What the Puck: Going into playoffs, Habs fans are more excited than they’ve been for a long long time

Canadiens supporters have had a rough past 30 years, but they have a new spring in their step as they look forward hopefully to years of playoff fun.

It’s been a long long time coming.

It is impossible to exaggerate the level of excitement among Habs fans just days ahead of the start of the first round of the playoffs with Nos Canadiens set to face off against the Tampa Bay Lightning beginning this weekend.

There is of course already much debate about how this young Canadiens team will fare against the battle-worn playoff-seasoned Tampa outfit. But that discussion is for another day for most fans.

Right here right now, supporters of le bleu blanc rouge are just so pumped to finally have a team that is at the very least in the conversation as a team that might win something in the postseason. This is a new thing for us.

I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that the start of these playoffs is generating more buzz than at any other time since 1993. In fact I’d argue there’s more hype this year than there even was in ’93. But we could argue that one. What isn’t up for debate is the notion that this is the greatest moment for fans since the last year the Canadiens won the Cup.

Think about it for a second. When was the last time the Habs were entering The Real Season with such a stacked lineup? Cole Caufield scored 51 goals, the first Canadien to hit the 50-goal plateau since Stéphane Richer way back in 1990. Nick Suzuki ended the season with 101 points, the first Hab to cross the 100-point mark since Mats Naslund in the 1985-1986 season! Suzuki is also, astonishingly enough, the first Canadiens captain ever to hit the 100-point plateau! It was also a breakout season for Juraj Slafkovsky, who finally became the power forward everyone had been dreaming of him morphing into, and he underlined that transformation with 30 goals.

Meanwhile Lane Hutson tied Larry Robinson’s record for the most assists from a Canadiens defenceman in a single season, with 66. The crazy thing is this is only Hutson’s second season in the NHL. He is also unquestionably among the top five best defencemen in the league. Then there’s rookie phenom Ivan Demidov. Sure, he won’t win the Calder Trophy simply because Matthew Schaefer has had such an unbelievable season. But with 19 goals and 62 points, Demidov was the leading rookie points-getter as of Wednesday afternoon. And everyone knows this is just the beginning with the too-talented 20-year-old Russian winger.

But it’s not just the achievements this year that have fans salivating. It’s the fact that all of these dynamic young players are going to be with the team for years to come. Caufield is signed until 2031; Suzuki 2030; Slafkovsky 2033; Hutson 2034. Demidov still has to sign his long-term deal but obviously it’s coming.

A Habs team with so many young stars signed long-term is something fans haven’t seen since … well since forever. Really. You’d have to go back to the 1970s.

So folks here are positively exhilarated, with good reason. And the electric mood among the fan base is heightened even further given that they’ve had to live through 30 years of teams that were hard to get excited about. When I started writing the What the Puck column in January of 2016, people soon began complaining that I was too negative and my response was always the same: I’m grumbling because the team isn’t very good and any self-respecting fan should be grumbling along with me.

Yes, 2014 had the makings of a magic playoff run, until Chris Kreider ran Carey Price out of the rink, but overall the Marc Bergevin era was as flat as a week-old open can of Molson Canadian. The 2021 COVID playoff spring was also a blast, but that was a terrible regular season by any definition and that was not a team with a future.

The less said about the late 1990s/early 2000s Canadiens teams, the better. The brutal reality is that ever since Serge Savard was fired four games into the 1995-1996 season, Montreal has not been a top-tier team. Now it is and it is likely going to be for years to come.

So yeah, it’s been rough for the devotees. I know, it’s harder to be a Toronto Maple Leafs supporter. They’ve had nearly 60 years of suffering. But it’s not the same. The Leafs are expected to be bad. Ever since the Canadiens won 17 of their 24 Cups between 1955 and 1993, having the best team is the bar, not winning a series. People here have never been satisfied with anything less than at least a berth in the Cup final. Leafs fans can go home happy with much less.

At the end of the Bergevin era, there was a danger that the fans here were going to go the way of the Toronto supporters and start accepting mediocrity. But then Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes arrived and reminded us that that wasn’t the Montreal way. Fans lived through a couple of rough years as the team rebuilt from scratch and the folks in the seats and watching at home accepted defeat only because they were confident that the new bosses were constructing something special.

Now comes the payoff. Maybe not a Cup but a place at the grownup’s table. So yeah, fans are ecstatic about that, as well they should be.

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