Dennis Kane’s Excellent Montreal Canadiens Blog

A fellow in Vermont contacted me after finding this site, and sent in this story.  He and I have one major thing in common. We have the same name. 

It should be really interesting to see how the Canadiens rebound from their less-than-stellar performance against Anaheim when the Carolina Hurricanes blow into town.

The Hurricanes are no slouches so far this season, but they’re not setting the world on fire either. Led by Ray Whitney, Eric Staal, and Rob Brind’Amour, this team has so far garnered a 4-2-1 record for nine points. Montreal stands at 5-1-1 for 11 points, so they haven’t exactly left the Canes in their dust.

However, the Canes have a special weapon, like so many great teams in the past have had. Boston had Orr, Edmonton, Gretzky. Detroit, Yzerman, Chicago, Bobby Hull etc. etc.

Carolina has Sergei Samsonov.

You can’t really look at the numbers. Okay, so he has no points and is minus 3 after seven games. But I’ll just bet, by the time the season has wound down, this Russian forward will have accumulated probably four goals and two assists!   

You know, there was a time when Samsonov was a real player - when he was a fresh-faced newcomer in Boston. He had been a primo Junior star in Russia, and in his first year in Boston, he won rookie of the year. But it all went away, never to be seen again, like dinosaurs, or Milli Vanilli.

Samsonov was soon dealt to Edmonton where they paid this underachiever 7.05 million over two years, and of course, he underachieved. From Edmonton it became Chicago, then the minors, and now Carolina, where they’re giving the guy 7.6 million over three years.

Every good young player in the minors, and those in the NHL making much less than Samsonov, must wonder what kind of Houdini tricks this guy knows.

Samsonov was the ultimate failure in Montreal too. In his year there, 2006-07, he notched nine goals and 17 assists in 63 games. He had become the new Vladimir Krutov, which certainly would give Canucks fans something to shudder about.  However, there’s no word on Samsonov’s hot dog eating abilities, which Krutov was a force to be reckoned with during his short stay in Vancouver in 1989. He was labelled Vladimir Crouton.

Montreal really needs this game on Tuesday. Get back to their winning ways. Get back on track. Don’t let Samsonov score.

And I’d like to see Alex Kovalev explode. It’s time. He needs to have a big season, like last year.

 For the longest time when I was a kid, I had no idea Billy Reay played for the Canadiens. I associated him with the enemy, and the enemy only.

The very first time I went to Maple Leaf Gardens, Billy Reay was the guy I could see from my seat in the greys, and he wore a fedora as he stood behind the Leafs bench, coaching his Leafs and trying to beat the Habs.

Of course, lots of men wore fedora’s back then. But he was the only one standing behind the Leafs’ bench.

And I was surprised when I learned when I got a bit older that he had once been a solid player for the Montreal Canadiens.

Reay played left wing in Montreal from 1945 to 1953, winning two Stanley Cups with Montreal in 1946 and  1953. After that, he coached the Leafs from 1957 to 1959, but the interesting thing is, some of the Habs brass wanted to hire him as coach in Montreal in 1955 but decided to go with Toe Blake instead.

So he didn’t get the job with the Habs and ended up with the Leafs a couple of years later in 1957, and two years later was replaced by the feisty Punch Imlach, another guy with a fedora. In 1963 he began coaching the Chicago Blackhawks and remained there until 1977.

Billy Reay holds the honour of inventing one of hockey’s more cherished traditions - raising the arms and stick in celebration after scoring a goal.

But in my mind, he was the guy in the fedora standing behind the Leafs bench who I could see as I looked way down from the greys in Maple Leaf Gardens.

(For all the Brief Beehive Moments, with more in the future, just go to Brief Beehive Moments in categories and click away.)

Waiting for Mats Sundin to figure out what he wanted to do turned sour after about the first month. And finally, in the middle of September, with training camp close to happening, Bob Gainey made his move.

Because I’m sure Gainey was even more sick of the Sundin thing than we were.

So he went out yesterday and landed centre Robert Lang from Chicago, and now the team is set for training camp with all the pieces in place, and scoring Lang instead of Sundin isn’t that bad a thing at all.

It’s all strength down the middle now, with Lang, Saku Koivu, Tomas Plekanec, Maxim Lapierre, and Kyle Chipchura.

Robert Lang’s been around. He’s 37 now, and has played with six previous teams, LA, Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, and Chicago, and was even Alex Kovalev’s centreman in Pittsburgh. He’s a playmaker who averages 50 points a year, and is going to be, in my estimation, a key player with the Habs.

This means the Canadiens are now a mix of older and young, of experience throughout, with Carey Price beginning his second full season.

The Canadiens gave up a second-round draft pick in 2010, which is fine. Because this is a team gunning for all the marbles this year, their 100th season, and the time is ripe.

This Lang thing puts me in a good mood. I’ve got big expectations for him. They say he might he play alongside Kovalev, just like in the old days. And he seems really happy to come to Montreal, which is of the utmost importance. “You never want to get traded or have to move your family,” he said, “but I think it’s going to be a great situation. It’s a great hockey town.”

Of course it is, Robert. It’s the greatest hockey town on the planet. You’re walking into a great thing, and I know you’re 37 years old, but you now belong to a historic and legendary team and you’re going to do great.

Welcome aboard, Robert. Wear the CH with pride.

ALSO:

Patrice Brisbois has resigned with the Habs and this is good too. Brisebois, mistakes or not, is a classy guy with something to offer, but unless there’s an injury from another blueliner, he won’t see tons of ice time. 

And this is another guy who wants to play in Montreal and had hoped that Gainey would resign him so he could stay. And he may even pop the odd power play goal.

Even in 1934 the Boston Bruins were a dastardly bunch. Of course, that’s not anything new. Every year they’re a dastardly bunch.

Why is that? Does it have something to do with the Babe Ruth curse, or trading Bobby Orr to Chicago?  I think it’s something only schooled professionals might be able to figure out.

For example, in 1934, Bruins defenceman Eddie Shore clubbed Toronto’s Ace Bailey over the head. In fact, he clubbed him so hard, he ended Bailey’s career by fracturing his skull.  But worse than that, he almost ended the poor guy’s life.

It was such a terrible situation that later that same year, a charity game between the Leafs and the league’s best players was held in Toronto to help the Bailey family, and $23,000 was raised.

And this was the beginning of the annual NHL all-star game. 

When Shore did this to Bailey, my father was 14 years old, and he felt bad about what had happened. So he wrote a little get-well letter to Bailey while the player lay between life and death in a Toronto hospital.

A while later, a letter arrived for my dad, and it was from Bailey’s wife, thanking him for his kind thoughts.

And what happened to the letter?

It disappeared when he went into the army, never to be seen again, he explained. Must have got thrown out by his mother, he added.

Why do mothers throw out their kids’ good stuff, like hockey cards, baseball gloves, favourite t-shirts that might only have a few holes in it, and letters from Ace Bailey’s wife?

Mothers might not be as dastardly as the Bruin Bruins, but they throw out good stuff.

 This is a set of Sherriff/Salada hockey coins from 1961-62. I’ve had these since I was eleven years old. They came in Jello and potato chips, and I pressured my mom to buy handfuls of Jello instead of just one or two. So we had a kitchen cupboard with lots of open boxes of Jello in it. I also ate more potato chips than any one human should possibly eat.

At school we would play closest to the wall, just like hockey cards, and I was devastated if my hoard of coins had dwindled. But on the other hand, if I went back to class after recess with dozens more than I had started out with, then all was right with the world. I think it was kind of like having sex before I really knew what sex was.

You could send away to the company for the shields, which I did, but after putting them in their holes and trying to hang them on the wall, most would fall out because they didn’t fit well. So I added small amounts of glue to the backs. When you see these coins in their shields on ebay, which you don’t see very often, most have been glued like mine.

These plastic hockey coins began the year before, in 1960-61 and I had a bunch of them years ago, but not anymore. They also came out as metal coins in 1962-63, and I still have the full set of these.  And there were no shields available for these other years.

The coins made a comeback in 1967, but I don’t think they became all the rage like they were in the earlier years. These later coins have become quite rare and valuable because, I suppose, there just weren’t that many.

Baseball and football also had their own coins, as did old cars and airplanes. But it’s the hockey coins that I cherished the most. 

They should bring back hockey coins for the modern generation. Maybe they’d get kids away from computer games for awhile.