The Chicoutimi Cucumber

It'll be a banner year for reclamation projects, that's for sure; there will be some useful players bought out or else nor re-signed due to the shrinking cap. Hopefully the Habs's pro scouting is where it needs to be and we can scoop up a valuable addition or two. Hemsky, though? Yikes.

In pure hockey terms, the Kaberle deal was actually quite reasonabe. The point was to acquire a guy who could help the power-play, the ineffectiveness of which was the primary reason that last year's team was sucking. All of this was made necessary by Markov's unexpected relapse; having failed to sign any insurance on D other than Campoli, Goat was in a position where he HAD to do something. So Goat basically gave up nothing to get a player who had a track record of producing PP points. It made sense, in context. Unfortunately Kabs didn't really give the PP the kind of pop it needed, and - more importantly - by that point the rebellion against Martin had acquired a life of its own. His being replaced by a 'temporary' coach didn't help matters. It was all too late; nothing short of radical surgery was going to help that toxic team. As a cap move? That's another story. But Gauthier may well have calculated that a buyout would be an option under the new CBA. And you know, most teams have one or two crap contracts. So personally I think the deal was made out to be worse than it actually was. People were acting like we gave up Guy Lafleur for a bag of pucks or something.

Yep. It's a legitimate concern. I fear that Price was mishandled, either through overcoaching or by being exposed to way too much pressure (or way too many rewards) too early in his career in Montreal. Had he experienced a bit of losing in Hamilton it might, ironically, have done him some good. That the Gainey regime's single greatest failing was in player development reinforces the possibility that Price was screwed up by poor managerial decisions. But again, to my mind the issue is less that Price sucks (he doesn't) than that we've sunk $6.5 mil in cap space into a goalie who has not shown himself to be reliably any better than a handful of other goalies in the regular season and quite a few playoff goalies. That we all have a strong gut feeling he could dominate outside of the Montreal pressure-cooker, though, does tell us something. He does have the tools - he's big, he has great lateral movement, his technique seems strong, he hungers to win - to be 'that guy' we all want him to be. The great challenge seems to be to get Price in the right kind of head space while he's still wearing the red white and blue.

If MB gives him that then we are in deep, deep trouble - afflicted with a GM who hasn't got the faintest idea what he's doing. Streit was crazy like a fox back in 2008! Got what he wanted and was proven justified. This time around, though, we're talking cap-crushing dollars for a guy on the back nine? No thanks. But some idiot GM will indeed shill out. Just watch.

He'll get a fat contract from some desperate clown. Maybe not that fat, but fat enough.

Price isn't a medicore goaltender, though. Where Neech is correct is to say that "It's much easier to pick up comparable goaltending than to pick up an elite forward." This is the real disappointment of Price's career (and contract) so far. He was not supposed to be one of a number of very fine NHL goalies - he was supposed to be on another plane from the rest of them. And because he isn't on such a plane, he is therefore replaceable; which means trading him for the 1st-overall pick (or one of Edmonton's young studs) would be a sound idea.

Right. We didn't know that, and we were all wrong about it, including Gainey. As for +/-, I don't think you can take the numbers from a team that is a total piece of crap and condemn individuals for having bad +/- totals, although I freely grant that Streit is no stud in the defensive zone (then again, neither is Brian Campbell, Dan Boyle or any of a number of other offensive d-men around the league). As for the notion that his numbers have 'declined ever since' 2007, that's pretty flippant; he banked seasons of 56, 49, and 47 points, all within the same basic range, and scored more goals in his first season with the Isles than he did in his last season with us. So the issue as I see it is that management and nearly the entire fanbase mis-evaluated Streit, thinking that 2007-08 was a freak season and/or that he was purely a beneficiary of that season's offensive machine rather than a significant independent contributor to it. Now it's a bit hypocritical to get in high dudgeon about Gainey making the same mistake as the rest of us, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. 'No one knew Markov was going to get hurt' - true, but it comes down to depth. Going into 2008-09 the only serious offensive defenceman we had was Markov, making us wholly dependent on him, which is never smart team-building. So I stand by the assertion that keeping Streit (and 4.5 mil was reasonable money for what he brought the Islanders and us in 2007-08) would have been the smart thing to do in retrospect. At the time, of course, I thought the Islanders were dumb to sign him to that contract, just like everybody else.

I am in no way insinuating we should sign him now at anywhere near that rate. Indeed, we don't need a defenceman of his profile at all, except at a cut rate. But $4.something million for a 50-point defenceman was a great signing for the Islanders. Yes, everybody thought it was outrageous at the time. Everybody was totally wrong, as Commandant's post correctly explains. We made a mistake then and no amount of obsessively standing by your original opinion will change that simple fact.

Are you crazy? Letting Streit go was a significant mistake. He'd have made a huge difference to our defence corps (making it devastating with a healthy Markov and still giving us a legit PP QB without Markov).

Nothing on the idea of a 'coach's challenge' to bad calls? I rather thought one of those per team per game might make sense. Ah well. These proposals seem reasonable to me, especially the visor, which constitutes a no brainer. (In fact, a full face shield might be the most sensible option of all in terms of protecting all areas of the head, but there we go).

It all depends on how the UFA market is for defenceman. If there's one thing that general managers have demonstrated beyond all doubt, it's that if there are stupid contracts available to be signed, they will sign 'em.

Hey, as Habs29 will remind you, I was all for acquiring Gomez. Always loved his game, so much speed, panache and playmaking. And it has been long forgotten that he was pretty good in his first season with us. The trade turned into a total disaster, but if only Gomez had not suddenly forgotten how to play hockey - if only he had remained the highly entertaining 50-assist, 60-point playmaking C he'd been for the previous seven or eight years - it would be merely a dubious trade, not an apocalyptically horrendous one. Gainey can certainly be (and was) criticized for trading a promising young talent for a bad contract. But I'm not sure anybody expected Gomez to simply evaporate as an NHL-quality player, nor can Gainey be reasonably criticized for having failed to forsee that. Frankly, it was bullsh*t bad luck, kind of like Markov breaking his leg 400 times in a row.

Trading McDonagh for a $7-million-dollar bag of pucks was a terrible, terrible decision, and I don't think we need to pretend that McD would not look terrific in a Habs jersey to make ourselves feel better about it. But describing it as 'franchise sinking' is just over the top.

Yeah, I didn't mean 'gets fired' in the literal sense - I meant rather 'isn't this the second goalie coach fired in Price's time with us?' But maybe I'm confusing him with Luongo ( natural mistake for me, living in Vancouver). Goalie coaches aren't exactly front of mind 99.9% of the time. Whatever the case may be, I think it's fair to say that Price has yet to consistently deliver on his massive promise and that a change in his coach might redound to his benefit. Carey seems to be a candidate for the Lars Eller school of sports psychiatry. I don't mean that as an insult in any way, incidentally. It's just these droughts he goes through are damaging his career and if he can acquire some therapeutic tools for transcending them, that'd be great.

My memory is spotty, but isn't this the second goalie coach Price gets fired? The Price file depresses me a little bit. He's a good goalie and all, but...I seem to recall when he first came up, his positioning was so superb he hardly seemed to move in the net, yet the puck always hit him; and he projected a surreal unflappability. Neither has been reliably true since 2009, although he had a helluva 2010-11 season and playoff. I know next to nothing about the technical aspects of goaltending, but sometimes I wonder whether he has been 'overcoached' (kind of like Tiger Woods, always reconstructing his swing and wasting months of his career in the process) or otherwise mishandled.

Yeah, Gainey made mistakes but describing him as an 'organization sinker' is way off base. Even Gauthier did zero long-term damage (indeed, you could argue that the Goat wasn't all that bad in terms of pure hockey decisions; his deeper problem was that he was terrible at people management and organizational practices, which are key parts of a GM's repetoire).

I think, provisionally, that we're in good hands. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of any mistakes he made this year other than (inexplicably) not signing Jagr. Therrien delivered strong results this season. MB appears to have unloaded Cole at just the right moment. He had two modest but solid UFA signings in Bouillon and Armstrong and one tremendous, team-changing acquisition in Prust. (Because Prust was hurt in the playoffs people seem to have forgotten what a difference-maker he was). By all accounts Bergevin knocked it out of the park at the 2012 draft. Nevertheless, the Cole trade will ultimately only be assessable once we see how MB replaces him on the roster. Right now we're at least one winger short in the top-6. It's all well and good to talk about cap savings, but cap space doesn't win hockey games. Habs29, we still have no evidence that Robinson would have come here. One thing about Larry, he has never shown any desire to coach in high-pressure settings. He doesn't want to be a head coach, which is one clue to his mindset. He took a sweet, low-pressure position in sunny San Jose. Beyond that, I'm not sure you can say that he would have made Subban or Emelin better than they are. Frankly it's hard to imagine two players who could have progressed better than those two. (In short, good as Big Bird is, we don't appear to have a problem with coaching on the blueline). As for the Subban contract, it may be that we could have locked up a franchise defenceman long-term at a cut rate if MB had not taken the stand that he did. But remember, MB was widely viewed as setting a precedent for how his regime would deal with RFA contracts in particular and player negotiation in general. The stand he took has cut the knees out from under future blackmailing by RFAs for big fat contracts and in that sense will benefit us in future dealings apart from Subban. And then there is the question of what it would do to PK's psyche to be prematurely over-rewarded. Would he have been as hungry, and therefore as good, if he'd gotten the $6 mil last summer? We can't know, but these things need to be kept in mind. I'll give Bergevin an "A-." It is, however, way too early to be conclusive about him. You need at least three years to get a bead on a GM, I should think, except in clear-cut pathological cases such as Houle or Gauthier.

Habs29's proposal was not to "trade Price." It was to trade Price for the 1st overall pick in this year's entry draft. If that is the proposal, then it is radical but worth considering from the Habs's perspective. For that matter, you could talk about moving Price for Yakupov or one of Edmonton's other supposedly 'franchise' young players. Whether these moves are possible - whether the other team would go for them, or Bergevin ever even consider it - is another question. But trading Price just for the hell of it is obvious lunacy, especially with the goalie market the way it is, and definitely not what Habs29 was proposing. I do think that Price is in another category from most goalies out there, though. I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that he could be absolutely dominant in a less pressure-filled city. In that sense he may command a strong return despite the flooded market.

It's an interesting idea. I sort of like it, precisely because of the number of quality goalies floating around. (We could get Luongo for a song). And I could see the Avs biting, actually - like Tampa they seem to have an obsession with Montreal/Quebec talent, Roy likes Price, and there is a very strong organizational precedent for grabbing Montreal goalies and riding them to glory. At the same time, it's a hard one to process because the idea of Price as absolutely 'core' to our team is so entrenched. And you just know he would channel all that hard-won Montreal experience into dominating performances for the low-pressure Avs. I'm a Price defender, but it is worth remembering where his mystique comes from and the degree to which his stock has fallen. When he first emerged, he was supposed to be the Crosby of goalies - an absolutely elite generational talent who would dominate at his position, the child of destiny who would inevitably bring us a Cup. Six years later, these ideas seem rather quaint. He is among the top goalies of his cohort, but no more than that - a mere mortal among other flawed, mortal players. Quick's c.v. is better, for one. Indeed, while I trust that he can be an elite playoff performer on a regular basis, this is no longer self-evident - let alone the view that he is a Cup-stealer in the fashion of Patrick Roy. I seriously doubt that MB would do this. But it's interesting thinking.

Can the Disney movie be far behind? The Mighty Bongs of Kingston! A hit for sure.

Meh. The real issue is what MB will do with the cap savings from Cole's salary. We need another forward who can play in the top-6.

I'd like to see the Canuckleheads get hold of him...not only would he bring some fire to a listless dressing room, but he'd offer round-the-clock entertainment for us living in this neck of the woods.

Ha ha, I know what you mean...I come on here daily but with zilch happening, the exercise is forlorn.

That's the Bruins for you, always drafting/acquiring small platyers. Kreijic, Marchand, Chris Bourque, Ference...now this. When will they ever learn.

4 years: dumb. Sakic + Roy sharing power = two alpha males sharing one office: dumb. Anything's possible, but this looks like the seeds of a future disaster planted right there. Probably all coming back to moronic ownership.