Who would’ve thought that, at the beginning of the season, the Montreal Canadiens would go from a Stanley Cup Finals appearance last season to being a bottom five team in the league?
They currently are 29th in the 32-team league, but it’s not just the points that are worth paying attention to.
When almost every player is laying goose eggs, there is something very wrong. That is despite their recent firing of general manager Marc Bergevin, assistant general manager Trevor Timmins, and senior vice president of communications Paul Wilson, hiring former Rangers GM Jeff Gorton as executive vice president of hockey operations to task him with finding their next (bilingual) general manager.
Ducharme was given a three-year extension after the Habs’ run to the Stanley Cup Final when he was the interim coach. However, he is 21-31-9 in the regular season.
There has to be something team president Geoff Molson will say about this, but he has been in hiding for the past two years. The team is falling apart in apocalyptic fashion, yet he won’t even address the Habs Faithful.
That’s no way to treat your fanbase.
That 15-16-7 run last season combined with the 6-15-2 start to the season is not good. The only thing that may be saving Ducharme’s job is that they’re already paying Claude Julien through this year. If he were to be gone, they would have to hire a new coach who would be the third person getting paid a head coach’s salary for the 2022 season.
That’s not ideal, and the Habs are not a budget team.
It may save his job for now, but the team’s performance is not saving his job. The Habs have made a habit of allowing five or more goals regularly and are one of the lowest scoring teams in the NHL.
Coaches are supposed to have adjustments for when special teams struggle, but the Habs have the 29th-ranked power play (12.9%) and the 29th-ranked penalty kill (68.6%).
This is all a bad sign.
If it weren’t for Julien still getting paychecks from the Habs, Ducharme would already be gone.
It doesn’t matter if the team is without Shea Weber. It doesn’t matter if the team lost Phillip Danault in the offseason because he signed with the Los Angeles Kings. It doesn’t matter if Carey Price took a leave of absence to focus on his mental health. The Habs are 28th in goals for per game (2.35) and have the 2nd-worst goal differential in the league (-29).
While he did put a defensive scheme that neutralized the Toronto Maple Leafs’ offense in last year’s playoffs, it can also be argued that Sheldon Keefe played right into Ducharme’s hands, especially when loading up Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, and William Nylander on the same line.
The only positive is that Calder Trophy candidate Cole Caufield was sent down to the AHL to regain his confidence while calling up Michael Pezzetta.
Pezzetta turned heads during training camp, but he’s just a 4th line plug by this point. But this season alone turned every single bit of positive around. This team is awful, and a big part of it has to do with how they are on the competitive level. At one point, the practice lines looked like this:
Forwards
Tyler Toffoli / Nick Suzuki / Jake Evans
Mike Hoffman / Jonathan Drouin / Josh Anderson
Artturi Lehkonen / Christian Dvorak / Joel Armia
Michael Pezzetta / Adam Brooks (no longer on team) / Cédric Paquette
Defensemen
Alexander Romanov / Ben Chiarot
Brett Kulak / David Savard
Sami Niku / Chris Wideman
Extra: Mattias Norlinder
Goaltenders
Jake Allen / Sam Montembeault
While Jake Evans played first line winger before in the playoffs, putting him on the first line makes no sense.
He played alongside Danault and Brendan Gallagher to form a solid shutdown line, but Tyler Toffoli and Nick Suzuki are not Danault and Gallagher.
Toffoli and Suzuki are offensive-minded players, but they don’t drive plays. Suzuki is good, but he has struggled against the top centers this season. Toffoli is a sniper, but he doesn’t do much with the puck going up the ice. Evans could drive plays, but he is very raw, especially against the top players in the league.
Ducharme probably is putting Evans on there because of his defensive prowess, since Toffoli and Suzuki are not the best in that regard. But that puts more pressure on Evans to drive the plays offensively and be as defensively capable. That’s way too much for him to do, and even when he is playing on the wing, he is a natural center. That makes the second line even more idiotic.
And this goes back to 2012. The Habs were bad and were given the 3rd overall pick. The first pick was the infamous bust Nail Yakupov. The second was another bust in Ryan Murray. The Habs picked the skilled Alex Galchenyuk, hailed as the new top line center of the future.
There was one problem: He didn’t live up to the hype.
There were many things wrong with him, and we will never know what his true potential looked like. The move to center was a disaster. He had one good year in Montreal, and ever since, he has bounced around the league, whether it be to Arizona, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, or Toronto.
From one 3rd overall pick to another, Jonathan Drouin was picked up by the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2013. They traded him to the Habs in 2017 to acquire blue-chip defender Mikhail Sergachev. Once again, Drouin was hailed as the center of the future, and he too has yet to live up to the hype.
Drouin has played better on the wing, but then Ducharme says that he will be playing center between Mike Hoffman and Josh Anderson. That’s just stupid. While Evans is out of position on the first line, Drouin is too on the second line. It would be easier to swap the two.
Artturi Lehkonen, Christian Dvorak, and Joel Armia have what it takes to make a good shutdown line, but it’s funny to think that Bergevin gave up a first and a third round pick to acquire a third-line center while deciding not to match the Carolina Hurricanes’ offer sheet for Jesperi Kotkaniemi.
The fourth line is basically a plug line.
The defense is decimated from injuries. No Jeff Petry and no Joel Edmundson means that they are without their top pairing. But why is Mattias Norlinder here? He should get experience and confidence in the SHL.
If Geoff Molson cared, he would have fired Dominique Ducharme by this point. It seems that Ducharme has lost the locker room. The players have lost their respect for him. While he was the coach during the Finals run, it’s clear that the team didn’t make the final because of him.
They made it to the Finals because Playoff Carey Price was on full display, Shea Weber took the team under his helm, and Corey Perry provided a lot of inspiration.
Another reason Molson is not firing Ducharme is that the now-fired Bergevin made the mistake of signing the head coach to a three-year deal. Julien is still being paid $5 million this season, and firing Julien to replace him with Ducharme has been a huge mistake.
The unwritten rule with the Habs is that the general manager and the head coach has to speak French. It’s so ironic that the one who is the most-hard line in pushing the agenda that the coach AND the GM be bilingual is someone who lives in upper Westmount and is a member of Montreal’s richest and most famous families.
The belief is that francophone Quebecers would accept a unilingual English-speaking coach IF he turned the team into a playoff contender AND immediately began making efforts to learn French.
But instead of planning for the future, they’re not just destroying the team, but they’re also damaging their two best young players in Suzuki and Caufield.
They gave Suzuki a large contract and made him their top line center way too early. He’s nowhere near ready to be a top line center. And instead of making a plan for Caufield, a natural goal scorer, they started playing him in the NHL, sent him down to the AHL, and then recalled him. He still looks lost.
The front office is not thinking right. When the top priority is money, you spend an enormous amount of time thinking about language politics and PR spin. Hockey comes way far after that.
It’s just disaster all around for the Habs.
留言