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My friends have stopped watching Habs games.

Almost all of my close pals live for the Montreal Canadiens. We talk about them endlessly. Many of us play hockey. When we get off the ice on Sunday nights, we crack open a few cold ones and we over-analyze the team we’re obsessed with. We love the Habs more than you can imagine. And these people have stopped watching.

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Canadiens TV ratings dropped 13 per cent on RDS and TVA Sports for the first half of the season, according to a La Presse report, and there are empty seats at the Bell Centre. But that’s not even the worst of it. People are angry, and with good reason. I walked into one of my favourite West End watering holes the other night to grab a burger and a brew, and I also wanted to catch the Bruins-Habs matchup (which Boston won 4-1).

Photo by Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette

So this guy sits down beside me at the bar. He seems like a regular guy, a francophone in his late ’40s who does renovation work. He asks me how the game is going. I tell him the Habs are sucking. He then, unprompted, tells me that he hasn’t watched a full Habs game since they traded P.K. Subban. Please note he doesn’t know at this point that I’m considered to be the honorary president of the P.K. Fan Club.

My point is that this guy speaks for thousands. And it’s not just P.K. He went on to talk about Alexander Radulov and Andrei Markov and the contempt that Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin showed these veteran players. He then noted that the Canadiens made a profit of US$92 million last year, even though the team was pretty sad-sack, and he believes team president Geoff Molson doesn’t care.

He said Molson has become the Harold Ballard of the modern era. That, like the former longtime owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, all Molson cares about is that the loonies are flowing in despite the cruddy product on the ice. I’m not saying I agree with the chap, but I think that’s the way thousands of Montrealers feel. And this is a very dangerous thing. Fans are starting to hate this team.

Here’s the tweet of the week, from my old friend Richard Labbé, who covers the Canadiens for La Presse.