Canadiens embracing, not tempering playoff expectations

LAVAL-SUR-LE-LAC, Que. — It’s become an annual tradition, and we’re not just referring to the Montreal Canadiens golf tournament.

No, we’re talking about what gets said every year at the season-opening golf tournament, about the tempering of expectations at a time when they most need to be tempered, when fans typically feel best about their team’s prospects — before a single game has been played. That exercise of toning things down almost feels necessary in a hockey-mad market like this, so you come to expect the team’s brass will always go through it from the podiums in front of one of the plush greens of one of the most picturesque golf courses in Quebec.

Last year was no exception. The Canadiens’ company line was about “being in the mix,” and if you’d have run concurrent tape of Canadiens owner Geoff Molson, executive vice president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton, general manager Kent Hughes and coach Martin St. Louis saying those words, it would’ve sounded like the harmonized chorus of a song about tempering expectations.

Thankfully, Gorton kicked off this year’s golf tournament by confirming there’d be no such refrain.

Oh sure, he and the rest of the Canadiens hierarchy cautioned that one of the youngest teams in the league last year got younger over the off-season.

But Molson, Gorton, Hughes and St. Louis all said that youth was somewhat mitigated by the team’s experience over the last few seasons, and none of them flinched at the suggestion the Canadiens should make this year’s playoffs.

Gorton may have taken exception to the word “failure” as a qualifier for missing the post-season, but he did say it would certainly be “a disappointment” if that was the outcome come April.

It sounded a lot less general than what we heard from him last year.

So did this from Gorton: “We all want the playoffs.”

The Canadiens should expect to be in them.

A 70-point, six-foot-four, right-handed, top-pairing defenceman in Noah Dobson was added to a defence corps that already housed the 66-point Calder Trophy winner in Lane Hutson and flashed incredible potential last season. Zachary Bolduc, who had 19 goals as a 21-year-old last season, was brought in from St. Louis to help bolster an emerging forward group that will also now feature budding superstar Ivan Demidov. And it doesn’t appear as though Gorton and Hughes have any intention of standing pat.

“We made a few moves for the team to try to improve our skill,” Gorton said.

He added that he and Hughes will look to make others based on what they see through training camp and the opening of the regular season.

“I think we can be picky (as) to what’s next, what we need,” Gorton said, outlining a luxury he and Hughes haven’t really had since embarking on this rebuild three-and-a-half years ago.

They couldn’t be selective about what they needed when they were moving contracts out at the start. They were volume shooting in the asset-collection phase, aiming to keep the team somewhat competitive while setting the foundation for it to hopefully become a long-term contender. They had no choice but to look far down the road and avoid looking too closely at what was directly in front of them.

But now Gorton and Hughes can focus more on the present, and on the precise moves that will immediately make the Canadiens more competitive.

It is the players who put them in that position at this juncture. The players of the Canadiens’ core grew together. They suffered together, learned how to play together, learned how to problem-solve together, and then learned how to win together, finally experiencing moderate success together last year.

Now they’re ready for more.

“From management, coaches, players, I think we all have the same belief and the same goal in mind, and we’re really trying to build something special here, and I think we’ve been able to do that the last few years and we’ve acquired a lot of great talent,” said Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki. “It’s about putting that all together.”

What it’s really about is everyone believing it should come together now.

The owner says it’s time.

“It’s amazing how fast three or four years go by, but it has been three or four years,” said Molson.

Not that he’s under any illusions about the Canadiens’ ability to immediately contend for the Stanley Cup.

Neither is Gorton. Nor is Hughes.

“Ultimately, we don’t feel like we’re done building our hockey team,” the GM said.

But, just like Gorton, he talked about a different phase of building, and about the excitement that comes with elevated expectations.

“It’s pretty exciting when you show up at the rink and the most important thing is the outcome of that game,” Hughes said. “I think competitive people want to win. My wife would accuse me of wanting to beat my five-year-old in cards. For me personally to go to the rink hoping that we’re winning a hockey game or making the playoffs, yeah, it’s why I took this job…”

St. Louis took his to bring this team to this stage as fast as possible, and he outlined why he believes the Canadiens are ready to progress through it.

“We have really good people. We have a good group of good humans, and I think it starts there,” he said.

He talked about the influx of talent with Dobson, Demidov and Bolduc coming in, and said the continuity of the rest of the group has forged an unbreakable bond.

“Our players really care about one another, and I mean that,” St. Louis said. “I’m not just saying that and throwing these words out there. I really do (mean it), I’ve seen it. And you’ve seen that through the low points of a season, when they’re going through a tough time, how much they rally around each other and help one another and are happy for one another when somebody does something great. It’s a very selfless group, and I love that.”

It’s a very driven group that’s facing higher expectations head-on.

No one who spoke on Monday was looking to cool down the temperature or set the bar lower.

It was refreshing, and the right way to kick off a new season and a new era of Montreal Canadiens hockey.