The Chicoutimi Cucumber

Well, Machine, yer preachin' to the choir, in that I always liked Cammy as well. But I can see the virtue in unloading the $6-mil contract.

Great, lateral-thinking GD thread! You know something? I really dislike the Sens. They remind me of the old Hartford Whalers in being a fundamentally boring franchise that manages nevertheless to be a pain in the ass. But at least the Whalers had a great name and a great logo, not this stupid condom thing. You'll notice I can't even to them the courtesy of outright hating them like I do Toronto and Boston - they're too collectively and organizationally bland for that. Even their fan-base is middling at best. Just a complete corporate nonentity of a franchise. Blech.

I understand that Cammy was one-dimensional and overpaid, but how anyone could prefer this useless turd Bourque to him is beyond me. Cammy clearly cared, had panache, and reliably delivered in the clutch. Bourque has none of these attributes.

He turned it around last season, when his career as an NHLer was pretty much in the balance. Other than that, he was a dog the year before and has been a dog this year. His three good seasons in Calgary were clearly the high-water mark; this guy is basically a bum, and that he only amped it up when he had to prove that he was a legit NHL player proves that he is all about cashing a paycheck, There is no hope for a bum like that.

Habsfan, it's been the same old story for years and years. The Habs' bigger players tend to avoid the net, while the Habs' players who do drive the net and screen on the PP tend to be shrimps like Gally and Gio. People have screamed over the years about guys like Moen and Darche being used on the power play, but what all that b*tching overlooked was that at least those guys would go to the net. And that is the reason they were used in that way. I'm actually not one of these size fetishists like Pierre Macguire, who goes orgasmic over any player with size and dismisses dudes like Ribeiro as non-NHLers. But I am getting pretty tired of the team having the same structural problems year after year after year. It just gets bloody boring.

#79 will be re-signed, I believe. Like I said in the context of Pleks, I just do not believe that "Bergie" is going to unload absolutely core, high-value, defining veterans on the club. He is going to continue "building from within," and we'll just have to hope that we have enough high-end talent coming up to make us contenders within the "Markov window." I doubt it myself, but I also respect that argument that shipping out Markov or Pleks would decimate our team and have consequences that could be hard to calculate: high, high risk moves. A maybe a team that is comfortable ensconced in a playoff position - two years in a row on a 100-point pace - doesn't need to take those kinds of dizzying risks.

These seem like good moves for the Oil (just as signing Bryghalov was - people confuse the difference between a grossly overpaid player, and a bad player). Was goaltending really the problem, though? - or is it an amateur-hour defence corps and a team that can't play D, period? If so, then Scrivens et al. will just be the next victims of the killing floor.

Just to be clear, I'm not calling for MT to be fired. I do agree that he is on borrowed time - he has maybe another year or two at most - just because that's the life of the average NHL coach and he is not, to my mind, exceptional enough to buck those odds. Gauthier's hockey moves were mostly good...but being a GM is also, and very significantly, about managing people. Gauthier seems to have created a toxic environment nobody wanted to be a part of and to have had the people skills of an eel. That exemplary leader and team guy Hal Gill bent Dave Stubbs' ear with something like 30 minutes of off-the-record anecdotes about the insane stuff that went on under the Goat seems to show pretty conclusively that this guy should not be running an operation. Given his hockey acumen, I'd take him on board, but never as more than a lieutenant. If the point was to "save face," I don't think he succeeded. But it is interesting to consider that part of the problem may have been a transitional phase in ownership. That hadn't really occurred to me before.

I don't support the NFL model at all. That is a brutal, exploitative model, is what that is. Contracts should be binding on both sides. Personally, I believe that PK will sign with us long-term eventually - on the condition that we pay market value. Bergevin burned any possibility of a "hometown discount" by playing hardball on the RFA deal, and I think it would be 100% reasonable of Subban to say, "OK, just like you said, it's a business. Now pay me every penny of what I deserve." And if the Habs refuse to pay and let him walk, then we are an organization of blithering idiots.

Therrien has done well. But I cannot believe that he is a Lindy Ruff/Barry Trotz franchise-defining coach. He'll be out within the next couple of years, I'd expect. I disagree that "all Canadians should be bilingual," but that's neither here nor there Canadians aren't and never will be, so we've got to deal with the facts as we find them. What I regret is that the Habs have chosen to deal with these facts by massively shrinking the pool of available talent, thus putting themselves at a systematic competitive disadvantage, forever. Que sera sera.

Yeah, it was in the Globe where I read that Quebec media reports that Noel had "lost his French" were totally false. I was being a bit ironical in that post though - his track record isn't exactly one of sterling success. Still, given that the Habs are an affirmative action program for French-speaking coaches and managers, having the additional option is better than not having it.

Added bonus to this firing: one more bilingual coach is in the talent pool to replace Therrien!

I think there is a difference between Subban going for a short-term deal in order to maximize his payout later on, and him intending to leave Montreal. The former could just be his maximizing his leverage; nothing would stop him from then signing up with Montreal long-term at maximum dollars. It's just business.

It's a good plan, G Man. But if DD keeps producing like he is, there will be a trade market for him, should we choose to go that route.

Great post, Link. I think we do want to see a trade for the sake of seeing a trade, in part because this team can be so uninspiring on such a regular basis. You watch guys like Bourque dogging it night after night, it's hard not to fantasize about Changes. Trades are fun and this team has had a fairly static roster since the Gal(l)ys were brought up. It's a normal urge, but as you say, that doesn't make it wise. The other thing about "patient building" is that I think many of us have the uneasy feeling that our prospects are a bit too much like the prospect pool from the Gainey Rebuiuld 1.0 - that's to say, good players but not the nucleus of a future perennial contender. If that's your sense, it's plausible to muse over trades to bolster the high-end young talent in the system.

Buffalo's new GM seems to be trying to correct one mistake by making another one. That's fine by me.

The return of Emelin might be the most significant aspect of last night's game.

Happy for Maurice. I always liked his style, even when he was a bag-eyed wreck in TO

Interesting that Grigs and Yakupov have struggled so much while Galchenyuk has quietly taken up a reliable and regular shift on ye olde Montreal Canadiens. I think analysts should ask some serious questions about which team got the best forward in that draft.

Um, they scored twice last night. And I don't care if they score two goals per game provided they only surrender one. What do you want them to do, blow out the defending Cup champions? The team needs help on the wings. No question. Bourque and to a lesser extent Gio are dead weight. However, when the playoffs come around, I'm quite certain that Gionta will produce (if he's healthy). Book it.

I like Habs29's original post above, and I don't have any easier answers to the questions it poses. What I can say is that I don't think Bergevin will trade Pleks. It's easy for armchair GMs to sit back and say, "well, the only way we can become contenders is by moving this terrific player to get back two key organizational pieces." There may be truth in that - squinting into the future, I just don't see the Habs as having the pieces to become genuine contenders. A good team with an outside chance to win, sure; but a Chicago, St. Louis or Pittsburgh? No. But I doubt Bergevin thinks like this. He almost certainly sees Pleks as a core piece of any future winning team and probably an irreplaceable asset. GMs tend to favour the bird in the hand. You think Philly is happy they traded Carter and Richards only to watch those guys become the core of a Cup team that very year? Maybe they should have kept the birds in the hand. And Pleks is only 31. Look at Datsyuk, 35 with no signs of slowing down; if Plekanec follows that template we could be looking at another 5-7 years of him playing at this level (!). When you frame it that way, trading him is insane. All of this is to say is that moving him is a nervy, high-risk, high-reward move. I would admire the GM who pulls the trigger to trade Pleks for two young players, say, a top-3 forward and a top-4 defender, which is what Habs29 envisions. That could indeed bump our future up a notch, from "good team" to "serious contender." It could also blow up in our face by gutting our roster of its heart and future captain. Few GMs will take such a risk. I don't think "patient builder Bergie" will.

Well! We're in for a hell of Stanley Cup Final this season For the entire "smurf" era, it's been the same story. The Habs reliably do great against smaller, elite, east-west teams like Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, When we play such teams we get spectacular hockey (as was obvious even from watching Canadiens express last night) and a team that very often wins. What we can't do, of course, is beat the north-south, bruising teams - the Phillys or St Louises of the world - with any regularity, notwithstanding our ability to give the Prunes really tough games. The other thing with a team of smurfs is that they can't bring their "A" game in the regular season with high-end consistency. They just get too ground down, too beat up. Hence the lacklustre stretches that have fans ripping their hair out. The annoying thing is that this hasn't changed since 2010. Three GMs later - same story! What we need to do is to become like Chicago, a small team that nonetheless can regularly beat anybody, not just teams of a certain profile. (Watching the Hawks, they resembled no one so much as the classic Montreal Canadiens teams of yore: not hulking, but simply all-around superb. Damn, that Towes is a slick player). This game shows a couple of other things. One, the team yet again rallied with a superb effort after a no-show. This team is still responding to Therrien and still has a lot of internal pride. Two, when this team does marshal its "A" game it is very good. We won't do well if we run up against too many north-south, physical, big teams (Ottawa, Philly), but we might do some damage in the playoffs if we get OK matchups and do manage to put it all together.

Ha ha, I too will always pick Boston over TO. It's a bit like choosing typhoid over cholera, but in a crunch it's the Bruins for me. I'm admittedly surprised - I thought for sure the Leafs would step up to "good team" status this season, despite all the statistical evidence that they were something of a mirage last year. Oh well, happy to be proven wrong on this one

Well, to me the verdict is still out on Cole. Players do go through bad spells and then rediscover a solid game. It's like the idea that Clarkson is garbage. Well, maybe - or maybe he is struggling to make an adjustment or otherwise going through a bad patch. That aside, there can be no denying that if we'd kept Ryder instead of Briere, or had replaced Cole with a player who actually suited team needs, I wouldn't even be bringing it up.

Like I said in the "Philly" thread, the PK benching is hard to assess in isolation from the wider narratives around PK. Subban has faced substantial and largely unwarranted criticism ever since he first arrived in the NHL (including from Therrien when he was a media blatherskite). For those of us who believe that PK Subban is a bona-fide superstar whose supposed "weaknesses" have been grossly exaggerated, it's frustrating to contemplate that the Habs management itself tends to take the lukewarm view of what he brings - that the Habs, in effect, are on the wrong side of the PK narrative. So then Therrien benches Subban, and it's difficult not to relate that action to this wider perception that the Habs are on the side of the NHL old boys in turning their noses up at this fabulous player. That doesn't mean that benching Subban was wrong, necessarily. Really, the rightness or wrongness of this decision depends upon the relationship between MT and Subban, and what Therrien actually thinks of PK. I categorically reject the idea that Therrien needs to "fix" our greatest player since Roy. But if the point was more to apply to Subban the same basic principles that would apply to any other player, then it was a good decision. In short: if Therrien had a proven track record of seeing Subban in the way that I see him - as a franchise player and one of the very best defencemen of his generation, a superstar - then the benching would be much easier to accept. If the benching, conversely, comes out of this "fixing Subban" school of thought, then it's crap, because the principle upon which it's predicated - that Subban is defective in major ways - is crap.