One thing really stood out last night. The Canadiens clearly have a lot more talent especially up front, than they've had in a very, very (very) long time. Fans have frankly gone through what can best be referred to as an endless drought when it comes to offensive skill.
I was trying to recall the best Canadiens teams of the last 30 years (and, well, I got depressed, as there really weren't that many). The 1995/1996 team (post Patrick Roy trade) would be a good comparable to this current edition, certainly in terms of the group of forwards. They had some niece pieces up front such as Turgeon, Recchi, Damphousse, Savage, Rucinsky and Koivu, but their defensive corps was at best porous and outside of the enigmatic Vladimir Malakhov, they had little in the way of talent.
The 2007/2008 team had its star up front in Alex Kovalev (as well as a couple of decent centers in Koivu and Plekanec) and a relatively solid top 3 on D in Markov, Hamrlik and Komisarek (yes I'm aware of how the rest of his story went) but that group certainly wasn't 3 to 4 lines deep like the current edition of les Canadiens. Petry/Weber/Chiarot/Romanov? are also undoubtedly superior to that group. And certainly none of those teams in the past 30 years came close in terms of having a quality goaltending duo like Price and Allen.
Make no mistake about it, last night's game showed the Canadiens are still flawed, that they are a work in progress. But when fans after the game are talking about the team needing a better 4th line center or whether Joel Edmundson should be on the 2nd or 3rd defensive pairing, you know you got it pretty good, especially given the misery the organization has been through for the last 3 decades.
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