The Habs Home Opener Ceremony Electric

The past few seasons, the home opener ceremony wasn’t very special as it was mainly just calling the players to the ice one by one as they saluted the crowd to a set playlist that the Canadiens’ DJ had already set up. The days of the passing of the torch on the ice from a former player to the team captain or another star player appeared to be gone, and fans had been generally disappointed in the ceremonies over the last few seasons. There was even a clip during the first season of The Rebuild: Inside the Montreal Canadiens show on Crave that showed a season ticket holder walk up to owner Geoff Molson and tell him that the ceremony that night was the worst he had ever seen. 

This year, that is much less likely to happen, as it started with a great video tribute to the late great Ken Dryden, which included his former teammate Bob Gainey reading a passage of Dryden’s book The Game. Throughout the video, there is a voice-over from Dryden that was certainly done on the night that the Habs retired his number, which gives fans chills. Dryden talks about how extremely lucky he was to be able to be a member of the Montreal Canadiens.

Starting the ceremony off with a tribute to one of their greatest goaltenders in team history, who recently passed away, made for one of the best starts to the team’s opening ceremony in years. As sad as the passing of Dryden was, it somehow gave the Canadiens something to make their home opener ceremony better by adding the passion a former star had for the team. A good number of Dryden’s teammates from the 1970s were seen by the ice as they watched the tribute to him. There is a good chance that some of these players actually made the trip to the Canadiens opener just to honor Ken Dryden, as he truly seemed like a superhuman at times to his teammates.

Following the tribute to Dryden, it came time to present the staff and players. To present a majority of the staff, the Canadiens decided to do it in a video style with a player presenting various parts of the staff. For example, Brendan Gallagher introduced the medical staff, while Mike Matheson introduced all the coaches outside of Martin St. Louis. With how popular St. Louis is as the head coach, Michel Lacroix presented him, and he got one of the loudest ovations from the fans, alongside when Lane Hutson and Ivan Demidov got theirs.

Earlier on Monday evening, it was announced that every player who would be in the lineup on Tuesday night would get to come out with a song of their choosing. This led to anticipation from Habs fans about what players would choose as their songs.

By seeing the songs that the players chose, we got to see a little more into their music tastes. One of the most intriguing choices was Russian Ivan Demidov, who came out to Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace. We now see that Demidov has a good taste for hard rock music. Meanwhile, captain Nick Suzuki decided to go out with the Canadiens’ usual song Fix You. What we can take from that is he lives to be the team leader and has adopted the intro for every game as his own. There were many different genres that the players chose from. 

Personally, my low-key favorite song chosen was Kirby Dach coming out to Show Goes On by Lupe Fiasco. It brings back memories of getting hyped for a sporting event when I was a kid.

Overall, the presentation of the whole pre-game ceremony was amazing, and the Canadiens should consider doing intros similarly to that again in the future. Sure, it was only 10 seconds per player, but it was a great touch to see them come out to music that hypes each one of them.

How did you like last night’s pre-game ceremony?