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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/01/21 in all areas

  1. Commandant as president and Habs29 as GM! It would be the Habsworld Dream Team. Plus, imagine the epic front-office arguments…
    1 point
  2. I come to praise Molson, not to bury him. Having stupidly left the President position open for a decade, he has cleverly leveraged that vacancy to cut the Gordian knot created by the language “requirement.” This was a strategy many on this board had called for, but the way it’s arranged allows the “GM” the necessary fig leaf of dignity. Similarly, he leveraged the “specialness” of the Montreal market to argue that managing the Habs is too much for any one man - another well-calculated claim designed to appeal to the vanity of the francophone media and a fan base conditioned to this of the Habs as “special.” And, he went out and got a guy in Gorton who ticks all the boxes. Experienced at different levels. Understands a rebuild. Universally respected. Good call. You know what this means, right? Molson has engineered a workaround that allows the Habs to be run by a unilingual Anglo. That is a very valuable precedent. He has shown the way. In his stated intention to prioritize diversity and mental health - and in citing insufficient support for player thriving in Montreal as one of his criticisms of the old regime - he is also showing good sense. That both Price and Drouin had to take leaves of absence is a flashing yellow light, suggesting that our players are not being adequately supported. If we’re going to ask players to assume the pressures and responsibilities of being Habs, we have to offer them state-of-the-art mental wellness supports. I applaud all of this. My one concern is how sustainable the two-heading managerial monster will turn out to be. For a while, everything will be fine. But if we hire a Luongo - French-speaking and charismatic - and he starts to feel his oats eventually, we risk setting up a power struggle between the two as they vie for Molson’s ear, with the francophone guy using his loyalists in the French press to control the message. If Molson is smart, he will create ground rules, e.g., no major hockey matters get discussed without both President and GM in the room. If he creates a system where the two are using separate channels of communication to speak with him, he will compound the “power struggle” dynamic. Making this work in the longer term will require some adroit executive management by Molson.
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  3. Sarcasm and tone are very hard to read in print.
    1 point
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