It has been a few weeks now that our favorite team has been eliminated from the playoffs and all I have been hearing on TV from the French media is that we should rebuild the team. I know that we have just had a really terrible and disappointing season for the centennial year, but I don't think it is the right thing to do. If we take a step back and look at the entire situation, we will see that it is not as bad as we think. We don't have a crappy team in Montreal. Just in the first half of the season, we have had our best first half season in twenty or so years! I remember we were in the 4th position in the East, we were only a few points behind Boston that had a phenomenal year. At one point of the season, we were only 5 pts away from them. We could've been 2nd or 3rd if it isn't because of the division leaders rule for the standings. And we were able to accomplish that even with many injuries to our top players, a complete line was not dressed for a big part of the season. Yet, we were still winning our games. This is not because of luck. We have a really good depth to support our star players. They were able to temporally replace players like Koivu, Tanguay, Higgins which is really good already. We should have lost many games while they were out. Our "friends" from the media seems to have forgotten this point and never mentioned it to the public.
But if they are so good, how do you explain the terrible second half of the season one might ask. Well, usually in a season, NHL teams gets about 3-4 major injuries to their players. We are not talking about key players here, but players overall. Now look at the Habs, 3 major injuries to our key players in the first half of the season. Each of them were out for 4-6 weeks. Again, normally, players comes back and the team is healthy again with maybe some minor injuries to some players. But again, not for the Canadiens, as more key players get injured. Robert Lang was out when he was the team's best scorer. Guillaume Latendresse was hurt on the same night, he too was playing excellent hockey with Lapierre. When Tanguay came back from his injury, he was hurt again only after a few games. There was also Bouillon and Laraque. At the end of the season, Markov, again our top scorer was injured. In the playoffs, Schneider and Tanguay. I mean, you see there is a limit to every team's depth, when there is that many injuries in only one season...it is actually a miracle that we were able to get in the playoffs. There is no team in the NHL who can be competitive in those circumstances, let alone get through the first round and beat Boston.
Remember last year when we had an amazing season and finished first. Our team was so exciting to watch. At the start of this season, every expert would agree that the Montreal Canadiens were the team to beat this year. Bob Gainey's new acquisitions of Alex Tanguay, Robert Lang and George Laraque and with essentially the same players, the Habs would be even stronger this year. Now suddenly, after an unfortunate series of injuries which led to this disappointing season, these same experts say that we need to kick all the UFAs out of Montreal and trade all the young prospects we have away. What the hell? They are contradicting themselves. We have waited 5 years to build this team and now you want to rebuild again? Instead, I would give another year or two for this team to mature and then if they are really that bad, we can start over. It doesn't make sense. It would be illogical and stupid to rebuild after only 1 bad year. We will never have a competitive team if we keep on rebuilding forever.
