The Halak trade may not actually be the end of the world

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we’ve resorted to this.

That’s right. In response to the Halak trade, a Habs fan is behaving like… well.

Remember the night Montreal found out Komisarek signed with the Leafs? The internetz was littered with pictures, videos and proud recounts of Habs fans burning No. 8 jerseys and Komo effigies. For the love of God, why hasn’t anybody figured out they need to take our matches away? Pierre Gauthier would be wise to inquire whether Dick Cheney is leasing out his bunker, cause you know Big Dick ain’t lettin’ you stay there for free no matter how many souls you have crushed.

Put them down.

As usual, Montreal Canadiens fans, y’all need to calm the fuck down.

How quickly we forget. The very same fans that brought the ‘Jesus Price’ nickname into our collective vocabulary and decided he was the next Patrick Roy are now freaking out because he’s the only starter the Habs have left.

First of all, Gauthier has yet to confirm this. We could find out tomorrow that he has, in fact, been traded to Los Angeles like some of us had been hearing. GMs have made stupider decisions. Second, the Habs could do worse than a guy with Carey’s upside.

Fellow fans of a team that has been mired in mediocrity for 17 years, allow me to let you in on a little secret: Upside is your friend. Some nights upside can be the only thing keeping Habs fans from pitching themselves off of the roof of an apartment building. Remember, two years ago, how Andrei and Sergei Kostitsyn’s upside got us through the Habs’ second round exit at the hands of the Flyers? How at the beginning of this season the team was so new and different and the only thing we could be sure of was Guillaume Latendresse’s upside? And how, now that all those ships have sailed, we’re banking on Benoit Pouliot’s upside and taking PK Subban’s to the bank? Upside was invented to keep Habs fans sane. Leafs fans and Oilers fans will often borrow this upside stuff, but don’t let them fool you – they’re only ingesting the generic kind.

Halak doesn’t have much upside left. We won’t know this for sure for a very long time, but he may, in fact, have peaked. He may never be better than he was this year in the Olympics and the Stanley Cup playoffs. The good news for St. Louis, if that’s true, is that all he needs do is aim to match his performance from this year once in a while and they’re in business.

Let’s look at this trade through upside-coloured glasses, if only to stop crying for a bit. The Habs traded a guy at or near his best for two kids with some upside and kept a goalie with heaps of the stuff. They win this trade in the upside department.

Besides. Keeping both goalies would have been impossible given the Montreal Canadiens Salary Cap Clusterfuck of Epic Proportions. It would have hurt Carey’s development, and it would not have been fair to Halak. So they got two prospects that apparently aren’t too terrible for Halak’s rights. Remember that St. Louis got his rights and not Halak, so they still have to go through the negotiations and possible arbitration headaches, and that returns on goalies are almost never anything to write home about, and also factor in the glut of goalies on the FA market this year. Hey, what do you know? As far as goalie trades go, this may not be the worst.

This trade is not the end of the world. I promise you that trading Price would have been a bigger mistake.

We will be fine, Habs fans. Minus the whole “missing Halak” part, but we survived Koivu. We’ll get through this.

Here is an obituary of Jaroslav Halak’s time in Montreal by Habs blogger J. T., who said it better than I ever could. I really do love Halak and wish him the best in St. Louis. I will cheer for him any time he isn’t playing my Habs, just like I cheer for Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and his perfect hair.

And listen up, Habs fans. If a single one of you boos Carey at the Bell Centre next season, I will come find you. You can try to run. You can try to hide. But I will hunt you down. I will find your friends. I will kick you in the nuts. And then I will feed you to a Leafs fan.