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Controversy will come no matter what. Controversy wasn't dead when the team was 2/3rds French with a French coach and GM right after winning a Stanley Cup. It was actually magnified to the point where Guy Carbonneau had just captained the Canadiens to a Stanley Cup the previous season and one bad moment on a golf course got him traded for Jim Montgomery. You will never escape it no matter who speaks what on the team. However, a good coach and GM who can speak THE LANGUAGE OF THE MEDIA can deflect the attention from the team and place it on themselves. This is about the most useful asset of Brian Burke. He was able to keep both Toronto media and Toronto fans hanging onto his every word for four seasons and it's only now where they've realized all of his changes still kept the team with massive weaknesses that kept them right where they were with John Ferguson Jr and Richard Peddie running the team. That's because Burke confronts the media and puts them on their toes instead of the other way around. There are other GMs and coaches who do this like John Tortorella. This is what the team truly needs. If a Jim Nill was the GM it wouldn't matter if he doesn't speak French if Patrick Roy is the head coach, a man with an enigmatic personality who will engulf the attention of the media onto him and speak up for his players. Same goes for if Roy was the GM. There are a few others I think could be that passionate orator in our GM pool (Bergevin) but we need either the coach or the GM to be able to speak both French and English to keep the media at bay and let slumping players or a slumping team work out their problems without the media stirring up the pot like we saw this past season. You can have a coach and GM who make great on-ice decisions and great managerial decisions but if they do nothing about the media and fans those factors will seep into the team and handicap your on ice performance. This is less about finding a guy who can make good decisions. This is about finding a guy who can facilitate a winning organization. That's why I respect the Detroit Red Wings so much. They've accomplished it for over 20 years now.

Media & Accountability Criticism of Criticism From Critics That Ought To Be Left In Critical Condition Maybe the anti-Montreal fan/media critiques have gotten old... but last night I was thinking about Price and his biggest dickrider, Jack Todd, and how this situation can possibly play out. I have always supported Price and believed that he was going to someday be an elite goaltender. For a year or two, it seemed like there was hardly a hockey enthusiast around who would have disagreed. Then came Halak. Unlike Price, Halak was not a high draft choice, hadn't been a star player all through his junior years and hadn't come to Montreal facing an unendurable wall of pressure. The underdog began to outplay the struggling hero and so the goalie controversy began. Fans and journalists complained that Price was being awarded starts based on reputation, that he was not being held to the same standard as his mild-mannered teammate. An outright war seemed to break out among fans: Price or Halak? One was a superstar, the other was lucky to be a back up. The only issue more important to us Habs fans was whether Bella from Twilight would wind up with the ghostly Edward or with Jacob, the hunky werewolf. Players were attacked personally, boos were heard, blah blah blah. This is a story we all already know intimately. When Halak was traded to St. Louis, half the fan base felt like they had just lost the war they had been fighting for the past year or two. Even Jack Todd shut his mouth for a short while (though nothing would stop Red Fisher from ranting about the trade without actually bringing up any of the factors that Gauthier had to consider in making his decision). It was a time for Team Price-ers to celebrate their victory and Team Halak-ians to complain that Habs management is clueless and just made The Roy Trade 2.0. Now we play the waiting game. This is what I was thinking about last night as I watched Price steal a win against the Penguins. If Price bombs and Halak has a solid career with the Blues, it would suck for all Habs fans... except for Jack Todd and his like who will delight in the opportunity to say that they were right all along (whether by fluke or by insight). A couple of weeks ago, just after Price was booed in that first pre-season game, I saw a couple of guys on my Facebook news feed saying that they were rooting against the Habs until Price was gone, admitting that they "want him to fail so bad." Being upset with management's decision is one thing but rooting against a specific player because of your disappointment in the trade (or because you think the player in question sucks) takes things to another level, a personal level. This, however, only applies to a few extreme cases, and probably to nobody on this board. But what if the trade turns out to be a great one? This is where things get interesting, isn't it? In this situation, all Canadiens fans should be happy. Will Todd and the extremists be disappointed or even embarrassed that they harassed and booed a young player over the span of years only to see him turn into an elite player and prove many of his articles to be the mean-spirited, self-promoting rantings of a gutless provocateur? I think not. I think that if Price turns into an elite goalie, Jack Todd will shrug his shoulders and say, "I've never been so glad to have been proven wrong! Price sure has matured an awful lot in these past seasons and showed up his critics," ignoring the fact that he was the critic (or the main voice in the press representing the critics) and that his contributions were nearly the cause behind ruining this player's career. Price was attacked personally on a regular basis by a so-called professional (the same "professional" who wrote an article bashing a leader and good guy like Gomez for being ugly) in articles that persuaded many fans to voice their displeasure for Price - which in turn caused a hell of a lot of stress on our player, not to mention the fact that it nearly (and still may) ruin his career (--> life) - and then he can shrug it off and he say he's happy he was wrong. I don't write this so that we can all feel bad for Price, however; the guy's a millionaire, young, handsome and is probably doing just fine even while facing so much pressure and so many detractors. My question, instead, is: where is the accountability? Why should anyone bother to analyze decisions rationally when you can bitch, bitch, bitch about professionals trying their hardest and then never be held accountable when it turns out you were completely clueless? Why root for a team that may win or may lose when you can root for yourself and win all the time? By making life hell for your athletes, you can take pleasure in being right when you contribute to their crashing and burning or you can shrug it off and take pleasurable in them succeeding when they prove you wrong. Those of us who actually cheer for the players on our team don't have such luxuries. I'm still confident that Price will be a top goalie in the NHL and I'm equally confident that Todd will shrug it off, praise Price's new-found maturity and Gauthier's foresight, and then move on to his next target without ever losing any credibility among the general public. Nobody will be held accountable for almost ruining an innocent humans career (even less so, if they actually succeed in doing it). Nobody will change the way they analyze hockey from then on. Nobody will lose their job, their credibility or even their mean streak. It disappoints me that media coverage in general is so weak. The French media's crazy and the English media's dumb. The Gazette reports the news competently but also holds biases and doesn't offer much analysis beyond the most basic statistics. TSN has entertaining coverage but also relies on their analysts to be experts on all 30 NHL teams which is frankly impossible. As a result, they wind up talking out of their asses a lot of the time. Sportsnet is just pathetic. I was watching them the other day (don't ask) for about 10 minutes and in that time their experts were predicting the results for that nights games. The conversation went something like this when it came time to speak on the Pittsburgh-Montreal game: "Pittsburgh is predicted to win this game." "Ya think!? They lost their first game and are pumped up to get a win in their new building. Against Montreal, this is money in the bank for them." I can only hope that poor analyst didn't lose too much of his hard-earned cash last night. I was amazed at how they spoke as if 1) Montreal was a bottom 5 team in the NHL and 2) whenever a good team plays a bad team, the good team has a 90% chance of winning, as if upsets rarely occur at the NHL level. This is all a bit besides the point. I just find it kind of gross that experts aren't held to a higher standard than they are. They can spew whatever garbage they want and never worry about being wrong. I don't think this is only the case in hockey. I'm a bit of a cinema (amateur for the moment) expert and I see similar idiocy among the major mainstream media voices in that field as well. And then there's Fox News... This post isn't targeted at someone like brobin who falls closer to Halak on the Price-Halak continuum. It's targeted at the boo birds and trolls like Todd who are constantly poisoning the Canadiens well. Journalists will blame the General Manager when he throws contracts worth millions at stars that refuse to come here, never acknowledging the fact that they're a major part of the reason why players will sometimes accept less money to avoid playing in Montreal. So ###### them. The best hockey analysis I've read has been by amateurs on message boards and blogs. So keep it up posters. For every troll like Todd let there be fifty of us billy goats gruff. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!