The Chicoutimi Cucumber

AAAH! We cannot lose BOTH him and Markov. Fortunately it sounds like he'll be back for the start of the season. The more worrisome possibility is that he'll be a step behind due to missing training camp, which isn't good either. I'd curse the luck, but really, this is part of the risk in having an older defence corps. Spacek is injury-prone as well. It's a bit of a ticking timb-bomb back there. Let's hope Subban really is all that, and that OB can step it up a notch.

I will be shocked if it's not Gionta. It just seems obvious. He is locked up long term unlike Gill, Gorges and Markov; brings it every night; top-6 player; exciting player you tend to pull for; no baggage like Gomez; and has the proven maturity, winning heritage and Cup rings, unlike Cammy (whose game I love). It's a no-brainer, really. The only issue with Gio is age. If he loses a step, he may not be a player who can plausibly be deployed in the bottom-6, in which case he will become marginal fast. But that's a minor risk. Time to end the speculation and pull a Jean-Luc Picard: make it so!

I spoke my mind at length about this in the 'What a Bung-hole!' thread a while back. Suffice it to say that the argument is nativist at best and racist at worst. Francophone players and coaches such as Pouliot or Martin are not 'Quebecois' if they were born elsewhere (regardless of whether they live in Quebec). English-speaking players living in Quebec (E.g., Saku Koivu, who did more for Montreal than 99% of these turds will ever do) - immigrants, in other words, albeit immigrants of an unusual type - are also not 'Quebecois' because they're not French-speaking. In short, unless you have both the right bloodlines *and* speak the right language, you are not a 'real' Quebecois. This is just the sports version of Jacques Parizeau's infamous referendum-night speech on 'nous' (meaning francophone Quebecers with ancestral roots in the province) being the voters that really matter, as opposed to 'money and the ethnic vote.' Besides, the team is managed by a francophone Montrealer. I guess Gauthier is what they used to charmingly refer to as a 'n***er king' (i.e., a local lackey of the colonial overlord. They said the same thing about Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien - basically anyone who disagreed with their narrow and paranoid vision. After all, all federalists are 'sellouts'). The Molsons stepped up where local francophone money failed to - and Gilette before that *saved* the team despite the complete lack of serious interest from credible Quebecois investors. Yet all this is a 'plot.' It's just ridiculous. The sad part is that there IS a legitimate criticism that the Habs have not done enough to draft and nurture local talent (French or otherwise). What is absolutely ridiculous is feeding this into a preposterous nationalist persecution complex that is about 40 years out of date. GET A LIFE, YOU F**KING JERKS :hlogo:

I'll believe that when I see it, but it certainly sounds promising. :hlogo:

On a related note: one of the problems with Gainey hanging around in the shadows, as he is, is that it likely impedes the Habs' ability to lure back into the fold certain talented people whose throats he slit. Carbo and André Savard top that list - the former having been fired, the latter having been shunted aside to make room for Bob and later driven out by his own frustration at being marginalized. These guys are both French and have impeccable credentials as good hockey men; of necessity the Habs should be aggressively recruiting people with that profile. Could be that Uncle Bob is making that harder. As for Carbo, I'm not saying he was a horrible coach, but given his oft-stated love of coaching, it seems likely he'd have pounced on any credible opportunity that came his way. His record was mixed and he is plainly no coaching 'star' a la Guy Boucher.

You get fired in hockey. If Carbo can never forgive Gainey for making a decision that any other GM would also have made, then that may be an understandable, human response, but it's not a reasonable one. Just as I'd like to see the Habs bring back Andre Savard into the organization, I would like to see Carbo return to the Habs' organization in some capacity (I could see him being groomed for GM some day). But as a coach, there is no indication that he was anything special. He might or might not become something special someday; certainly, his Montreal experience would have given him a lot to draw from in that regard. Like I said, though, the fact that he seems to have been completely overlooked by the other 29 teams since his firing might offer a clue into how his coaching abilities are regarded around the league.

I love how the BRILLIANT coach Carbo, that tactical wizard unjustly fired by evil Bob Gainey, and who was so righteously defended and made into a secular saint by the stupendous hockey minds of the Quebec fans and media, has been so quickly snapped up by other NHL clubs. It just goes to show what a HORRIBLE, franchise-shattering error it was to let him go I remember the 100th anniversay celebration...Gainey stood more or less alone out there, isolated from several old friends whom he had fairly recently fired. At least, that's how I recall it. It seemed a sad sight and a case study in the price that power can exact. Hopefully Bob has healed the breach with Carbo...and Doug Jarvis too.

It should be Price!! Thank you, Mike Gillis. I could be off-base, but I remember reading somewhere that after the disaster of Carbo and Chelios tying in the vote and becoming co-captains, Koivu and Corson were basically in a dead heat. Could be that Habs' management has been burned once too often by doing it democratically. Having said that, I often wonder if management consults with players as they should. For instance, before acquiring a player, in addition to scouting reports and all that, it would make a lot of sense to confidentially ask players on your team what they think of him as a hockey player. That'd be the most direct way to find out whether he's easy to play against, etc.. Does management do this? Beats me. But they should. Not to change the subject. Anyway: too bad about the death of the tradition of players voting for captain, but there might be good reasons for its demise given our history.

Well, you might be overlooking the fact that Muller was done as a top-6 forward by that point. Muller had a weird career in that for the first half of it, he was an elite all-around C. By the time he hit 30, he had for some reason lost a step and mutated into the bottom-6 grinder they knew in Toronto and elsewhere. I agree that Schneider was a lot to give up, but the bottom line is that in that deal we traded a #3 C for a legitimate #1C, and traded a top-2 defenceman for a top-4 defenceman. So I think it was another good trade by Savard. Indeed, when you consider that Savard left us with a team that had Damphousse, a young and superstar-calibre Koivu, and Pierre Turgeon at C - not to mention Roy in nets and a bunch of other good players - you realize what a strong hand he bequeathed his successor. Unofrtunately his successor was a moron and soon dispatched Turgeon in exchange for an older Corson a few years later. ARRRGH. But don't get me started. :hlogo:

Heh...I'd forgotten about that. It certainly humanizes Richer's on-ice erraticism but does nothing to relieve the aggravation of having had to endure Houle's numb-skulled re-acquisition of the guy. Oh well. Water under the bridge. Still...anyone who saw Richer in full, magisterial flight during the 1989-90 season can only shake their heads at what could have been; Wamsley's account of what he could do when he was on is completely right, and I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say 'the next Guy Lafleur.' The happier story is that we turned him into Kirk Muller, who, next to Patrick Roy, was the single biggest reason we won the Cup in 1993. So all the frustration paid off in the end.

I remember the debate around that trade quite well. It seemed especially polarized between anglophones (who opposed the trade of Corson + Gilchrist) and francophones (who of course loved it). I recall one French guy specifically calling up the English sports show and arguing that Damphousse was an elite offensive talent and that those other guys were merely good players, and that when you get a chance to acquire the former, you do it. He turned out to be completely right. A good lesson there. Just as French Canadians tend to overrate francophone players and are maybe too generous toward talented mediocrities like Kovalev, I think English Canadians have a certain cultural tendency to over-value physical/lunch-bucket hockey players, over offensively gifted ones. Some part of us just loves the plumber. But ultimately there's no substitute for sheer talent. Richer was the most infuriating Habs player of my lifetime IMHO. An absolutely sublime talent capable of dominating games and, indeed, entire seasons, he lacked the will and desire to do so, preferring instead to carve out a comfortable little career as a middle-of-the-pack second liner. He could have been Guy Lafleur; he chose to be Martin Ruscinsky. This was frustrating enough on the first go-around, but then to have that idiot Houle trade Lyle Odelein, our only physical defenceman and dressing-room leader, for this bozo - and to have this trade be praised by the dumb-ass French media - was more than I could take. Unsurprisingly, Richer put in a couple of mediocre seasons before being shipped out of town, while Odelein went on to be his usual rock on the blueline for NJ. I remember the French media expressing puzzlement that it should be so. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. If I had to sum it up, I'd say the anglo response to the Damphousse deal illustrates the Anglo pathology of overrating grinders over talent, while the francophone response to the Richer deal exemplifies the francophone pathology of celebrating sheer talent/frenchness over substance. Not that I'm generalizing

Corson was a good player, although I recall a lot of hype predicting that he'd emerge as a truly elite, dominating power forward (never happened) and I suppose my attitude toward him was slightly coloured by disappointment as a result. I'll bet we can both agree, though, that trading him for Damphousse turned out to be a great bit of GMing by Serge Savard :hlogo:

Obviously you're correct in purely rational terms. Numbers have no inherent value. We could also change the red line to paisley and make the refs dress in mascot outfits. What I'm suggesting is that if you have a sense of the history and traditions of the game, your preference will be for continuity with the practices that characterized that history, unless there's a good reason to change them. A great many of the things we do are 'arbitrary' in purely rational terms - we do them because that's our tradition, how we do things. And we come to value them for precisely that reason. Having said that, it's obviously not an issue to go ballistic over one way or the other. It doesn't cut to the heart of the game in the way that, say, shootouts do for some people. Like I said before, it's more a matter of seemliness. It behooves the Habs in particular to be faithful to the traditions and mystique of the game, as they are its ultimate expression. Let the Nashvilles have the gaudy jerseys and the novelty acts. The Habs should always be old school. :hlogo:

This IS a good read from one of the best Habs-related sites in existence. And saskhab, thanks for the awesome list! bar, the issue is simply tradition. In the old days teams almost always allocated numbers starting from 1 and moving upwards. Since there's only 20-odd players on a team, in followed that numbers over 30 were rare and typically reserved for guys trying to make the cut. This is why you find very few of our retired jerseys with big numbers on the back. Instead we have #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #10, on up to #33. Then it stops (until #99, the universal Gretzky jersey-retirement). Historically, players just didn't wear these inflated numbers. So to people like me, who tend to enjoy hockey traditions and be irked when they are arbitrarily discarded, the proliferation of high jersey numbers might be OK for junky franchises like Vancouver or Florida...but it's unseemly for a team that has the greatest heritage of them all. I agree with everything this article says - including the principle that superstars might be the exception to the 'low jersey number' rule. I never begrudged Gretzky his #99 (especially since it showed such a keen sense of tradition, given that #9 is the most mythic number in all of hockey). Mario's 66 was a clever inversion of Gretzky's 99. Jagr's 68 was a play off Mario's 66. And so on. Fun stuff. But the Habs are in a super-starless era, so it's a moot point. With #6 awarded to Spacek, I'd like to see PK grab #8. :hlogo: And I'm a little surprised nobody's jumped on #22, given its distinguished associations (Steve Shutt).

No, that number describes his expected points totals for this year.

No kidding. Frank Mahovlich! There ought to be a ban on numbers over 35 for regular roster players. Of course, with so many Habs' numbers retired that might take us into negative integers For time-wasting trivia before the season starts, dig this investigation into the history of the #27 in NHL and Habs history: http://www.hockey-reference.com/friv/numbers.cgi?number=27 Does anyone with even more time on their hands have it in them to create a list of all available Habs' numbers that are NOT football numbers - i.e., numbers under, say, 38?

I think I want these words inscribed on my tombstone.

Bettman is such a soulless pr*ck, he'd probably prefer Arby's.

Hilarious. The team is a Stanley Cup semi-finalist and yet the fans are in an indigant, fatalistic rage before the season even starts Right-handed shot, good faceoff man, veteran leadership for the bottom-6, some possible offensive upside if used on the powerplay, cheap - this the sort of move you'd expect from Gauthier's track record, a small step but one that improves the team. And I could not agree more with Easy Ryder: this signing saves us pssing away a draft pick at the deadline. Good, responsible GMing.

dlbar, you've jogged my memory. Johnson was hailed for his shot-blocking prowess in Vancouver but was basically labouring with injuries his whole time there, which is why he was such a marginal factor. The issue with him is clearly age + injuries. He looks OK on paper but my guess is he's too broken-down and old to be fully effective - certainly that's what his Canucks dossier suggests.

Yeah, I love how players who hardly have any playoff experience get labelled 'playoff busts' if they struggle a bit. I remember they used to say this about Pavel Datsyuk. Kovalchuk only had one playoff on an actual hockey team, as opposed to a piece-of-crap franchise of third-raters, and in that one playoff he registered more than a point per game. I wouldn't bet against him to deliver the goods. The real issue with the Devils, to me, is how Brodeur will react to the new, supposedly more offensively-minded regime. I'm pretty sure the Devils will be fine, an elite team yet again - but there's a small amount of potential there for internal ruptures and a major step backward from the guy in nets.

A nothing player, really - unless he's good on faceoffs. That I live in Vancouver and pay some attention to the Canucks, and yet my mental file on Johnson is practically empty, may give you a clue as to the sort of impact he's likely to make. Or maybe I just didn't pay enough attention. I still think we should be looking instead at someone with offensive upside to potentially help bail out the top-6 when Kostitsyn gets hurt/craps out/slumps and when and if Pouliot struggles: a Mike Comrie type of player - super cheap, a bit of a wild card, but with some potential top-6 tools. But Gauthier isn't the type for such moves, I suppose. You could also argue that we should be hoarding cap space in order to bolster the PP by signing a MA Bergeron type, in the event that we are gravely wounded by our lack of left-shooting cannon from the point, as per JT's latest post: http://habsloyalist.blogspot.com/2010/09/special-teams.html And BTH will no doubt observe that if Gauthier is concerned about our lack of veteran experience on the bottom-6, he should have saved some trouble and re-signed Moore

This is one issue I can't get too excited about. The main thing is to avoid making two mistakes that hurt us in the past: 1. Allowing the locker room to become divided between two camps for the captaincy. (Remember the Carbo vs. Chelios days? And apparently there was a bit of a Corson vs. Koivu division in the mid-90s). Last season we had a bit of a rift between Gomez ('let's play up-tempo rushing hockey') and Gill ('let's play stay-at-home conservative hockey'). If this rift still exists, the eventual choice of captain could have ramifications for it. 2. Not pulling the old Ronald Corey move of choosing a captain based on PR rather than actual leadership (Turgeon). While I'm sure Cammy has leadership qualities, there might be slight grounds for concern if he becomes the choice - that the team is going with stylish media relations over true in-the-room leadership. And while we're at it, here are two questions to ponder: 1. Do we HAVE to have a captain? Is it totally inconceivable that we could simply go with a rotating captaincy or else the 'triple-A' model? 2. What will be the method for choosing a captain if we do need one? The tradition has been a player vote. has it been confirmed that Martin will be making the choice?

I agree that parity is here in a big way. However, speaking realistically, Washington, Pittsburgh, New Jersey and Boston have to be considered 'locks' to make the dance. Philly should also be a lock, with only the possibility of horrible goaltending and perhaps collective fatigue from last season's playoff raising a question mark. And I suppose it is possible that NJ could take a lurch backwards despite Kovalchuk, given Brodeur's ongoing decline and an apparent organizational shift toward a more open style. So I'd put Boston, Washington and Pittsburgh in the 'guaranteed playoff team' category and the other two in the '95% guaranteed' category. The rest of the conference is more or less an even toss except perhaps for Florida, TO, the Islanders, and Atlanta. So yes, parity, but on three levels really: 4-5 locks to make the playoffs, 5-6 teams that are good enough in principle to make the playoffs, and 3-4 teams that would need a miracle season to make the playoffs. The Habs are in the upper segment of the second group IMHO. If the young guys deliver, they will enter the first group.

I think we can all see the weaknesses on our team. Other posters have identified them accurately. However, I feel it's ALWAYS a mistake to start panicking about what other teams are doing or have done. Every single year I read posts about how 'the other teams have gotten better and the Habs haven't.' And every single year the Habs make the playoffs while one or more of these 'improved' teams doesn't. While it's true that the Habs are not a top team, it's also past time that Habs fans stopped griping about us being a 'bubble' team and recognized that our team reliably makes the playoffs. In six seasons since 2002-03 we have made the playoffs five times, getting out of the first round three times. In today's NHL that is an impressive track record; significantly better than, say, the supposedly admirable Vancouver Canucks. And more recent years have seen a marked uptick in performance. Over the last three seasons, we finished first in the conference once (08), were universally hailed as a contender but then fell apart (09), and then went to the semi-finals (10). While the past is hardly an automatic predictor of the future, fans need to start shedding this 'loser' mentality. The Montreal Canadiens have actually been a pretty successful organization over the last six or seven years. I have considerable faith in Subban and IF Hammer and Spacek don't regress too much due to age, our D actually looks pretty good. The team will have much-improved chemistry so we can expect substantial improvement from within. Pleks, Gomez, Gionta, and Cammy are top-6 players on ANY team in the league. The X-factor is the young players, including Price. If they play well, we will be more than a bubble team. If they don't, it'll be like last season. Like I said, I'd feel better if we had one more player who has a track record of being able serve at least temporarily on the top 6 (Guerin). But hand-wringing anxiety over whether a semi-finalist will make the playoffs seems to me unduly pessimistic. :hlogo: