Montreal in Technicolor

This blog is going to be about everything that comes into my head. Probably boring for most people, but if one person ever reads this i'll be so fucking honored i'll buy them a cupcake.

About myself, female, 21, university student in politics and economics so expect a little talk about that. I'm a musician and music lover (like 99.6% of the planet) and i love hockey (go habs!).

I'm also a part-owner of Elektrek clothing! (follow us on twitter @elektrek).

Tonight's blog: Why The Canadiens will Not Make It Past The First Round (Part 1)

I love them ok, I really do. But as i sit here and write this, I'm trying really hard to not sound like the Antichambre panelists incessant yelling or the "jumping off the bandwagon so hard I broke my face" crowd either. But these Habs are just not going to cut it after Round 1. We're small, fine whatever. I don't think that's the answer. Halak or Price, whatever, we're blessed to have 2 great, young goalies. Ask the Flyers how a lack of goaltending is doing for them. Strength? Conditioning? Injuries? Power Play? Here are my first 5 reasons. The next five will come after the Panthers game, I want to see if we bounce back.

10. Injuries. Alright, fine, every team has had them. But of all the teams that have had them, the ones that have lost the most man games are the ones whose game has suffered. See the Red Wings, Edmonton, and then the Habs. We lost Cammalleri, Pouliot, Gionta, Gomez, Spacek, Bergeron, Andrei Kostitsyn for varying amounts of time, and it definitely cost us SOME games. I mean, all due respect to Mathieu Darche and Tom Pyatt, but they definitely aren't filling that void up in the medium to long term.

9. Lack of a true #1 centre. I love Scott Gomez as a player, HATE his contract. I won't go into it because it's been repeated ad-nauseam by every armchair GM and reporter out there. He's a premier playmaker, I would say a little less talented than Marc Savard in that area but infinitely better than some other centres in terms of playmaking skill (Marleau, better size but Scott is a better playmaker, Bozak (hahaha), Stajan (whose Calgary's freaking #1). However, Scott Gomez is small, does the same move every time he gets into the zone with varying success and refuses to ever shoot the puck. For 8$ million, we should be getting significantly more production. Tomas Plekanec? Great regular season player, I'm hoping he improves on his successive horrible playoff performances. We don't have a Getzlaf, Backstrom, Toews, Zetterberg, Carter, Richards, or even a Kesler! We don't have any centres in our farm system either who are real difference makers. This is a problem now, and it will be in the future.

8. Slow and old defense. This has been a problem throughout the season for me. Watching Hal Gill handle any 5 on 5 time is seizure inducing, same for Bergeron, and Spacek is the King of turnovers. Hamrlik and Spacek are way too old to be a second line pairing playing those kinds of minutes. We cannot expect them to be playing these minutes and not make mistakes, but that is Gainey's fault for not trying to get someone younger than Spacek. Markov is excellent, and O'Byrne is developing nicely. Gorges is a warrior and a little undersized but rarely makes huge gaffes (See: Spacek, Jaroslav). What we need for defense is mobility and size. Replace Gill with Rob Scuderi (his old defense partner in Pittsburgh), Spacek with Beauchemin (offense and a hard hitter) and Bergeron with Dennis Grebeshkov (young and excellent offensive star floundering in Edmonton). All of a sudden, we're faster, younger and a little bigger. Obviously, it's easy for me to sit here and make these propositions, but you get the idea of what some change can do here.

7. Get bigger on the wings. I absolutely love Brian Gionta, Mike Cammalleri, Andrei Kostitsyn and Benoit Pouliot. They're small for the most part however. Especially BG 21 and MC 13. AK46 and BP57 are fine with size in my opinion. For the 5$ million Gainey spent on Brian Gionta (who is a warrior and I LOVE), wouldn't it have been for the organization to go for someone with size since we have tiny centres? Someone like Dustin Penner, who the other GM's wouldn't have touched with a 10 foot pole before this season. Dustin Byfuglien on a Hawks team desperate for cap space? We need size in the top 6, without it, we're going to be crushed as we were in the two games before the Olympic break with Philly.

6. Enough with the perimeter passing and "jeux de dentelle" on the power plays. The problem here is that the guys got some confidence when the pp was #2 and forgot what made it successful. Passing to Bergeron, he unleashes his only redeeming quality and it either goes in or we pop it in after a scramble. Now, what we do resembles losing the faceoff, regrouping behind Halak, passing to Gomez is he's on the ice, who outdekes 4 guys then passes into the corner. Repeat. Repeat. If we do manage to get it in and set up, after about 55 seconds, we pass around but generally take 1 shot. Stop looking for the perfect play, dirty goals count too! It's not acceptable to have 2 shots on a 5 on 3.

5. Mental preparation. There is something very very wrong here. I'm not by any means a coach or a psychologist, but we either come out impossibly flat and lose the game, or collapse in the last 3 minutes of a game that should have been locked up. We can't always blame the goalie. In tonight's game vs the Sabres, Carey makes 42 saves and we stand by in the last 2 minutes and let them run rampant in our zone. Carey makes a game saver, and instead of clearing, we let them take another 13545345345 shots and eventually one goes in. We're rattled, and instead of calling a timeout, our wonderful coach does nothing at all and they tie it up. This team doesn't focus for an entire 60 minutes, and that is problematic for professional athletes.

Look out for Part 2 tomorrow night! I'm also going to live blog the game (if i can!)