Montreal Canadiens, A New Beginning

It’s been difficult to process all the changes over the past several days but in an email today to some Canadien cronies, I managed to articulate some of my incomplete thoughts on the goings-on.

My overpriced opinions:

Misgivings

• Loss of leadership in Koivu
• Loss of greatly skilled and undervalued player in Kovalev
• No guarantee of chemistry between any of the new offensive players
• Too many changes behind the benches to be able to count on any continuity and an improved on-ice product
• Just a bit too much emphasis on skill/talent over character.
• Price will not work out
• Kovalev was more important to our power-play than can be easily stated

Pluses

• Jacques Martin is a great coach, in the right place at the right time
• We needed a new goaltending coach and got one.  Is he good?  Let’s see if he works out with Price.
• Getting rid of Higgins was a great idea.  And a great move.
• If Bob wants to play a special new brand of small-ball, he needed to get guys in the room who understand and agree with the innovative new approach.  Especially since it has no real parallels.  There has never been a team with such a bent for speed in combination with the current post-CBA rules.   And Bob seems insistent on finding out if he can do it his way.  So getting rid of the old-school thinkers in Hamilton makes sense from that point of view.
• The shake-up will get a few soldiers’ heads on straight.
• The press can find someone new to feed on besides Saku and Kovy.  And the press can more easily be exposed as the morons they are (you know the ones I’m talking about)

Balancing Thoughts

• Koivu may have privately asked to leave and Bob said he would take the PR hit for him
• Kovalev is 36 and he may not be able to replicate 84 points again
• At least Gainey phoned Koivu.  There are horror stories about all of: Pollock, Grundman, Savard, Houle and Corey. Gainey is doing what a good GM should do.  He has to make changes.  He gave this group many years to work through their issus.  And he treated each situation in isolation and in juxtaposition with the bigger vision.  He worked to make sure he could make moves this summer, and he followed through.  It’s all very shocking to deal with.  But it’s not arbitrary.
• It’s a younger (read faster) man’s game now and even Yzerman, Lemieux and Gretzky said so in words, by retiring or both.  Koivu and Kovalev are well into their twilight years

Misc

I wanted to comment on the Ribeiro for Ninimaa deal.  If Ribeiro was the cancer he was supposed to be and if he was mired in ego, there is no way his points total was going to up any higher in Montreal.  So moving him was a good thing even if his productivity increased in Dallas.

To me it’s the Allen Iverson syndrome.  There was no way Iverson was going to learn that his poor ball-distribution was a problem that he needed to address until he found out (by trade) that he wasn’t untouchable.  That trade snapped him out of that type of thinking.  Without a trade, Ribeiro would only have worsened in attitude.

Now, as for Ninimaa, we paid out money for the dude but once the contract was done, we had that money again.  Not the best way to spend but the money was available again for another player once we moved Janne on.  And if Janne had worked out, Bob would have looked a bit smarter.  But in the end, if you trade a guy and the new guy doesn’t work out, you can eventually, once his contract expires, move that new guy and you’ll still have the money to spend elsewhere.  Or you can outright trade the contract to someone else.

I’m probably dead wrong about everything but that’s what the gremlins in my couch have been saying for years.  I should really stop listening to them.  Or maybe I should start.  Hmm.

Related posts:

1. Baseball GM
2. Open Letter to Bob Gainey
3. Random Thoughts
4. Boston Game Two, Musings and In-Game Scribbles
5. Dallas Musings, In-Game Scribbles
6. Appreciate Your Artist, Alex Kovalev