Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Panic on the streets of Habtown: Canadiens pre-preseason report

Yemelin's fat. Spacek's fit. Markov's dying. Gomez's is apparently a liar (how else could he get injured if he was supposedly in such good shape?).  You get the picture.  Montreal is dying for hockey news, and this is what they came up with.  My Dad of all people asked me the other day why i hadn't written anything in a while, considering how there was suddenly so much in the news about the Habs, and more specifically, about Markov's injury woes.  He assumed i had a plethora of information with which to draw from.  My first response was one of laughter. "What news? All this is is sensationalism at its best, your typical making-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill scenario."  Then i thought about it further and realized i did have a wealth of information to draw from.  I could talk about how ridiculous the media is here.

Take RDS for instance.  The day the news came out that Markov had had water removed from his knee, and that he was no longer on schedule to begin the season like everybody thought he was, panic spread like wildfire.  People questioned the Habs doctors, questioned the organization, questioned Markov himself.  This went on for a day or two until finally it seemed to be put to rest a bit.  Markov declared that he wasn't worried, that he was more worried about the media (can't blame him).  Probably the best and at least the most well-known sports doctor in North America, James Andrews, explained that Markov's affliction was extremely common among sufferers of this injury, and it wasn't anything to be concerned about.  Great, I thought, nothing really to worry about, Markov may not be fit for the season's debut, but would be back not too long after that.  I slept easy that night.

Then i woke up the next day and began to surf the net as i often do.  Made the mistake of checking into RDS.  The headline declared this: "Markov toujours dans la nĂ©ant".  Which roughly translates to "Markov still in the void."  Obviously, like anyone reading this, I panicked, thinking that overnight Markov's little setback had turned into God knows what.  The first paragraph of the article didn't exactly ease my worries, either.  In a nutshell it basically said that Markov had not made any progress in his recovery in the last nine months.  Cue more panic.  Cue anguish.  What does this mean? Is Markov going to have to begin his recovery process all over again? Will he be out till November? December? The whole year?  But then i kept reading.  Realized that there was no new news here.  All it was was the same information from the last two days, just more scary sounding...

Welcome to Montreal.  Welcome to hockey preseason.  Welcome to madness.