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Habs awful from top to bottom
Jack Todd/The Gazette, Sunday, April 26, 2009
Let's face it, folks. The 2008-09 Montreal Canadiens booked an early tee time the old-fashioned way. They earned it.
The "thoroughbred" goaltender looked more like a secretary than Secretariat. More Man o' Bud than Man o' War.
The Canadiens were soft in the corners, confused in front of the net, inept on offence and disorganized on defence.
Their passes, as former Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty once said of striker Tony Hately, should have been addressed "to whom it may concern."
The general manager who made himself coach was more successful at bullying fans and the media than bullying his players into shape: After a playoff sweep at the hands of the hated Boston Bruins, he could crawl back to the executive suite with six wins and 14 losses to his credit.
Bob Gainey fired Guy Carbonneau and took over on March 9, after which the Canadiens managed exactly one win over a playoff team, taking advantage of a jittery Cristobal Huet to defeat the Chicago Blackhawks at the Bell Centre. Along the way, they also managed to lose to the Islanders, Leafs and the Senators – twice.
(I've forgotten – exactly why was it that Carbonneau was fired?)
In the middle of the playoff meltdown, we had Carey Price, old Man 'o Bud himself, yukking it up with this clown they call Cabbie, in Boston after a loss. As Stu Cowan said yesterday, had Cabbie approached Patrick Roy in the same situation, he would have been lucky to escape with a goalie stick in his head.
(While the nonsense with Price and Cabbie was going on, Georges Laraque dropped by for a few laughs. Try to imagine a similar situation: John Ferguson finding Jacques Plante kidding around with a reporter after a playoff loss in Boston. Plante would have needed an extra mask.)
No, this dismal performance went from top to bottom: from George Gillett Jr. putting his team on the market just as his charges are fighting to make the playoffs to the boorish way Canadiens fans behave on the road in Ottawa, Toronto and Boston.
Gainey failing to get any real impact help at the trade deadline, then playing Price, night after night after night, long after it was plain that the kid lost it somewhere around the all-star break, with a deserving Jaroslav Halak sitting on the bench, quietly fuming.
I'm sorry, Bob: If your thoroughbred is running like a nag, get another horse.
Mike Komisarek? Never recovered his game after injuring a shoulder in that fight with Milan Lucic. Roman Hamrlik? Where did he spend the season? With that second-rate mobster and the Kostitsyn brothers? Tomas Plekanec – ice-cold, briefly hot, frigid again.
Guillaume Latendresse? What happened to that speed he supposedly picked up in the off season? The Latendresse we saw against Boston would have lost a foot race against a three-legged turtle.
It might be easier to list the players who could still hold their heads up at the end of the season: Christopher Higgins, Josh Georges, Max Lapierre, Mathieu Dandenault, Glen Metropolit, Tom Kostopoulos. Alex Kovalev, who despite everything put the hammer down through the last 20 games of the regular season and that truncated playoff series.
Saku Koivu, playing hurt and worn down, battled to the end. But given the amount of static he has to take here, you couldn't blame Koivu if he decided this is the time to move on.
The Canadiens do lead the hockey world in one category: lame excuses, the lamest of which is the assertion that these Habs were weighed down by the burden of high expectations.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a load of horse patootie. Every Canadiens team from 1950 to 1980 began the season expected to win the Stanley Cup. Not merely to make it to the final, but to bring home the championship. And they did, year after year. With class, determination and talent.
Five in a row in the 1950s. Four Stanley Cups in five years in the 1960s. Four in a row in the 1970s. With a few sublime surprises along the way, such as 1971, when they overcame the mighty Bruins and the almost-as-mighty Chicago Blackhawks en route to a miracle Stanley Cup.
In the past 15 years? They've won three games in the second round of the playoffs. They've won a total of four playoff series. That's an average of one every three years.
Yet Gainey expects unquestioning support from fans who stood in line for hours waiting for tickets, only to get duped at the last minute into making hefty contributions to the George Gillett Bailout Fund?
Sorry, Bob. Ain't gonna happen. Not in this town. Nor should it. Montrealers were conditioned by players like Bob Gainey to expect excellence, and when GMs like Bob Gainey don't deliver, they're going to hear about it.
There is one valid excuse for this season: injuries. Just as the Canadiens were insanely healthy last year, they were insanely unhealthy this year. They don't have enough depth to win a playoff series missing three of their four most talented players: Robert Lang, Andrei Markov and Alex Tanguay.
Given the injuries, there was only one way this team was going to steal a series from Boston: Price had to do it. He had to do what Jonas Hiller has done in Anaheim, Hendrik Lundqvist and Simeon Varlamov have alternately done in the Washington-Rangers series, what Roberto Luongo has done in Vancouver.
Price didn't do it. Not even close. Not one game. Yet Gainey threw him to the wolves, then snarled at the fans who were trying to tell him what a terrible, wrong-headed decision that really was.
Where do the Canadiens go from here? Gillett, horribly overextended with his grotesquely leveraged purchase of Liverpool, is furiously trying to bail.
If Gainey does come back, he is going to have to accept that, after running this team since 2003, he can no longer pawn off his failures on
Réjean Houle or André Savard. For better or for worse, this was the Gainey show, and so far it has produced more failure than success.
On the flip side, to go back to the team's favourite excuse, Gainey & Co. did accomplish one thing this season: they dramatically lowered expectations for next year.
Of most concern, perhaps, is the fact that the Canadiens have no young impact players in the system who appear capable of turning it around. They have good players, useful players, but there are no budding superstars – here or in Hamilton – capable of taking this team to the next level.
Price was supposed to be that superstar but, so far, he has been a colossal disappointment.
It's not merely that Price's play has been so shaky so often. It's more that he just doesn't seem to get it. From that plethora of web photos showing him with a drink in hand to the 30 pounds he put on during his rookie season to that dismally inappropriate yuk-yuk interview with the Cabbie, Carey Price appears to be a young man who thinks it will all come to him without effort.
It won't. The really great ones in every sport – Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Patrick Roy – start with more talent than everyone else, and then they work harder. They win because they want it so badly, they refuse to lose.
Price has to decide what's more important. Does he want to be the best goalie of his time? Does he want those Stanley Cup rings? Or is it more important to go on behaving like he's just too cool for school?
Only one part of this centennial season came out right. Claude Julien, unjustly fired by Gainey, came back to get a 49th-birthday present in the form of a much-deserved playoff sweep over the guy who bounced him.
Good for Julien. The man is a straight-up, square shooter who deserved to win, as did GM Peter Chiarelli and a superior Bruins team.
Bob Gainey, George Gillett and the Montreal Canadiens did not.
jacktodd46@yahoo.com
Jack Todd/The Gazette, Sunday, April 26, 2009
Let's face it, folks. The 2008-09 Montreal Canadiens booked an early tee time the old-fashioned way. They earned it.
The "thoroughbred" goaltender looked more like a secretary than Secretariat. More Man o' Bud than Man o' War.
The Canadiens were soft in the corners, confused in front of the net, inept on offence and disorganized on defence.
Their passes, as former Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty once said of striker Tony Hately, should have been addressed "to whom it may concern."
The general manager who made himself coach was more successful at bullying fans and the media than bullying his players into shape: After a playoff sweep at the hands of the hated Boston Bruins, he could crawl back to the executive suite with six wins and 14 losses to his credit.
Bob Gainey fired Guy Carbonneau and took over on March 9, after which the Canadiens managed exactly one win over a playoff team, taking advantage of a jittery Cristobal Huet to defeat the Chicago Blackhawks at the Bell Centre. Along the way, they also managed to lose to the Islanders, Leafs and the Senators – twice.
(I've forgotten – exactly why was it that Carbonneau was fired?)
In the middle of the playoff meltdown, we had Carey Price, old Man 'o Bud himself, yukking it up with this clown they call Cabbie, in Boston after a loss. As Stu Cowan said yesterday, had Cabbie approached Patrick Roy in the same situation, he would have been lucky to escape with a goalie stick in his head.
(While the nonsense with Price and Cabbie was going on, Georges Laraque dropped by for a few laughs. Try to imagine a similar situation: John Ferguson finding Jacques Plante kidding around with a reporter after a playoff loss in Boston. Plante would have needed an extra mask.)
No, this dismal performance went from top to bottom: from George Gillett Jr. putting his team on the market just as his charges are fighting to make the playoffs to the boorish way Canadiens fans behave on the road in Ottawa, Toronto and Boston.
Gainey failing to get any real impact help at the trade deadline, then playing Price, night after night after night, long after it was plain that the kid lost it somewhere around the all-star break, with a deserving Jaroslav Halak sitting on the bench, quietly fuming.
I'm sorry, Bob: If your thoroughbred is running like a nag, get another horse.
Mike Komisarek? Never recovered his game after injuring a shoulder in that fight with Milan Lucic. Roman Hamrlik? Where did he spend the season? With that second-rate mobster and the Kostitsyn brothers? Tomas Plekanec – ice-cold, briefly hot, frigid again.
Guillaume Latendresse? What happened to that speed he supposedly picked up in the off season? The Latendresse we saw against Boston would have lost a foot race against a three-legged turtle.
It might be easier to list the players who could still hold their heads up at the end of the season: Christopher Higgins, Josh Georges, Max Lapierre, Mathieu Dandenault, Glen Metropolit, Tom Kostopoulos. Alex Kovalev, who despite everything put the hammer down through the last 20 games of the regular season and that truncated playoff series.
Saku Koivu, playing hurt and worn down, battled to the end. But given the amount of static he has to take here, you couldn't blame Koivu if he decided this is the time to move on.
The Canadiens do lead the hockey world in one category: lame excuses, the lamest of which is the assertion that these Habs were weighed down by the burden of high expectations.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a load of horse patootie. Every Canadiens team from 1950 to 1980 began the season expected to win the Stanley Cup. Not merely to make it to the final, but to bring home the championship. And they did, year after year. With class, determination and talent.
Five in a row in the 1950s. Four Stanley Cups in five years in the 1960s. Four in a row in the 1970s. With a few sublime surprises along the way, such as 1971, when they overcame the mighty Bruins and the almost-as-mighty Chicago Blackhawks en route to a miracle Stanley Cup.
In the past 15 years? They've won three games in the second round of the playoffs. They've won a total of four playoff series. That's an average of one every three years.
Yet Gainey expects unquestioning support from fans who stood in line for hours waiting for tickets, only to get duped at the last minute into making hefty contributions to the George Gillett Bailout Fund?
Sorry, Bob. Ain't gonna happen. Not in this town. Nor should it. Montrealers were conditioned by players like Bob Gainey to expect excellence, and when GMs like Bob Gainey don't deliver, they're going to hear about it.
There is one valid excuse for this season: injuries. Just as the Canadiens were insanely healthy last year, they were insanely unhealthy this year. They don't have enough depth to win a playoff series missing three of their four most talented players: Robert Lang, Andrei Markov and Alex Tanguay.
Given the injuries, there was only one way this team was going to steal a series from Boston: Price had to do it. He had to do what Jonas Hiller has done in Anaheim, Hendrik Lundqvist and Simeon Varlamov have alternately done in the Washington-Rangers series, what Roberto Luongo has done in Vancouver.
Price didn't do it. Not even close. Not one game. Yet Gainey threw him to the wolves, then snarled at the fans who were trying to tell him what a terrible, wrong-headed decision that really was.
Where do the Canadiens go from here? Gillett, horribly overextended with his grotesquely leveraged purchase of Liverpool, is furiously trying to bail.
If Gainey does come back, he is going to have to accept that, after running this team since 2003, he can no longer pawn off his failures on
Réjean Houle or André Savard. For better or for worse, this was the Gainey show, and so far it has produced more failure than success.
On the flip side, to go back to the team's favourite excuse, Gainey & Co. did accomplish one thing this season: they dramatically lowered expectations for next year.
Of most concern, perhaps, is the fact that the Canadiens have no young impact players in the system who appear capable of turning it around. They have good players, useful players, but there are no budding superstars – here or in Hamilton – capable of taking this team to the next level.
Price was supposed to be that superstar but, so far, he has been a colossal disappointment.
It's not merely that Price's play has been so shaky so often. It's more that he just doesn't seem to get it. From that plethora of web photos showing him with a drink in hand to the 30 pounds he put on during his rookie season to that dismally inappropriate yuk-yuk interview with the Cabbie, Carey Price appears to be a young man who thinks it will all come to him without effort.
It won't. The really great ones in every sport – Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Patrick Roy – start with more talent than everyone else, and then they work harder. They win because they want it so badly, they refuse to lose.
Price has to decide what's more important. Does he want to be the best goalie of his time? Does he want those Stanley Cup rings? Or is it more important to go on behaving like he's just too cool for school?
Only one part of this centennial season came out right. Claude Julien, unjustly fired by Gainey, came back to get a 49th-birthday present in the form of a much-deserved playoff sweep over the guy who bounced him.
Good for Julien. The man is a straight-up, square shooter who deserved to win, as did GM Peter Chiarelli and a superior Bruins team.
Bob Gainey, George Gillett and the Montreal Canadiens did not.
jacktodd46@yahoo.com
Hilarious.
