Richard Wolowicz
So did we miss anything good?
We may have taken a bit of an Easter break, but fret not, gentle reader, French Immersion spent the time nimbly running up and down staircases, shadowboxing in Place des Arts, generally limbering up, muscling up, and resting up for the Habs' impending glorious Stanley Cup run.
As such, we missed the Bronx cheers aimed at our boy Carey after his manful performance against Carolina (our jaundiced view of the Bell Centre's goalie and anthem-booers: Biggest. Jackasses. Ever. Any gathering that routinely shows more pre-game appreciation for Georges Laraque than for Tomas Plekanec is gaspingly ignorant and cannot, under any circumstance, be described as a sophisticated hockey crowd. But we digress.) We also missed Plucky Jaro's consecutive shutouts, which have lifted his team and made him the NHL's first star for the past week - and good thing too, because he had won only one of his previous four starts.
"It feels great," he said, "but it was a team effort."
And that's, uh, it.
Jaro's about as good with quotable quotes as he is handling the puck (speaking of which, goalie coach Pierre Groulx had him fetching dump-ins behind the net at the team's workout today).
It's this blog's oft-stated position that goaltending is not the issue with this team, and that an unnecessary and unhealthy amount of attention has focused on Price v. Halak, or, for that matter, on whether the team has a captain.
That said, let's dwell on this for just a second. Halak has proven fortunate where Price has not (you just know that Van Riemsdyk shot that popped up over him and went wide the other night would have gone in if the other guy had been in net), but since luck generally favours the well-prepared, Halak deserves considerable credit and praise.
Yet for all the love bestowed on Plucky Jaro, virtually none has spilled over onto Groulx, who has been the guy holding the whistle and clipboard as the Habs' goaltending pair has risen into the top NHL's top third.
Groulx, who is a Jacques Martin protégé from his Ottawa and Florida days, rightly claims some credit for making Craig Anderson into a certified number one, and it seems to us that he should get some for Halak's breakthrough year (and for his work with Price, who has mostly played brilliantly over the past month, even if the hockey gods have decided he's no longer allowed to win).
So well done Pierre, you get a highly prestigious and not-the-slightest-bit sarcastic gold star from FI.
Beyond all that guff, goalie heroics are only part of the meta-narrative in this town on a meh spring Monday.
Because, math geeks and geekettes, it turns out Vos Glorieux have a 98.2 per cent chance of making the playoffs (as per sportsclubstats.com), and a 62 per cent chance of finishing sixth, the position they occupy today.
So it's as good as in the bag. Happy Days! Time to pop open a bottle of over-taxed plonk from the SAQ!
Or not.
The Canadiens have exactly been tearing it up, having won three of their last eight contests.
But they only need three points to officially cement their playoff status - even if they don't pick that many up, it says here they'll still make it because Flyers and Rangers will be beating each others' brains out this week.
So cue the imminent loss to the Islanders of, er, Long Island, tomorrow night.
Regular perusers will have noted we like ending on a blue note here at FI, so here's another friendly figure for you to remember as everyone lays their wagers for the playoffs: if the Habs can get to three goals in a game, they are virtually unbeatable this year.
As our mucker Arpon Basu laid out on his Daily Hab-it blog this weekend, the CH are 33-3-3 this year when that happens (top five in the league in terms of winning percentage), and only 6-29-5 (seventh-worst) when it doesn't.
That, kiddies, is the biggest differential in the whole N.H. of L - not an especially great omen, given the ratcheted-down post-season style of hockey.
And oh yeah, that 1-0 win over the Flyers, which has to rank among the Habs' luckiest of the year?
The first and only time in 2009-10 they've won a game with that scoreline.
Onto the playoffs, then.