) " Bob Gainey believes the pressure surrounding the Montreal Canadiens in their 100th anniversary season can only be a good thing. The team’s executive vice president and general manager met the media in Halifax on Friday to promote a Sept. 22 exhibition game against the Boston Bruins at Metro Centre. (Ted Pritchard / Staff) |  |
Title expectations are high for the 24-time Stanley Cup-champion Montreal Canadiens entering their centennial season.
Bob Gainey says there is nothing wrong with that.
"Expectations are fine," he said. "They need to be there. People need to have them or it can get pretty dismal if you’re a team that never has any expectations."
Montreal’s executive vice president and general manager made the media rounds in Halifax Friday to promote the team’s season-opening exhibition game Sept. 22 against the Boston Bruins at Metro Centre.
The Habs are coming off a 104-point season in 2007-08, tops in the Eastern Conference. They were knocked out in the second round of the playoffs by the Philadelphia Flyers.
"The Canadiens are going into their 100th-anniversary season and we’d like it to be one we could really enjoy and celebrate," said Gainey. "There are no guarantees. That’s what sports is about. But we’ve tried to direct our team to be a little stronger every year for the past three or four years mostly through the maturity of the younger players."
Montreal has only tinkered with the fabric of the hockey club, adding some scoring with former Halifax Mooseheads forward Alex Tanguay (Calgary) and grit with Georges Laraque (Pittsburgh). Right winger Michael Ryder exited to Boston in a move embraced by both club and player.
"Our focus going into the summer was to try to reinforce our group of forwards," said the NHL Hall of Famer, six-time Stanley Cup winner and former member of the AHL’s Nova Scotia Voyageurs. "We needed to replace Michael on our team and that’s where Alex Tanguay came into the equation.
"Some of our younger players really improved last year and made us a much stronger offensive team. We scored perhaps more goals than anybody else in the NHL last year and felt like the fact that many of those guys were not really physically big players, and a number of them European players, that they might be able to use the presence of a big brother. So that was the addition of Georges Laraque."
The defence is virtually unchanged and Carey Price and Jaroslav Halak, along with free-agent pickup Marc Denis, will handle the nets.
One of the last vacancies is a scoring centre who could buttress Saku Koivu and Tomas Plekanec.
The Canadiens believe they remain contenders to acquire unrestricted free-agent Mats Sundin, but Gainey concedes his lines of communication with the long-time Toronto captain have gone cold and he can’t afford to be overly optimistic.
Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia and the New York Rangers all have a reported interest in the 37-year-old Sundin, who had 32 goals and 78 points for Toronto last year.
"There’s been no change in our contact with Mats Sundin about the possibility of him joining our team," he said. "I haven’t heard of any other change either from the other teams or from him that he’s decided he’s going to come back and play."
He said the Habs would be a good fit for Sundin. "He wouldn’t be required to do everything on his own. There’s a variety of other good players who could play beside him."
Gainey said one of the off-season thrusts of Habs’ management has been to tighten up the finances to be in position to take a run at a front-line player.
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