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Carbo fired


alexstream

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Hopefully there won't be too many vets on the team next year who he didn't coach in Hamilton.

I can only hope that alot of those vets are gone.

I was thinking Hartley, alot of people i think TSN were saying Crawford, but Lever wouldn't bother me much. I just don't know much about him. He has won several AHL championships.

A defensive coach is a MUST

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What do Tremblay, Vigneault, Therien, Julien, and Carbo have in common? Zero NHL head coaching experience before they became the Canadiens head coach. The last Habs coach with previous experience? Demers, the last coach to win a Cup in Montreal. I think it's about time we go out and get a coach with NHL head coaching experience.

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What do Tremblay, Vigneault, Therien, Julien, and Carbo have in common? Zero NHL head coaching experience before they became the Canadiens head coach. The last Habs coach with previous experience? Demers, the last coach to win a Cup in Montreal. I think it's about time we go out and get a coach with NHL head coaching experience.

I hear Tremblay, Therrien, and Carbo are available.

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From TSN.ca:

Ouch. Not a French candidate to be seen a mile away. Looks like 'best man for the job' really might be a consideration. Who'd a thunk it!

Carbo was the best man for the job but we just fired him. After him (well, before him, but he already had a job) the best man for the job is Bob Gainey. Anyway, some of those candidates were bilingual:

Roy's French, and his English is about the same as Gainey's French. Marc Crawford also knows some French, enough to at least answer questions, I think.

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Carbo was the best man for the job but we just fired him. After him (well, before him, but he already had a job) the best man for the job is Bob Gainey. Anyway, some of those candidates were bilingual:

Roy's French, and his English is about the same as Gainey's French. Marc Crawford also knows some French, enough to at least answer questions, I think.

If you enjoyed losing more and more, Carbo was the perfect man for the job! He was brilliant with his (no-existant) defensive system. I like the way he communicated what he wanted to all the players so well.

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Hopefully Gainey will look at all that is available and pick the best man for the team. Much like he does at the draft table where the best player available to us gets picked regardless of position or nationality.

I could care less if he speaks french and I hope Gainey doesn't limit our choices simply because of it. That would really be a bummer, we should have just kept losing with Carbo then.

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Hopefully Gainey will look at all that is available and pick the best man for the team. Much like he does at the draft table where the best player available to us gets picked regardless of position or nationality.

I could care less if he speaks french and I hope Gainey doesn't limit our choices simply because of it. That would really be a bummer, we should have just kept losing with Carbo then.

Get the best coach possible, free Rosetta Stone software with every coaching position offered... :)

Edited by brobin
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If you enjoyed losing more and more, Carbo was the perfect man for the job! He was brilliant with his (no-existant) defensive system. I like the way he communicated what he wanted to all the players so well.

We had a winning record, had won 5 of our past 7 games (not saying they were all great performances), were coming off a win and had only just got Alex Tanguay back from injury. The previous season they won the East. Keeping the coach around wouldn't guarantee more losses.

We didn't really have a system last season either and we were winning games. He correctly identified that our team had to start playing better defense if they wanted to improve. He couldn't get us to do it - partly his fault, partly the players's fault but that isn't worth firing a promising coach over.

Everyone jumps on the communication thing because that's the one thing he admitted himself. Now you're going to mention how Begin and Laraque and Samsonov didn't know their roles. How the ###### can these guys not know what their roles on the team are? Begin and Laraque have probably been playing the same roles since they were playing Moustique C in Chicoutimi. Samsonov was an offensive player who needed to work hard and create chances offensively. The same thing he's had to do on every other tam he's played on. Why do these guys need to have their roles dictated to them? If you work hard and get results, you play. Otherwise you sit. The only mistakes Carbo's done in this regard are benching people even when they've been working hard (Rivet - could he have lost Koivu right here? - and this started to happen to Samsonov in the second half of the season).

The only good reason to fire Carbo is to jump start the team going down the stretch (unless Gainey intends to take over long term but this seems unlikely). It's an uncharacteristically short-sighted decision by Gainey that sets us back a couple of years and ruins the stability that he had created by keeping Carbo around for three seasons.

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Now you're going to mention how Begin and Laraque and Samsonov didn't know their roles. How the ###### can these guys not know what their roles on the team are? Begin and Laraque have probably been playing the same roles since they were playing Moustique C in Chicoutimi.

I completely disabree with all this. While many have derided Carbo for not having a system - I'm sure he did - it just wasn't effective enough, but that's beside the point. Within that system, everyone had a role to play and specific guidlines to follow. They obviously didn't know what those were. You can argue that they should know these, that guys like Beggers and BGL would know what their role is since junior, and for a small minority, you could be correct - to a degree. But what was Laraque's role on the ice when he wasn't fighting? Where was he supposed to go relative the the play? How was he supposed to approach his man, what was his defined space within the confines of gap control, and where was he supposed to be when opposing players dumped the puck deep into the Montreal zone? When the play collapsed to the Montreal net, what was his role there? How was he to deal with attacking players in the neutral zone, angle to the boards, or force the pass? Was he supposed to forecheck deep, hold the blue line, maintain man-to-man coverage in the neutral zone, or maintain a zone? Was he to go to the net, hold an outside position, work the cycle, stay out of the cycle, force inside passes, or allow board passes in the attacking zone? Did the coach as him to look for the big hit in a certain zone and not in other zones? Was he supposed to look for someone in particular on the ice?

And I've barely gone into what he needed to do when the Habs had the puck.

I don't know how many people have played sports at a high level, but once you get there, roles are very specifically designed. Very rare is the team that allows players complete freedom (see: QMJHL), and even when they say a guy has attacking freedom, it's usually within certain constraints. The way talk is on boards to a large degree, it makes the game sound so simple and straightforward when it's anything but. To go from a coach like Carbo to a Lemaire would be hugely different. It's not even that Carbo is necessarily a *bad* coach, it's just that, apparently, he couldn't communicate the details of whatever he wanted to the guys. Argue that all you want, but the results speak for themselves. How many shots a game allowed on average? How horrible was the defensive coverage?

The problem is, without definition, younger players especially can easily be led into panic if what they first try isn't successful. And yes, the vets need to be the calming influence. They were - in the beginning of the season when we were winning games we had no right to win, that was because of veteran confidence. Things started to get out of hand and Carbo was incapable - for whatever reason - of reigning it in. It's not completely his fault, nothing happens in a vacuum. However at some point, when he saw that things defensively were nowhere close to respectable, he really needed to sit down and spell out every detail from start to finish regarding the defensive game.

If the strategy is to give the blueline, as it seemed to be, then the defenders had to know precisely where to angle their player, the wingers needed to know how to cut off specific passes, and the centres needed to know who to pick up as the play came deep. That sounds like it should be easy, but it's not when things are chaotic and each rush from the opponents is slightly different. You have one guy panic and lose his man, and that throws off the entire team in coverage. One step to the left and you've left an entire lane open which exposes the team in a horrible way. You don't win from skill alone, you need to harness that skill and put it into a clearly defined system which allows you to get the most out of each skill.

Why was he using his pluggers so much? Probably because they are players with limited offensive upside who inherently think defense first. Is that a knock on the some of the other forwards? Sure - to the extent that it's a knock on Ovechkin, Crosby, et al. - attackers think attack first; which is why they're attackers. Carbo was desperate for defensive awareness on each line because he didn't seem to be able to communicate his strategies to everyone. Unfortunately then, he was caught in the Catch-22 situation of over-aggressive commitments from those same low-skill players. As a forward who has played at a fairly high level in competitive soccer, I *love* when a defender comes at me. Use a little skill, pull the ball to the side, watch the defender fly off into nowhere, and then you have a huge opening. Again, those guys have to be taught precisely what to do.

Bottom line, he was in a no-win situation because his demands were not clearly specified. And again, if you haven't played at very high levels in organized sport, you may not understand just how detailed things can get. Had the players quit on him? It seems so, yes. However there does seem to be good reason why it happened - as a player, you can get really frustrated if everyone isn't on the same page.

Unfortunately, the Habs weren't even in the same book.

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Those things you listed aren't about Laraque's role, that's the general team system. He doesn't tell each player to play a specific way, he tells them the style and his principles, and then the players do their thing - but for all we know, he did tell them a good deal of that stuff. Do you think Gainey has sat down with the players and told each one of them everything they have to do at every second of icetime they're given? No coach does, most of it is common sense and any NHL player should already know it. Basically everything you listed depends on where the puck is and what's going on, he can't have such a detailed system programmed into his head, he needs to have the right instincts. Like you said, every rush is a little bit different, the players need to read the play and adjust. Telling them to keep their right skate at a 42 degree angle and the left at a 76 isn't going to be useful in real-game situations. But the general system, whether to play man-to-man or zone, how many forecheckers and stuff like that are things that every coach tells their team about. The players sucked defensively, that's it. If anything, fire Muller and hire a defenseman.

The reason why he played the grinders so often is because they deserved it twenty times more than Koivu, Kovalev, Plekanec and Higgins did. When your leaders have quit, he needs to use guys like Lapierre, Kostopoulos and Pacioretty who truly lead by example. He did it to send a message - that the guys who earn their icetime are the ones who'll get it. That's how he's always done it: win and you stay, lose and you're out. There's no grey there. On the PP, he used Kosto and Metro because of their RH shot. Plekanec would have scored on the 5-on-3 last night had he had a right shot. We could have used Metro or D'Agostini out there.

Who are the players that quit on their coach? Koivu... and Hamrlik? And then you defend their leadership? Barring some maniac who, I dunno, tortures his players after losses, anybody who'll quit on their coach - not to mention his teammates, fanbase, himself and the rest of his organization - is pathetic. Carbo benched Rivet two years ago so he's going to quit? The players quit on Carbo so we know that our leadership is coming from the captain and not the coach? When you sign a contract paying you millions of dollars a year in exchange for your services, you don't quit on anybody, even if he once benched your BFF.

Further, these problems are things that have been affecting the team for years. Before Carbo came, and for the first two games after Carbo's left. Have the players quit on Gainey too? I can't believe that. They just don't know or seem to be able to play a defensive system, or to give a consistent effort, or what not. Whatever the problems are with the team, they clearly have absolutely nothing to do with who the coach is at the time. But maybe it's the assistant coach? Or the goalie coach? Yeah, let's bounce them next, they're giving the players mixed messages. They've convinced Laraque that he can be a real hockey player instead of just Price's bodyguard. Has every Habs coach over the past decade been posessed by Harold Ballard? Aside for Therrien, we've had nothing but good coaches recently and, aside for last season under Carbo, nothing but mediocre results.

How are we supposed to have a team when the coach changes every two years and half the team is hitting free agency? We had the chance to have some stability, to keep the coach and then decide what to do with Koivu and Kovalev but now we're going to hire Bob Hartley and then try it all again. Maybe Hartley is going to have wonderful communication skills, a brilliant system and he'll take this team to a Cup. Or maybe we're all going to start bashing him after his first season because we yet again have defensive and consistency problems and are yet again forced to decide whether the fundamental problems of the team - which clearly have nothing to do with talent - are connected with the coaching, or with a lack of leadership and proper attitude. And we now how that one ends.

We have the talent on this team and we had a good coach (be it Carbo or Gainey) but to quote George Carlin: "SOMETHING's ######ed up!" Something definitely isn't right here. Are all of our problems going to be fixed now that we have Gainey? Impossible. The only system we've seen this core win under is Carbo's firewagon style that he used last system. It isn't a full and proper system, but it's a style and our team is perfectly suited for that style. Gainey had us doing that in the first period of the Edmonton game and it was beautiful. Carbo's problem was that instead of getting them to play the same style but to work on their gameplan in their own end, he totally changed the system into a defensive one. Okay, he isn't perfect. But he's the only one who's ever gotten results from these guys. Was he Mr. Communication with a crystal clear system last season, but a confusing loner this year? What can your reason be for our regression from last season? He's the same man. Our man.

We probably will do a bit better for the rest of the year under Gainey than we would have under Carbonneau. But what about beyond this year? Time for a new coach and old problems. I'm sure Hartley can do a good job behind our bench but our problem has never been coaching, we were already set and stable in that department. We might still not know what our problem is but we know it isn't coaching. Maybe its players's attitudes toward coaches? Listen to what the man tells you (and I'm sure the coaching staff told them plenty of things, they have practices for a reason) and then do it. Questioning and quitting doesn't belong here or anywhere else.

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What I find interesting is that many hockey analysts are saying that the problem is we are trying to play a defensive style with players who can't do it. Bob built an offensive team that is suppose to just outscore the other team and rely on the goalie to be the best defensive system. (see Washington, Pitts). We did this last year and had success, but we got dumped in the post season because the goalie faltered (our system can't tolerate this) and the other teams stifled our offense.

So this year that mantra was "we need to play better 5-5 and play a more solid defensive game". Carbo tried all year and failed.

What did Gainey say he was going to do... get them to play a defensive style. I think what Gainey is going to learn first hand is that he didn't built the team that way. If he wants to be NJ, he has the wrong players.

If Gainey said, I shall stop the defensive stuff and "release the hounds", then maybe we would win some more games. We would still lose in the first two rounds when we hit a hot goalie.

So to sum up, Gainey has specifically stated that he is going to keep pushing the defensive game, so it won't be long before our players are pissed again.

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We don't have the horses to play a wide open offensive game. This team needs structure... the injuries have robbed us of our offensive prowess. We don't have high end offensive players like Washington or Pittsburgh at all.... and Pittsburgh plays a fairly defensive style, BTW. Pittsburgh wouldn't dare play an all out offensive game with a team full of Chris Kunitz's and no Malkin-Crosby. Washington wouldn't dare play an all out offensive game based around Fedorov and Flieschmann. We may have, when healthy, 2nd line quality forwards playing on our 3rd line. But we don't have enough 1st line players to fill out a top line, and we definitely don't have a talent on par with even Backstrom or Semin, let alone Ovechkin, Malkin, Crosby and Green.

Our strength was always depth and structure. It was never talent. This year, we lost both our depth and our structure. Hence, we aren't a strong team this year.

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Those things you listed aren't about Laraque's role, that's the general team system. He doesn't tell each player to play a specific way, he tells them the style and his principles, and then the players do their thing - but for all we know, he did tell them a good deal of that stuff. Do you think Gainey has sat down with the players and told each one of them everything they have to do at every second of icetime they're given? No coach does, most of it is common sense and any NHL player should already know it. Basically everything you listed depends on where the puck is and what's going on, he can't have such a detailed system programmed into his head, he needs to have the right instincts. Like you said, every rush is a little bit different, the players need to read the play and adjust. Telling them to keep their right skate at a 42 degree angle and the left at a 76 isn't going to be useful in real-game situations. But the general system, whether to play man-to-man or zone, how many forecheckers and stuff like that are things that every coach tells their team about. The players sucked defensively, that's it. If anything, fire Muller and hire a defenseman.

The reason why he played the grinders so often is because they deserved it twenty times more than Koivu, Kovalev, Plekanec and Higgins did. When your leaders have quit, he needs to use guys like Lapierre, Kostopoulos and Pacioretty who truly lead by example. He did it to send a message - that the guys who earn their icetime are the ones who'll get it. That's how he's always done it: win and you stay, lose and you're out. There's no grey there. On the PP, he used Kosto and Metro because of their RH shot. Plekanec would have scored on the 5-on-3 last night had he had a right shot. We could have used Metro or D'Agostini out there.

Who are the players that quit on their coach? Koivu... and Hamrlik? And then you defend their leadership? Barring some maniac who, I dunno, tortures his players after losses, anybody who'll quit on their coach - not to mention his teammates, fanbase, himself and the rest of his organization - is pathetic. Carbo benched Rivet two years ago so he's going to quit? The players quit on Carbo so we know that our leadership is coming from the captain and not the coach? When you sign a contract paying you millions of dollars a year in exchange for your services, you don't quit on anybody, even if he once benched your BFF.

Further, these problems are things that have been affecting the team for years. Before Carbo came, and for the first two games after Carbo's left. Have the players quit on Gainey too? I can't believe that. They just don't know or seem to be able to play a defensive system, or to give a consistent effort, or what not. Whatever the problems are with the team, they clearly have absolutely nothing to do with who the coach is at the time. But maybe it's the assistant coach? Or the goalie coach? Yeah, let's bounce them next, they're giving the players mixed messages. They've convinced Laraque that he can be a real hockey player instead of just Price's bodyguard. Has every Habs coach over the past decade been posessed by Harold Ballard? Aside for Therrien, we've had nothing but good coaches recently and, aside for last season under Carbo, nothing but mediocre results.

How are we supposed to have a team when the coach changes every two years and half the team is hitting free agency? We had the chance to have some stability, to keep the coach and then decide what to do with Koivu and Kovalev but now we're going to hire Bob Hartley and then try it all again. Maybe Hartley is going to have wonderful communication skills, a brilliant system and he'll take this team to a Cup. Or maybe we're all going to start bashing him after his first season because we yet again have defensive and consistency problems and are yet again forced to decide whether the fundamental problems of the team - which clearly have nothing to do with talent - are connected with the coaching, or with a lack of leadership and proper attitude. And we now how that one ends.

We have the talent on this team and we had a good coach (be it Carbo or Gainey) but to quote George Carlin: "SOMETHING's ######ed up!" Something definitely isn't right here. Are all of our problems going to be fixed now that we have Gainey? Impossible. The only system we've seen this core win under is Carbo's firewagon style that he used last system. It isn't a full and proper system, but it's a style and our team is perfectly suited for that style. Gainey had us doing that in the first period of the Edmonton game and it was beautiful. Carbo's problem was that instead of getting them to play the same style but to work on their gameplan in their own end, he totally changed the system into a defensive one. Okay, he isn't perfect. But he's the only one who's ever gotten results from these guys. Was he Mr. Communication with a crystal clear system last season, but a confusing loner this year? What can your reason be for our regression from last season? He's the same man. Our man.

We probably will do a bit better for the rest of the year under Gainey than we would have under Carbonneau. But what about beyond this year? Time for a new coach and old problems. I'm sure Hartley can do a good job behind our bench but our problem has never been coaching, we were already set and stable in that department. We might still not know what our problem is but we know it isn't coaching. Maybe its players's attitudes toward coaches? Listen to what the man tells you (and I'm sure the coaching staff told them plenty of things, they have practices for a reason) and then do it. Questioning and quitting doesn't belong here or anywhere else.

More than anything, Carbo's failure was his inability to get the team out of a slump when it happened. Two years ago, it was the 23 december slump. This season, it was on jan 20th I believe.

A coach needs a couple of things to succeed.

Hockey Strategy

Ability to communicate the strategies and have the players adopt them

Motivation skills

Know what's wrong, pin it and solve it (instead of panicking, changing lines every 10 minutes and getting fired)

I think Carbo particularly lacked the last two and maybe wasn't so good at the first two.

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Great Article in Today's Gazette by Jack Todd.

Carbo went from toast to roast

"In the long run, bouncing a coach is almost always counterproductive."

By JACK TODD, The Gazette

March 16, 2009

http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/new...html?id=1393084

Edited by Fanpuck33
Please don't post whole articles
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Yea, nice article. I beleive myself, Kozed and a few others already said most of that. You can't let the inmates run the asylum.

This has been going on way too long, i totally agree with stability, but you do have several coach killers in the locker room.

The coach should have stayed, the message should have been delivered to the players at the the trade deadline. You guys are gone.

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Great Article in Today's Gazette by Jack Todd.

Carbo went from toast to roast

"In the long run, bouncing a coach is almost always counterproductive."

By JACK TODD, The Gazette

March 16, 2009

http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/new...html?id=1393084

I was going to post this article too. Jack Todd nailed it.

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Boy, it's a pretty wacky world when people are agreeing with Jack Todd. And I haven't even read the article yet. One would think that Koz being in the same mindset of Todd would mean the world has officially ended.

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I dunno. I seem to recall that Jean Perron 'lost the room' in 87 (a 'room' that included Gainey and Robinson and Carbonneau) and we fired him and brought in some new guy, Pat Burns, who did OK. Then Pat Burns was fired for 'losing the room' in 1992. We brought in some guy called Jacques Demers, who did...OK.

It is frankly dishonest of Todd to end his list of examples at Jacques Demers. What that does is delude his readers into thinking that good teams (e.g., the Habs prior to 1995) don't fire coaches. The Perron/Burns examples shows that indeed they do.

Each firing has to be taken in its own context.

A further problem with Todd's argument (apart from Todd's longstanding general idiocy) is that he denies that losing the room should be the kiss of death for any coach. But it's ridiculous to deny that. I remember reading Steve Shutt on Scotty Bowman, saying that Bowman's genius was in handling the room so as to prevent a total rebellion. Shutt's underlying assumption was that if a coach loses the room, he loses his effectiveness, and ultimately his job. So this is not some novel theory in hockey circles.

Other than 'stability' - valuable to be sure, but not as valuable as having a respected and effective coach who is not driving away veterans and (perhaps) making it even harded to attract UFAs - there really was no overpowering reason for keeping Carbo. It's not like he was the second coming of Toe Blake.

People should get over this.

Edited by The Chicoutimi Cucumber
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I dunno, a lot of teams who have switched coaches in the last while have been doing pretty good.

i think todd's point is that the habs have been doing it for 16 years, and havent been doing pretty good....

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Added to that, Todd seems to not notice the irony in berating people who claimed they could coach better than Carbo, but yet proceeding to do virtually the same thing w/r/t managing the team and second guessing Gainey for the move.

That being said, I still have a hard time believing this was the right move, or done for the right reasons.

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I dunno, a lot of teams who have switched coaches in the last while have been doing pretty good.

Short term.. and he does say that sometimes it is warrented, but at some point, you have a good coach and you stick with him. I believe Carbo was good enough that we should have sent the other message... if you don't want to play for Carbo.. please give me your name and I will send you to Edmonton....

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Waidaminit....

How many of you guys quoting Jack Todd are the same guys who like to call him one of the worst journalists ever? Sumpthin stinks here.

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Waidaminit....

How many of you guys quoting Jack Todd are the same guys who like to call him one of the worst journalists ever? Sumpthin stinks here.

Jack Todd is God the superman!

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Waidaminit....

How many of you guys quoting Jack Todd are the same guys who like to call him one of the worst journalists ever? Sumpthin stinks here.

I was asking myself the same question. I am usually a fan of Todd's-- and his work is usually blasted by most people on this forum-- but this time he really blew it. Eg., saying that if Savard had made the same mistakes as Gainey he would have been fired. First, there is no way that he could know that it is opinion stated as fact and second AS made plenty of mistakes with free agent signiings.

As for changing the coach, his conclusions are disingenous. Sure Vignault is thriving now after a considerable period as a junior coach and a stint in the AHL-- not to mention that his job was in jeopardy earlier this year when the Canucks were in the toilet. Julien-- the Devils? Need I say more?

I maintain that if not for a wild streak of injuries and streaky (let's be kind) goaltending this team would be fine. As it is, Carbo admitted publically that he had run out of ideas and that in and of itself would have gotten him fired in most places.

So, lets take a deep breath, chill and keep the faith :hlogo:

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