Montreal Canadiens: Whose Idea Was It To Play The Same Team Every Night In The Preseason?

The Montreal Canadiens are finally going to play their final preseason game of the season tonight. Every year, hockey fans are excited to see the preseason arrive, but they are usually happier to see it end. That may be more true than ever before with the team still winless.

The games are usually filled with players who are obvious minor leaguers, perhaps even career minor leaguers, a handful of NHL veterans who don’t really seem to care, and a couple of prospects who flash a bit of skill.

The systems are flawed, the defence is erratic and those fourth and fifth string goalies leave a lot to be desired. But, it finally ends tonight with a game against, obviously, the Ottawa Senators yet again.

Canadiens 4th preseason game against Senators is a bit much

I mean, did the Habs even play anyone else this preseason? This will be their 8th game of the exhibition schedule, and 4th against the Senators. They had two others against the Toronto Maple Leafs, one versus the Winnipeg Jets and their first preseason game was against the New Jersey Devils.

Did the schedule maker think we were doing an All-Canadian division again? There was a time when playing just the Maple Leafs and Senators was necessitated by travel restrictions and border shutdowns.

But an infamously unvaccinated Robbie Ray is starting a playoff baseball game for the Seattle Mariners as they visit his former team, the Toronto Blue Jays this afternoon.

Couldn’t the Buffalo Sabres or Boston Bruins made a trip up? If the Jets were going to travel all the way to Montreal, why not play a pair of game on consecutive nights with drastically different lineups?

Making the odd schedule worse if the fact the Habs will play the Senators for the 4th time in eight days. This is their third consecutive preseason game against Ottawa to close out ther exhibition schedule.

This late in the preseason means the roster has been drastically cut down and the same lineups are pretty much being used every night. Professional hockey players facing off four times in basically one week in meaningless games could only lead to contempt.

And that is exactly what has happened. Senators plays keep diving and taking shots at Habs players, and Arber Xhekaj keeps beating up Senators players, and now Ottawa’s head coach is in a tizzy.

After the latest preseason meeting between these two clubs, Sens head coach DJ Smith was irate when meeting the media, saying that he would have a lineup ready to deal with the rough stuff in the next game, which is tonight.

The final preseason game is the last chance for NHL teams to get ready for the real thing. Most teams will ice something that looks just like their regular season lineup.

Tonight, the Senators will be putting a lineup together that looks more like something you would see on the movie Slap Shot or the dreadful movie Goon.

While the Habs are icing basically their healthy regular lineup, getting one last look at who will make the final cut, the Sens are apparently gearing up for a brawl.

Instead of getting one more look at newcomers like Alex Debrincat or Claude Giroux, the Sens had to make room for Mark Kastelic and Scott Sabourin.

Kastelic and Sabourin combined for 187 penalty minutes between the NHL and (mostly) AHL last season. On a team with a deep group of forwards, they have zero chance of cracking the NHL roster to begin the season, but will be playing tonight in a game the Senators clear deem meaningless.

Should (when) anything violent happens, you can blame the Sens coach if you want, but the schedule maker putting these teams on the same ice so many times in so few days made no sense from day one.

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