Todd: Canadiens’ success shaped by belief they’re part of something bigger
If there’s one thing that is striking about this young Canadiens team, it’s their togetherness. The mutual support, the shared joy in winning, the resilience that comes from backing one another at the toughest moments.
Everyone notices it, even fans of other teams and some of our more thick-headed analysts. There’s a buoyant delight in simply playing hockey and playing it well that you don’t always see, even in the best teams.
There are bound to be conflicts. You take a couple of dozen athletic young men and throw them together under extremely stressful circumstances for nine months at a stretch, and there’s bound to be tension. Perhaps someone will write a book revealing that nice guy Mike Matheson was really the Dark Lord of the Room, with Lane Hutson and Cole Caufield as his enforcers — but I don’t think so. With the 2025-26 edition of the Habs, what you see is what you get. That’s remarkable, because it would be hard to find a more disparate bunch of critters this side of the Bronx Zoo — once the title of a book about the famously disunited Yankees.
Alexandre Texier, who scored the winning goal in Tampa Wednesday, hails from Saint-Martin-d’Hères, a suburb of Grenoble in the French Alps.
Jakub Dobes, who stopped 38 of 40 shots to hold off the Lightning in Game 5, is a native of Ostrava in Czechia and the 136th pick in the 2020 draft.
Phillip Danault, who shook off a bloody nose to play the last 3:31 of that game with his club under siege, is a home boy from Victoriaville.
Lane Hutson, who made the almost no-look pass to spring Texier, is from Holland, Mich. — location for a deft little chiller called Holland, starring Nicole Kidman.
So it goes. For a good part of the season, the second line was made up of a Slovakian, a Finn born in Sweden and a Russian. It shouldn’t work the way it does. And yet, in 55 years as a fan and 32 years covering the Canadiens in one way or another, I have never seen a more united team.
From owners to players, from GMs to agents to fans to ink-stained wretches like myself, everyone connected to the sports world professes to believe in the team concept. “There’s no ‘I’ in team,” remember?
Horse patootie. GMs build their teams around overpaid “superstars,” then wonder why they don’t win. Fans exalt certain players to the moon and back, then turn on them savagely when they don’t deliver. Entire leagues are built on the brands of a handful of players who become household names: Michael Jordan. Wayne Gretzky. Pat Mahomes. Shohei Ohtani. Then when you get a group that is really a team winning games, folks shake their heads and wonder how this could happen.
How could it be that the youngest team in the playoffs has outplayed the experienced, superstar-laden Tampa Bay Lightning? Don’t they know they aren’t old enough? Experienced enough? Good enough? How could they be so resilient? Why do they keep bouncing back like a kid on a pogo stick?
Because they’re a team, that’s why. Because they support each other to a degree unimaginable in Toronto or Ottawa. Because a group of young stars signed long contracts for less than they might have made individually because they believe they’re part of something bigger — and they are.
Will it be enough? As of this writing, roughly a dozen hours before puck drop for Game 6 Friday, I believe that it is. They remind this old sports fan of the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates of Willie Stargell and “We Are Family.” The Pirates won a World Series behind that slogan.
Unless we’re missing something, this is a family devoid of tensions. Jayden Struble and Arber Xhekaj vie for the same spot on the third defensive pair and remain friends. Ditto Dobes and Jacob Fowler. Matheson accepts a different role to make room for the uber-talent that is Hutson.
Part of this, surely, is deliberate. Everyone fits. Brains and character rule. McNasties are as rare on this roster as Stanley Cup parades in Toronto. On the ice, the soft-spoken Nick Suzuki sets the tone. Off the ice, Martin St. Louis does the same. In the front office, Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes might yell at each other in meetings but in practice, they are a model of cohesion.
You can’t force players to bond. Stars and role players alike, they all have to want it. It starts with such vital ingredients as brains, character and humility and grows until you have a model team.
When it matters most, when an honoured, much-loved veteran like Brendan Gallagher is asked to sit for the first four games of the playoffs, he could make a fuss. Instead, he does everything he can to bolster his teammates, then when he returns to the lineup.
That is their superpower. I picked them to win this series in six games and I stand by it. And if they fail, well — they’ve given their fans a helluva season.
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