Instead of Forum and Its Ghosts, It’s a Centre and an Ugly Specter

Surely, it was an optical illusion.

On the plaques lining the walls of the Montreal Canadiens’ locker room, the faces of the great players who have worn the famed bleu, blanc et rouge appeared to be frowning upon the pretenders who wear that uniform this season. The torch those immortals threw from failing hands has dropped with a thunk on the ice of another monstrous arena with a corporate name and virtually no character.

“It’s always going to be special to play here,” said King left wing Luc Robitaille, a Montreal native. “It’s just now, a lot of teams come in here and feel they can win.”

These are not the Canadiens of old, the team that won the Stanley Cup 24 times, including one that predates the NHL, and set unapproachable standards of excellence. These are not the Canadiens who began every game with a psychological advantage because opponents were in awe of them and the hallowed Forum.

The Canadiens who lost to the Kings, 4-2, Saturday are a bad team. Injury depleted, certainly. But still a team with neither identity nor flair, unforgivable sins in a city that used to deify its hockey heroes but now greets them with a collective yawn.

King goalie Jamie Storr, 23, is among the first generation of players reaching maturity in a league in which the Canadiens are just another team. He felt no anxiety before playing at the Molson Centre Saturday, had no flashbacks to great games he had seen them play.

And how could he? The Canadiens have won the Cup once in the last 13 seasons. They missed the playoffs last season and are skidding in that direction again. They haven’t missed the playoffs two seasons in a row since the 1920-21 and 1921-22 seasons. They are 4-9-2-0 at home--a record inferior to the first-year Atlanta Thrashers’ 5-8-1-2. Early this season, they sold seats in certain sections on a two-for-one basis, an experiment that was quickly abandoned after a flood of adverse publicity.

“I wasn’t intimidated here. I felt a lot more intimidated going into Detroit,” Storr said. “They’re the number one team in the league. [Saturday] night, I wasn’t intimidated by the rink. It was fun to play in.”

That may be the ultimate insult.

It never was fun for the Kings, who were 7-43-11 at the Forum and Molson Centre. But Saturday, against a defensively lax Montreal team that was betrayed by the porous goaltending of starter Jeff Hackett, the Kings were tested only during a Canadien flurry that produced two goals early in the third period but couldn’t scratch out an equalizer.

“It’s a learning process,” center Sergei Zholtok said. “We have to learn to win games like this. . . . Maybe we try too hard to show as much as we can to our home crowd. We try to do extra. We try to be too nice.”

Red Fisher, who has covered the Canadiens for the Montreal Gazette for the last 45 years, has nothing nice to say about this team.

“This is the worst Canadiens team I’ve seen, no question. Last year, I thought it was the worst I’d ever seen, but this year is worse,” he said. “They went into this year without Mark Recchi [who was traded to Philadelphia for Dainius Zubrus and ranks among the NHL scoring leaders] and Vincent Damphousse [who was traded to San Jose for second- and fifth-round draft picks last March]. They went into the year fervently hoping and expecting the same kind of year Jeff Hackett had in the second half of last year, which they’re not getting.

“Right now is the king [worst]. Maybe next year will be worse still.”

There’s something to look forward to.

This collapse was not sudden. It was years in the making, many bad drafts--of their first-round picks since 1985, only Saku Koivu has made an impact with the Canadiens or any NHL team--and horrible trades. This is the team that traded John LeClair and Eric Desjardins to the Flyers for Recchi and a third-round draft pick who has never played in the NHL. That traded goalie Patrick Roy out of sheer spite in 1995. That acquired a gallant but faded Trevor Linden from the Islanders last May and signed him to a four-year, $15-million contract.

Linden had two goals in 25 games before spraining an ankle and going on the injured reserve list. He has company there in Koivu (shoulder surgery), Vladimir Malakhov (knee surgery), Brian Savage (fractured vertebrae), Turner Stevenson (back injury) and Scott Lachance (back injury). Winger Oleg Petrov joined them Saturday for at least two months, after injuring his left knee.”

“This management stinks,” Fisher said. “It’s not a very good management team. . . . Along with the injuries, bad trades and bad moves, what’s happening now on this team is a malaise, a disrespect for what this organization has always been about.”

The Canadiens used to embody excellence. Now they’re just bodies and their arena is another unremarkable stop on the circuit. As in so many other arenas, the lower bowl was about one-third empty Saturday and the announced crowd of 19,250 was 2,000 short of being the season’s third sellout. Also like those other arenas, the game was punctuated by promotions, jiggle shots of women on the center-ice scoreboard and fan giveaways. There’s none of the dignity and professional purpose that was standard at the Forum.

“When you played at the Forum, everybody was talking about the ghosts. You were always afraid to play there,” said King goalie Stephane Fiset, who grew up in Montreal. “Now, at the Molson Centre, it’s not the same atmosphere.”

The Canadiens knew they were in for a rough ride but never anticipated the lows--such as a 3-12-1-1 start that was their worst in 60 years--would be this low. “It’s not fun because of the past of the Montreal Canadiens. Going through a season like this is very tough,” said Pierre Mondou, a former Canadien and now a Montreal scout. “We knew we were going to fight for a playoff spot, for seventh or eighth. We knew we were not going to be tops in the conference. It seems very equal in our conference, and we thought with everybody healthy we would be there.”

Why they’re foundering is a constant topic of discussion on radio talk shows and in the competitive French and English press. “We want to sleep at night, so we only read the papers once a week or twice a week,” Mondou said.