“Take your game in the game!” Shortly after taking office, Martin St-Louis released this phrase, perhaps the most famous and overused among several of his amusing phrases.
Almost three years later, the same sentence resonates a little less well, let’s say. In fact, as question marks continue to pile up in the “Flannel” sky, observers and supporters alike are searching for answers.
To find them, it is imperative to understand. Understand certain meanings. “Take your game in the game”, it’s crudely poetic. It’s an icy jargon, a language specific to a colorful coach who, as a player, certainly coined this expression because he came so far to win everything it was possible to win.
But, basically, what exactly does “take your game in the game»? It’s rather difficult for me and those I’ve spoken to about it to find a clear explanation. It’s a formulaic phrase that made an excellent first impression, but which doesn’t age well after 32 months when we have to admit that not many players on the team have yet managed to “take their game in the game».
What I want to say here is that the Canadian and Martin St-Louis excel in the art of the formula, the pre-chewed. It’s very 2024 and I guess some organizational thinkers like it a lot, but the Canadiens aren’t a TikTok account, they’re a National Hockey League club.
So that the followers of young audiences like and follow well-formulated clips, I think that sooner or later performances on the ice will have to walk the talk. It can’t last forever with one concept sentence and three live translations per week at press briefings. The wall will eventually collapse.
At the same time, you are mistaken if you believe that I am giving in to panic by asking to throw the plan into the shredder and by calling for death to reconstruction.
As I am not a decision-maker, but an observer, I made the effort to understand the objective and accept the plan. I did it by telling myself that it would be nice to measure the evolution, the slow rise towards an imposing and lasting luster, a luster of yesteryear, fewer consecutive Stanley Cups, other times, other mores oblige.
However, when I notice a regression, even if it is only minimal, then I no longer buy! What I see this season after seven games deserves alarm bells.
This team shows no progress from last year… Worse. Individually, some young players, led by Xhekaj, are showing significant regression. This is not normal.
So, we must look for the reasons for this stagnation that looks like a decline and express them as an observer if we cannot advise them as a leader.
That’s what I’m trying to do this week. I know this upsets some of you, most of you with fake identities and no photos on your profile. I greet here the spin doctors responsible for keeping the wall in place, selling the plan beyond repeated defeats through social media.
Anyway, back on the ice. The team shows no structure, does not seem to have a strategy specific to each opponent it meets, the patterns of exiting the zone on the numerical advantage are palpable, but at five against five, what exactly is the situation?
Impossible to determine. For what? Because we play Russian roulette in our territory, we live from permutations to migrations, from zone defense in man-to-man mode. Result: there are so many possible assignments at the same time that no one manages to find a chair to steal, to borrow another expression from Martin.
Don’t look from noon to 2 p.m. for why there are so many individual appearances of more than 90 seconds on the ice; we spend our time chasing the puck in our zone with the look of the frightened deer trying to cross the metropolitan boulevard at 5:20 a.m.
So… structure, structure, structure please. And then work, work, work, work. That last bit worries me a lot less. The Canadian has a good group of players. When they are clear about what is being asked of them, they will execute. And then we can really blame them. In the meantime, the responsibility is shared at least 50-50 with the coaches.
Until then, the Canadian looks like a vulgar formula in the pay of the business world of 2024, the one where we like to launch something in cross promotion that covers 360 degrees. In this sense, what we see on the ice rhymes admirably with the organization’s infomercial aimed at moderating expectations: reconstruction! Hoping that there won’t be a season 2 with the addition of the word “eternal”.
