calm river, and at times, it felt like we lived on a river. TV show. “
It certainly did in 2021.
Reference-montrealgazette.com