So it’s a hot day in late spring at La Ronde. A crowded Saturday, asphalt melting under your feet, kids shrieking on wild rides, parents thinking they could use a stiff drink.
A criminally cute three-year-old toddles by, gripping a big chocolate ice-cream cone with both chubby hands. Then it happens: He tilts the cone and plop — the ice cream hits the pavement, where it instantly becomes a puddle of chocolate goo mixed with grit, candy wrappers and pigeon poop.
There is an awful pause. His eyes widen. His mouth opens. The kid takes a deep breath and in the next instant, the wail you hear drowns out everything. Even the F1 drivers, doing a hot lap in qualifying at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve next door, hear it and wonder: which car is that?
His face turns fire-engine red. Tears stream down his contorted features. Snot pours from his nose. His dad pleads with him. His mother promises to buy him another cone.
“I don’t want another one,” he shrieks. “I want that one!”
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: A Habs fan in training.
Following Thursday night’s 4-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings, I had to switch off the telephone machine and go to bed. I simply couldn’t take the whining, moaning, bitching and caterwauling on social media for another minute.
They were slagging the first line. They were on Kirby Dach, who is working to get back up to NHL speed after major surgery and a year away from the game. They wondered, five games into the season, if it’s time for a coaching change.
They were even, for the love of Bobby Orr, on Lane Hutson, the 20-year-old rookie who played more than 30 minutes in his seventh NHL game (much of it after Mike Matheson left with an upper-body injury), blocked three shots, made a brilliant backhanded pass to Cole Caufield, skated back to make a brilliant play to defuse a scoring chance for dangerous Kings winger Adrian Kempe and battled much larger players to a standstill in front of his own net.
All that when he wasn’t skittering out of reach of Los Angeles defenders.
Hutson’s crime? He had the puck in excess of four minutes but was unable to set up a goal.
Curiously, for all the whining, I saw zero complaints about the play of veteran centreman Christian Dvorak. As analyst Mike Johnson pointed out on TSN, Dvorak lost two critical defensive zone faceoffs and was doing little except screening Samuel Montembeault on Andreas Englund’s late goal that made it 3-1.
The fans would rather slag Hutson. They appear not to grasp that Hutson is a cheat code — very useful, but effective only when you learn how to use it. Hutson is so far outside the realm of the ordinary that to make full use of his talents, the Canadiens are going to have to build a system around him.
When they weren’t finding fault with Hutson or Dach, the fans were harping on David Reinbacher, because Matvei Michkov has two goals and two assists in four games. Rotten at any time, worse when Reinbacher is out for six months with a bad knee injury.
For those who think draft questions are settled four games into a career, we direct your attention to big No. 11 for the Kings. Anze Kopitar is now in his 19th season and already has three goals and four assists in five games.
When the Canadiens chose Carey Price fifth overall in the 2005 draft, it was barely noticed that the Kings took the Slovenian with the 11th pick. Fans wanted Gilbert Brulé, but in time the argument focused on Price vs. Kopitar. Who would you rather have? The dominating centreman who improves your team in every facet of the game, or the lights-out goaltender?
You can make an argument either way. Both players are headed for the Hall of Fame, but Kopitar is still building on a career that now stands at 1,378 games played with 422 goals, 796 assists and a plus-344 to go with two Stanley Cups, both won in seasons when he led the playoffs in scoring.
I would go with Kopitar over Price, in part because he has been a class act all the way. I’ve seen videos sent by a Croatian friend whose nine-year-old daughter has attended Kopitar’s hockey camps in Slovenia three times.
In the past, I’ve heard complaints about NHL stars who barely show up at the camps that bear their names. Kopitar isn’t like that. There is the towering superstar down on his knees helping a kid adjust her hockey equipment or patiently leading her through a skating drill.
Still, I recognize that there is an argument in Price’s favour. The point is that we’re nearly 20 years on from the 2005 draft and we haven’t settled Price vs. Kopitar, much less Reinbacher vs. Michkov from 2023.
As for the 2024-2025 Canadiens, this is a rebuild, remember? For all the squawking, this team is barely more than three years removed from a Stanley Cup final, so I have three words of advice:
Patience. Patience. Patience.
Twitter: jacktodd46