Improving now is better than tanking!

[hab29RETIRED]

2 hours ago, alfredoh2009 said:

Any junior manager in an organization has to sell the corporate goals to his crew. 
 

The stated goal of the organization going into the summer was: repeat

 

the series of events into the season didn’t change that goal. It was re-stated during the pre-season even after some of the injuries and NHLPA cases started to filter through

 

The leadership of the players became a void: Weber, Price, Tatar, Danault, Edmundson, Perry, Stall, Byron

 

Those that were supposed to step-in didn’t: Petry, Gallagher (I forget if he was hurt)

 

Those that were added were not leadership material. 
 

once that situation settled in, it rotted the team from the core. Without upper management support (president) and with a lame duck middle-manager (MB), it was a meter on time for the lower management to be flushed: anyone who has gone through that at work would understand that DD was put in an impossible situation 

 

he is not a moron, and he did not destroy anything : he was “chair a cannon” or “collateral damage”

It should have been clear from day 1 that repeat was not a possibility.  Hell it was pretty obvious before they played their first games that the playoffs weren’t a possibility unless their was a colossal collapse by TBL, FLA, TOR, BOS in their division, or CAR, WAS, PIT. Final spot was most likely going to be NYR, NYI, or even PHI. The only big drop that has surprised me is how bad the NYI have been. They weren’t even close to being a lock for the playoffs, but they have been worse than expected.
 

It was pretty obvious that BUF, NJD, MON, OTT and DET were going to miss the playoffs.  I saw as a bottom 4 team in our Conference. Not the worst. A lot of that is on coaching.  We are seeing that despite losing our leading scorer from last year, we are doing better than we were with DD. Hell, I think we are doing better with St. Louis now than we did with DD during the REGULAR season last year.

[Commandant]

He won 8 games out of over 40 this season. 

 

FIN

[xXx..CK..xXx]

A few things come to mind…

 

1) There should be no expectation of an NHL coach to come in and say “Hey boys, we lost our leadership crew and have many unfortunate injuries heading into the season. Let’s go out there, have some fun and make mistakes, regardless of the outcome”.

 

Sure, it is true that quite often effort can be more important to a coach than results, but to think that a coach should come in and quite literally have a tanking mentality (which is how I interpret this) is out of the question.

 

For me, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having had a coach who was trying to win (even) this season. I would want nothing less from my coach in any given season.

 

2) While it is well known to everyone that the Habs had the above stated unfortunate reality of having lost a leadership

core which included Price, Weber, Edmundson, Perry, Staal, Byron, as well as losing some players like KK, this does not excuse the coach from performing. 
 

Sure, we can get caught up in rebuttling those who use strong words such as “moron” and refute them. As an example, from personal standpoint I can say that I’ve never agreed with such strong words being used towards Therrien.
 

However, the fact remains that many people were asking for a change when it comes to Ducharme and after having not won 2 games in a row all season, we have now won 5. Everything that was mentioned outside of Byron returning is still the case and so to me it is clear that the team was playing under their potential. The one major change? Coaching. 
 

While I was not happy with our results, I admittedly did not spend my time over analyzing Ducharme’s failures. With that being said, our results this year both before and after his firing, the treatment of KK last playoff leading to his departure, as well as Caufield’s recent resurgence do lead me to have specific questions in terms of Ducharme’s method.

 

If players were tuning his system out? Well, that just makes things 20x worse.

 

For me, it’s not about him being a moron because I am sure he is not. With that said, I am and was happy to see him go.

 

[Commandant]

Ducharme is simply the Peter Principle in action before our eyes. 

 

From Wikipedia.

 

"The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again. If the person is competent in the new role, they will be promoted again and will continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which they are incompetent. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at this "Final Placement" or "Peter's Plateau.""

Ducharme was good as a junior coach and an assistant coach, but was incompetent as an NHL head coach.

[alfredoh2009]

I take issue with post calling him a Moron, an idiot, the cause of ruining anyone’s development or the reason the Habs cratered this season

 

There is no need to go to that extent; unless you follow the same moral compass as Petry or the likes

 

That’s it, that’s what drives me nuts. There is enough blame to go around to put it all on one person.

[The Chicoutimi Cucumber]

Just to be clear, it’s not all on Ducharme. 

 

The team was gutted by injuries and player losses. Really core guys from the Run of 21 - Price, Weber, Edmundson, Perry, Danault - were out of commission. We also lost KK.  Allen went down for extended periods, leaving us with #3-4 goalies, which is always death in the NHL. Plus there was understandable exhaustion from the run itself.

 

However, DD succeeded neither in getting buy-in from the veterans NOR in pivoting to a narrative of empowering and nurturing young players. He failed spectacularly in finding a narrative or vision for the team. He did a terrible job. And he deserved to go.

[hab29RETIRED]

44 minutes ago, The Chicoutimi Cucumber said:

Just to be clear, it’s not all on Ducharme. 

 

The team was gutted by injuries and player losses. Really core guys from the Run of 21 - Price, Weber, Edmundson, Perry, Danault - were out of commission. We also lost KK.  Allen went down for extended periods, leaving us with #3-4 goalies, which is always death in the NHL. Plus there was understandable exhaustion from the run itself.

 

However, DD succeeded neither in getting buy-in from the veterans NOR in pivoting to a narrative of empowering and nurturing young players. He failed spectacularly in finding a narrative or vision for the team. He did a terrible job. And he deserved to go.

100% agree.

There were many issues for this year’s epic collapse.

the first three are on MB.

1. The composition of the D. Been saying for the past three years we are out of step with the rest of the league in how we built our D. If Price and Weber hadn’t sucked it up despite obvious injuries, with Price being Hart Price and Weber playing like he knew it was the end in the unique Northern division, I doubt if the Clysdale model works last year. Net addition of Savard was a huge step back.

2. Centre depth. Horrible move to try and fill the losses of Danault and KK with Dvorak, and actually give up out 2nd as part of the deal while only getting a 3rd back from the Canes

3. off-season additions - sure Savard and Hoffman were both  available and willing to sign. But they were not even close to what we needed. but. Both are a waste of cap space, and did not really address our needs and a cap anchor going forward. May as well not signed either. Just because you have cap space doesn’t mean you need to use it. We are in cap hell, and are one of the worst teams in the league.

4. Injuries. We had tons. But shit everyone gets them, but do they all have historic collapses of epic proportions? Rarely. were we hit hard? Yes. Did the old GM plug holes that he knew about since training camp - no.  should the injuries and losses cause us to have been the worst team in the league most of the season? No. Should they have resulted in us being one of the worst non-expansion teams of all time? Definitely not.

5. That brings us to coaching. A coach has to get the most out what he has. That is where DD failed. He couldn’t get that veterans on board. He was wasting away a year for our best home drafted prospect since The McDonough, MaxPac, Subban draft. Coupled with the fact that the team regressed during the regular season under him last year, shows he was in over his head. In the playoffs further proof that the veterans were the ones carrying the team through to the finals, was they won without him when he was out with the Covid protocols. Even in the playoffs he was playing grunts and sat KK and Romanov, and started without Caufield.

 

So I agree DD was not the only reason for this nightmare season. But he obviously was in over his head and was incapable of being part of the solution.

[alfredoh2009]

thanks, that is more reasonable

 

and like Commandant said before: LA FIN

[Commandant]

2 hours ago, alfredoh2009 said:

I take issue with post calling him a Moron, an idiot, the cause of ruining anyone’s development or the reason the Habs cratered this season

 

There is no need to go to that extent; unless you follow the same moral compass as Petry or the likes

 

That’s it, that’s what drives me nuts. There is enough blame to go around to put it all on one person.

 

1) No one said its all one person's fault.  Doesn't change the fact that he was incompetent for the job of NHL coach and was a major contributor to those things....

 

2) If we are going to say that not being motivated by your boss is a failure of someone's moral compass, then what percentage of the North American workforce has Petry's moral compass, cause it's a lot.   Perhaps its also time to admit that the person responsible for being a motivator is also to take some of that blame. 

[alfredoh2009]

1 hour ago, Commandant said:

 

1) No one said its all one person's fault.  Doesn't change the fact that he was incompetent for the job of NHL coach and was a major contributor to those things....

 

2) If we are going to say that not being motivated by your boss is a failure of someone's moral compass, then what percentage of the North American workforce has Petry's moral compass, cause it's a lot.   Perhaps its also time to admit that the person responsible for being a motivator is also to take some of that blame. 

 

I thought you wanted to stop talking about this... 😳

 

1a) you are wrong, a few posters on this forum have pinned this season's failure in the first half on Ducharme

1b) I agree that he was a contributor, but I disagree in saying he had the biggest part of the blame

 

2) any majority accepting an attitude doesn't make it right. There are so many examples throughout history of this that I hope I do not have to list any to make this point: that would be a rabbit hole deeper than "who is to blame for a sports franchise disastrous season"

[Commandant]

27 minutes ago, alfredoh2009 said:

 

I thought you wanted to stop talking about this... 😳

 

1a) you are wrong, a few posters on this forum have pinned this season's failure in the first half on Ducharme

1b) I agree that he was a contributor, but I disagree in saying he had the biggest part of the blame

 

2) any majority accepting an attitude doesn't make it right. There are so many examples throughout history of this that I hope I do not have to list any to make this point: that would be a rabbit hole deeper than "who is to blame for a sports franchise disastrous season"

 

1a) Who has said its entirely his fault?   I honestly haven't seen that from one person on this forum.  I think we are a good group who generally have conversations with nuance instead of binary positions. 

 

b) what are we blaming him for?  If its missing the playoffs... there are lots of factors to that including the injuries.  If its for having one of the worst records in history and rivalling the expansion senators, expansion sharks, 70s capitals, the horrible colorado and detroit teams in recent years.... etc... and being worse than the Sabres/coyotes in the mcdavid/eichel tank seasons... yes, he does have the biggest part in that.   We were so bad, to a level that almost no one, not here, not in media, nowhere I've seen could have thought under him, and now we are still a bad team but a respectable one with St. Louis and virtually no other changes (other than Paul Byron playing a couple games).  So yeah, I think saying he has a big part in that disaster is fair.

 

 

2) i don't understand your point here.  His job was to motivate players.  If players weren't motivated (and it wasn't just petry), why doesn't he get blame for that.

[alfredoh2009]

2 hours ago, Commandant said:

2) i don't understand your point here.  His job was to motivate players.  If players weren't motivated (and it wasn't just petry), why doesn't he get blame for that.

 

that is clear: you don't get it.

 

It is fine @Commandant , don't sweat it. For all the contributions you make to the forum and the Habs on-line information, you sometimes miss nuances and sometimes go ballistic with opinions at the opposite of yours.

 

Let's end this, direct-message me if you want to chat about this but let's spare this topic from the others

[Commandant]

10 minutes ago, alfredoh2009 said:

 

that is clear: you don't get it.

 

It is fine @Commandant , don't sweat it. For all the contributions you make to the forum and the Habs on-line information, you sometimes miss nuances and sometimes go ballistic with opinions at the opposite of yours.

 

Let's end this, direct-message me if you want to chat about this but let's spare this topic from the others

 

 

 

Don't insult me publicly and then say... let's take this to DMs.

 

I've not attacked you in any way in this conversation, so no need to say this (the bolded) in front of "others" if you want things to be handled privately.

 

I have no issue with talking privately, and my DMs are open.... if you had something to say, you could just DM me.  But you lose my respect when you take a pot shot and then say... oh let's do this privately.  No need to take the public shot at me... before saying... lets keep this private. 

[tomh009]

3 minutes ago, alfredoh2009 said:

Let's end this, direct-message me if you want to chat about this but let's spare this topic from the others

Thank you! 🙂

[huzer]

Seems people are debating "really bad" vs "not good". Why does it matter, and whose feelings are getting hurt here? At the end of the day, this has been a catastrophic season that is the fault of players, coaches, and management. People that should be held accountable have been, for once. 

 

Now, if you simply don't agree that the coach should have been fired, then I wonder how you can possibly present evidence to the contrary without just shouting "injuries!".

[Commandant]

 

11 minutes ago, huzer said:

Seems people are debating "really bad" vs "not good". Why does it matter, and whose feelings are getting hurt here? At the end of the day, this has been a catastrophic season that is the fault of players, coaches, and management. People that should be held accountable have been, for once. 

 

Now, if you simply don't agree that the coach should have been fired, then I wonder how you can possibly present evidence to the contrary without just shouting "injuries!".

 

There is only one person who seems upset and had his feelings hurt by the coach being fired. 

 

Now he's constantly attacking Petry and Hughes/Gorton who he blames for getting the coach fired. 

 

Then he attacked me cause I simply said... hey if the team wasn't motivated, maybe the coach should take some of the blame for that. 

 

But of course it's my fault that he's been butt hurt for weeks that Ducharme is still getting paid to sit at home. 

 

And yes, I'm calling you out for that, @alfredoh2009... cause those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.  So yeah, maybe i went ballistic over the Mailloux thing, and you know what, I've thought it for weeks, but never said a word that you were being whiny over ducharme getting fired.  The moment you come after me though, I'm not holding back in saying it. 

[tomh009]

Please do take it to DM, @Commandantand @alfredoh2009. This topic matters to you, but not so much to the rest of us.

[Habs Fan in Edmonton]

1 hour ago, tomh009 said:

Please do take it to DM, @Commandantand @alfredoh2009. This topic matters to you, but not so much to the rest of us.

 I think everyone has had a chance to share their thoughts on DD and MB. It seems like we are rehashing old points of view again and again.  I guess that happens on a slow news day.  Time for a trade!