Category Archives: Canadiens

| Canadiens, Opinion

Four Habs Fans … plus one

I have, in the past, been critical of amateur bloggers following pro sports teams. Particularly in the wake of the success of my employer’s Habs Inside/Out website, I just couldn’t fathom how people without access to the team and with daily jobs that might affect their posting schedule could ever really hope to compete for news. Even analysis, it seems, hasn’t been very convincing (though people talking out of their ass about what players the Canadiens should sign and what lines they should put them on is a problem in just about every medium).

But while many of these blogs are long gone from my RSS reader, one is proving me wrong. Four Habs Fans is reminding me that if you can’t be informative, you can at least be funny:

©FHF

©FHF, or is it TFS? Or BGL or GMS or something...

It’s not perfect – they use acronyms for nicknames that makes it hard to follow if you’re new – and it’s rather sexist with the scantily-clad women (not that I … uhh … pay attention to the hotties or anything). But this Photoshop job alone has me singing its praises now.

Okay, maybe not singing. But I’ll offer them a lap dance.

Meanwhile, HIO’s Mike Boone – who also relies more on humour than original breaking news or analysis to create a following – is offering to liveblog Habs games from the home (or bar) of just about anyone with an HDTV and WiFi.

| Canadiens, Opinion

I like Georges Laraque

Georges Laraque and two fans pose boxing-weigh-in-style

Georges Laraque and two fans pose boxing-weigh-in-style

I’m going to come right out and say it: I like Georges Laraque.

When I found out last year that the Canadiens had signed him as a free agent basically as an enforcer to intimidate opposing teams and get into fights, I was disappointed. I’m not a fan of fighting in hockey, and I’m not crazy about goons.

Laraque is still a goon. He’s a fighter, an enforcer, a guy who’s there more for his size and the strength of his fists than the accuracy of his slapshot. But, for better or for worse he lives by a strict, unwritten code that supposedly uses one-on-one fighting to self-regulate against cheap shots that would otherwise target small superstars. And he’s always smiling when he fights, which I found incredibly odd. He finds it amusing when some guy from the other team thinks he can take on Big Georges Laraque. There’s clearly a big difference between Laraque and someone like Chris Pronger or Todd Bertuzzi.

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| Canadiens, Montreal, Opinion, Video

Thanks Saku

I’ll never understand the concept of free agency in sports. Or drafting, for that matter. Sure, it makes the odds even, so that a hockey team from southern California can compete against another from Montreal even though one city has ice and the other doesn’t. But it just makes the whole system seem so fake. Much as I hate to agree with some of the xenophobic francophones who want to cleanse their country of impure races, I feel for them in the thought that a team based in Montreal should have Montrealers on it. Otherwise, what’s the difference between the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs other than the city in which they play their home games. Why should fans here blindly follow the Canadiens, as if location alone gives their team an advantage?

Maybe it’s supposed to be like that. Maybe sports rivalries are supposed to be meaningless to preserve their fun. But it’s hard to think of the idea of a team when people can just come and go as contracts dictate, even sometimes when they don’t want to.

And so, just like that, Canadiens captain Saku Koivu signed a one-year deal with the Anaheim Ducks. The writing was on the wall for at least a week now (though most thought he’d be going to Minnesota to join his brother Mikko), but those crazy logic-defying fans held out hope that he’d still be here next season (at least the ones that don’t irrationally blame him for everything. We’ve now lost our C and both As (Alex Kovalev to the Ottawa Senators and Mike Komisarek to the Toronto Maple Leafs, both pouring salt into the wounds). Next year will see the biggest turnover we’ve seen in a while.

So, like Red Fisher, I will miss our captain, and thank him for his service. He spent his entire NHL career in Montreal, went through a lot (with us living it vicariously through him) and did a lot for our team and our city. He doesn’t speak French, isn’t from here (neither are Kovalev, Komisarek, Andrei Markov, Carey Price, the Kostitsyns, Tomas Plekanec, etc.), but he was an integral part of Montreal and loved by its citizens. He certainly won’t be booed by me next time he comes to town.

We’ll get a new captain, as parents explain to their young children what “salary cap” and “unrestricted free agent” mean, and why those things led to them losing their hero. But our fans will soon go back to irrationally predicting that the Canadiens will win the Stanley Cup next year (with lots of Quebec-born francophone players), because … well, just because.

Life will go on. Because hey, it’s only a game, right?

| Canadiens, Media

Pierre Trudel joins Fanatique.ca

A year after refusing an “insulting” contract renewal at CKAC and a month after his last column at La Presse, Pierre Trudel has joined Fanatique.ca as a star Habs blogger. His first post is a self-introduction. You can also read this old Journal piece to get an idea of who he is.

On his blog, he talks about the Habs and recounts rumours (though at least he describes them as such).

Fanatique.ca is owned by Branchez-Vous, and while not the most spectacular poaching in journalistic history (talk to me when you’ve convinced François Gagnon or Red Fisher to come on board), it is a step toward making BV a serious media outlet in the city.

Now that I’ve posted this, maybe Carl Charest will stop bothering me.

| Canadiens, In the news

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

So a singer, a philanthropist and a media magnate walk into a banker’s office…

Though scarier than the thought of Céline Dion being the permanent national anthem singer or the Journal de Montréal getting exclusives on everything related to the Canadiens is this:

This trio of potential buyers is said to be contemplating a dedicated pay-TV channel in Quebec that would carry Habs games and other hockey-related content as one way to increase revenues from the team.

It’s just an idea, but it’s an idea that would be devastating to RDS.

| Canadiens

Your 2009 Habs playlist

UPDATE: See the 2010 version here.

Since people seemed to appreciate last year’s list, here’s some Habs songs, most courtesy of your local radio stations, to get you in the mood as you prepare for the Habs-Bruins series which starts on Thursday.

And if public sentiment is any indication, our team is going to need all the help it can get. This time they’re No. 1 and we’re No. 8, we’re the ones plagued with injuries and will face each playoff round with the other team having home ice advantage.

In compiling this year’s list, I noticed quite a different tone from last year. In April 2008, the Canadiens were expected to finish out of the playoffs but surprised everyone with their strong season and first-place finish in the East. This year, the expectations were high (especially with the centennial) but a post-All-Star meltdown nearly put the Canadiens out of the playoffs. Some of the songs below reflect that.

I’ll start us off with Annakin Slayd, who produced a very popular video last year. This time he’s back with a French version, which thankfully removes obscures the Journey sample and adds a reference to Alex Tanguay to show it’s current. The production values (thanks to Aviva) are also noticeably better. But the song – and its magic – are still essentially the same.

A similar list is compiled on the Bébé Habs blog, though I’m doing my best below to respect copyright. Links to MP3s are on radio station or artist websites and YouTube links are to official videos only. Please let me know if I screwed up somewhere there or if there’s an iTunes link I should add.

Go Habs Go.

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| Canadiens, Humour, Video

Est-ce que tu vois, toi aussi?

I’ve always been (easily) impressed with the Justiciers’ song parodies (well, most of them anyway), but this one taking on 1000 coeurs debout, the theme for Star Académie (99¢ download, of which I better get a cut for that link), is particularly good. It’s actually the second version, done after the Canadiens’ two-and-a-half-game winning streak forced everyone to jump back on the bandwagon. The first version was much more cynical about the team (the week before, the Justiciers were even more cynical).

You can see more Justiciers videos on their website or directly on their YouTube channel.

| Canadiens, Media

Guy! Guy! Guy! Bye! Bye! Bye!

For those wondering, RDS had the scoop (and more importantly, the Twitter scoop) on Bob Gainey firing Canadiens coach Guy Carbonneau. They’ve cut scheduled programming of extreme winter sports on RDS and replaced it with a feed from its RIS all-sports-news network. A press conference is scheduled for 7pm.

Both RDS.ca and The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out website are experiencing unusually high loads and are noticeably slow.

| Blogosphere, Canadiens, Media

Traffic up at Habs Inside/Out

Habs Inside/Out traffic

Habs Inside/Out, my newspaper’s most successful online venture so far, is seeing 100% traffic increases over last year, according to a recent post from Mike Boone. Those kinds of numbers put all of their other blogs (and mine) to shame, but they are well-deserved because of the efforts put into it by Boone, Dave Stubbs, Kevin Mio and Pat Hickey, who all contribute to bringing breaking news to the site in addition to their day jobs for the newspaper.

| Canadiens, Media

The Great La Presse Habs Scoop of 2009

La Presse scored the jackpot in Friday’s paper when it combined the four things that journalists and their bosses have wet dreams about:

  1. A scoop, a story that nobody else has
  2. A story filled with anonymous sources about a crime boss/drug lord/mafia king
  3. A story about a celebrity scandal
  4. A story about the Canadiens

The news dominated coverage yesterday and today, even as everyone was talking about Alex Kovalev’s performance problems.

Part of that was because of La Presse, whose hockey analysts were dropping hints on every TV sports show they could find Thursday night to say that a huge scoop would appear in the next day’s paper.

The various news sources did all they could to try and match La Presse’s story before it came out, but couldn’t gather enough before publication to put it all together. So while most just waited until it was out and summarized La Presse’s story or re-researched it, Quebecor-owned 24 Heures put out its exclusive story that four Canadiens players had been arrested.

The story, still available in the Google cache, by reporter Maxime Deland, quotes a single anonymous source “very close” to the Canadiens saying four players had been arrested on Thursday night on their return from Pittsburgh.

Of course, no such thing happened, so 24 Heures deleted the story. I found no correction on their website, and the story was not in Friday’s edition of the paper.

The story has gotten so big now we have the second (third?) day stories about whether the media is blowing this out of proportion. This piece at Fanatique summarizes the timeline of stories from the various news outlets, while Yves Boisvert, Patrick Lagacé and Mike Boone defend the media’s insane interest in the Canadiens as a mere reflection of what the fans want to read.

UPDATE (Feb. 26): Pierre Trudel says La Presse did a good job with its scoop… in an article in La Presse.

| Canadiens, Public transit, West Island

STM to add Habs West Island shuttle bus

Thanks to Linda Gyulai’s most excellent CityHallReport Twitter account for tipping me off to the fact that starting Tuesday, the STM will be offering a shuttle service for Canadiens fans in the West Island as part of a partnership with the team and its The Goal is Green campaign.

It’s a one-way shuttle, leaving the Bell Centre 15 minutes after home games, and dropping off at “three specific locations”: Dorval, Pointe-Claire and Fairview.

Regular STM fares apply.

Speaking of the Canadiens, they’re looking for an in-game animator. Must be pretty photogenic and of a “pleasant appearance” and be fluently bilingual.