Montreal Canadiens Hit The Ice For First Time Since NHL Season Paused

The Montreal Canadiens had a handful of players take to the ice yesterday for the first time since March.

The Montreal Canadiens were last on the ice together on March 10. They lost 4-2 to the Nashville Predators that night. Two days later, the sports calendar was thrown into chaos and everything was put on hold until further notice.

Since then, we have heard plenty of rumours about how long the NHL would be paused and what the league will look like when it returns. Eventually, the league came to an agreement on a 24-team return to play plan that includes the top eight team earning byes into the playoffs and the next 16 teams taking part in play-in series to earn their own berths in the postseason.

This return to play scenario included a few phases before we see game action. The Montreal Candadiens finally began phase two yesterday when a handful of their players took to the ice in Brossard.

There aren’t many of the team’s players still in the Montreal area during this global pandemic. Forwards Jonathan Drouin, Paul Byron, Charles Hudon and Laurent Dauphin as well as goaltender Michael McNiven are in town and they were the five players that skated at the team’s practice arena.

As part of the NHL’s return to play rules, teams are allowed to have groups of six or less on the ice together for “socially distant” workouts. This will continue to be the protocol until the start of training camp which is tentatively slated to begin on July 10. That is just over three weeks from today, so we should start seeing more and more Habs players heading back to Montreal in the next week.

If everything goes according to plan, the players would have a three week training camp which would wrap up at the end of July. That means we could see the Canadiens taking on the Pittsburgh Penguins in the play-in series as early as July 31.

So, we are still more than six weeks away from seeing the Canadiens actually play a game. But it was still a nice sight to see a few players flying around the ice and firing pucks at the net with the Habs sweaters on. A few more weeks of this before training camp begins, and then a few more weeks before we get to the good stuff.