Gorges files for Arbitration, signs 1-year, $2.5M contract

[The Chicoutimi Cucumber]

Habs29, I share some of your concerns about asset management. But I still think you overstate the case - mainly because you take individual decisions totally out of context. I argued passionately for dealing Souray at the deadline, for instance, but the team was in a playoff hunt and Gainey was trying to reconstruct the team's identity as a committed, competitive club. Deliberately missing the playoffs in order to 'maximize assets,' apart from the instrinsic undesirability of missing the playoffs, may have had negative side-efects (e.g., instilling the message that losing is acceptable, or diminishing our appeal as a player destination. Consider how important our rep as a sure-fire 'playoff team' has been in enhancing our lure to UFAs). Similarly, the Habs shopped Ryder around in 2009 but didn't feel the return justified losing a player who could help them in the playoffs. That was a reasonable decision. You'll never win if you keep jettisoning players at the deadline.

That's another thing. It's easy to fantasize about the awesome return someone like Souray would have yielded. As I recall, the hottest rumour was Steve Bernier, who has turned out to be a flop. Whoopee.

Further, we turned Souray's salary into the signing of Hamrlik as UFA. So it isn't as though we suffered a net asset loss. You have to look at the overall picture.

As for the continual bleeding of draft picks, most of that has been a consequence of the fateful error of letting Streit walk as a UFA (as I argued endlessly in my push to keep Wisniewski). We shouldn't infer a general pattern from that single mistake.

I say all of this, not to deny that Montreal has made some questionable decisions with some of its assets - I myself am particularly bothered by the repeated throwing away of talented young players because they are immature (S. Kostitsyn, Grabovski,Ribeiro) - but to offer a more balanced assessment. The Habs have suffered mostly from throwing away a #1a C (Ribeiro) and a secondary PP quarterback (Streit), two catastrophic errors that we have spent years unsuccessfully trying to fix. The rest are marginal issues; and if the Habs were truly horrible at asset management in general, we would not have become the successful team we are.