Habs’ quest for mediocrity continues

Remember Michael Cammalleri’s comments just before he was shipped off to Calgary (between periods no less!)?

He basically said coach Randy ‘Parley-Vous’ Cunneyworth and the team were playing not to lose rather than to win. That was Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin’s system as well and it could be argued that playing-not-to-lose-(too-badly) kinda neatly sums up the Gainey/Gauthier era. Or as I like to put it – it’s all about the quest for mediocrity.

It was on display again Monday night when les Canadiens dropped a 3-2 decision in overtime to the surging Buffalo Sabres. The Habs scrambled to tie it up 2-2 in the dying seconds, with David ‘Big Heart’ Desharnais scoring with just five seconds remaining. It was indeed an exciting moment.

But when I heard the folks on TSN 990 saying this will be one of the great memories from the Habs 2011-2012 season, I felt like saying – puh-leeeeze. That kind of talk is all fine and good in Bob ‘Elvis Has Not Left the Building’ Gainey’s office but out here in the real world, Monday night was just another loss from a team that’s had way too many losses this year.

Montreal is in last place in the East. Last place, for heaven’s sake. There are no good memories to take away from this season. Then Cunneyworth went and defended his troops, with his excuses recounted in detail in Pat Hickey’s column in Tuesday’s Gazette.

On Daybreak Tuesday morning, sports columnist Doug Gelevan played a clip from Cunneyworth where the ‘interim coach’ (aka lame-duck coach) said: “Everyone’s working hard to emulate what (the Desharnais-Cole-Pacioretty line is) doing.”

To which Daybreak host Mike Finnerty quite reasonably asked – “How hard is everyone working?”

Then Gelevan played a clip from Edmonton Oilers coach Tom Renney who just roasted his players after they lost 3-2 to the San Jose Sharks Monday at Rexall Place in Edmonton. (Check out Doug’s blog for the audio of his item on the contrasting styles of Renney and Cunneyworth.)

“We have a few people who should look in the mirror,” said Renney. “You’re Edmonton Oilers….you’re a millionaire. Suck it up and play hockey.”

There you have it in a nutshell. In Edmonton, you have a coach who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is and scold his players for giving up. Meanwhile in Montreal, the coach lamely tries to defend a team who’ve given up on him. There is one line that comes to play every night. That’s it. Has anyone seen Rene ‘Lost in Translation’ Bourque lately? Or how about Scotty ‘Send Him Back to Alaska’ Gomez?

So why is Cunneyworth making excuses for these millionaire underachievers? Cos that’s the Habs culture. On trade-deadline day, there was Pierre ‘Yikes!’ Gauthier telling media wags that the Habs were playing with a lot of pride. (Eds. note: Get that guy out of the vegetable aisle now!) No Pierre, they’re playing like losers, which is why they’re in last place, home to the biggest losers in the conference.

But that’s the mantra of the firm of G&G – strive for the middle and if you end up short of mediocrity, make sure to remind everyone how hard Les Boys are working. ‘A’ for effort lads!

Not depressed enough yet? Well check out how well a couple of our favourite ex-Habs are doing. Andrei ‘Where’s the Party Cowboy’ Kostitsyn scored the only goal in the shootout Monday to give his new team the Nashville Predators a 5-4 win over the Phoenix Coyotes. That’s Nashville’s third straight win and they’re now in fifth place in the Western Conference. Wouldn’t that be great if Andrei and his little bro (and fellow ex-Hab) Sergei ‘I Am the Party’ Kostitsyn, along with fellow former Hab Hal ‘Gentle Giant’ Gill end up going far in the playoffs while the Habs perfect their golf swings? Preds management best make sure to thank Ghost Gauthier for all the help.

Andrei Kostitsyn, by the way, has three goals and three assists in his six games with the Preds (and that doesn’t include the shoot-out goal). He’s scoring 30 goals next year, as I told you a couple of weeks back.

Then there’s my main man Jaroslav ‘Tony Espo Part Two’ Halak. Halak is quite simply on fire for the St. Louis Blues. They won 2-1 Sunday night against the Columbus Blue jackets with Jaro between the pipes. This comes on the heels of Halak being named NHL Star of the Week for a three-game stretch in which he let in just three goals.

Stltoday.com had a good piece on Monday titled: ‘How’s that trade for Halak looking now’. The short answer is – it’s looking mighty good for the St. Louis Blues and not so good for Montreal. In the article, open-line host Kevin Wheeler notes that Halak’s stats since Nov. 1 (after a shaky start) have been unbelievable – a goals-against-average of 1.56 and a save percentage of .940. Did I mention that the Blues are sitting comfortably in first place in the West five points ahead of the Canucks?

Wouldn’t that be great if the Blues end up going far in the playoffs back-stopped by Halak, maybe doing an imitation of his superstar heroics for the Habs during that miraculous 2010 Habs playoff spring? Blues management best make sure to thank Ghost Gauthier for all the help.

Ah the Ghost! I caught a glimpse of him on the sports news Monday night, coming out of the general managers’ meetings in Boca Raton, and I kind of did a double-take on the couch. My first thought was – didn’t Geoff Molson already fire him? My next thought was – why does this guy strut around with so much confidence? It’s like he’s proud of how he’s driven this once-great team into the ground. I guess it takes a special kind of talent to do that.

But tell me one thing. The Habs aren’t still paying him a salary right? Tell me he doesn’t still get a pay-cheque for wreaking this kind of havoc.

There is a God….Scott Gomez scores!

Where were you when Scott Gomez scored his first goal in more than a year?

Me I was, appropriately enough, out on the hockey rink, playing a little shinny, having grown a tad bored with the Habs-Islanders match-up – what I like to think of as the meeting somewhere that is very much not the summit – and so I missed seeing the momentous moment live. Canadian Press mistakenly reports that Gomez tipped in a Raphael Diaz shot. In fact he blasted in a one-timer from the right face-off circle doing his best imitation of Cammie back when Mr. Cammalleri was scoring those sorts of goals on a regular basis.

Gomez’s last goal was Feb. 5, 2011 against his former team the New York Rangers, at the Bell Centre. It was a more innocent age. We still had the faith. Gomez had hair on his head. The coach spoke French. We still believed ‘world peace’ was an achievable goal. Then came the drought.

A National Post blog breaks down the Gomez stats: He played 50 games in between the two goals, while missing 21 games earlier this season due to injury, with total ice time of 17 hours, 40 minutes, and 30 seconds. 50 games works out to $4,486,067.80 in salary for the over-paid forward. The National Post also notes that over the same period Tampa Bay phenom Stephen Stamkos scored 48 goals. (That’s just mean of the Post but hey those guys in Toronto are mean. You know it.)

After the game, Gomez sounded relieved, but still curiously downbeat.

“I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself,” said Gomez. “I’ve just kept working. It’s certainly good to get a win, and of course it’s great to finally score.”

I hate to be a party-pooper – okay actually I revel in being a Habs party-pooper – but the photo in La Presse and The Gazette says it all. The shot shows Gomez and a few of his team-mates celebrating near the bench, all with big smiles on their face, and just behind them you see coach Randy ‘Parlez-vous’ Cunneyworth staring straight-ahead, with the kuind of grim look normally reserved for that moment when you realize you’ve just been fired. Come to think of it, that’s probably what M. Cunneyworth was thinking about. How, no matter what happens, he is going to be tossed on the trash-heap of history once this sorry season finally winds down.

But let’s live in the moment just for a second. Gomez scores. Doesn’t that mean anything is possible? That the Habs could win the Cup? That people will start reading newspapers again? That I could perhaps lace-up and take Gomer’s place on the third line?

The Habs can’t even tank successfully

There isn’t all that much to cheer about for Habs fans these days with Your Montreal Canadiens sitting in the basement of the Eastern Conference. The one straw we in the mopey Habs Nation could grasp at was to jump on the Fail for Nail campaign.

That’s the growing movement to have Montreal do as badly as possible in the hopes of finishing dead last and having a good shot at nabbing Russian sensation Nail Yakupov in this June’s entry draft. The 18-year-old from Tatarstan – who is currently a high-scoring right-winger with the Sarnia Sting in the Ontario Hockey League - is generally considered to be the guy most likely to be snatched up first at this year’s draft.

Richard Labbe has a good piece in La Presse Thursday, titled Pas de ‘Fail For Nail’ a Montreal in which, unsurprisingly, the Habs players say they are not buying into the notion of playing as bad as possible in order to snare the Russian sniper. I guess that means the Habs are playing so bad for other reasons only known to their psychiatrists.

But if they keep doing fairly bad, rather than really terrible, then the Canadiens will once again finish just out of the playoffs. The result? No playoffs – which means no fun for us and no dough for the owners – and also no good draft choice. Brilliant.

When Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin was given his walking papers that fateful day Dec. 17, the team’s record was 13-12-7. Since Randy ‘Parlez-vous’ Cunneyworth has taken over, the team has come up with an oh-so-mediocre 8-12-2 record. The result is that they are 21-24-2 after 54 games, which has them comfortably nestled in 14th place in the East. But there are actually four teams below them in the League standings, including Carolina, Anaheim, Edmonton and cellar-dwellers Columbus.

In other words, if the season ends today, no Yakupov for the Habs. Too bad.

In my more delirious moments – which occur with frightening frequency – I’ve actually thought that the team management deliberately threw the season in December by firing a coach with a .500 record and hiring a unilingual anglophone as an “interim” coach. It was completely predictable that it caused a firestorm of controversy chez nous, which was a huge distraction for the team, and the ‘interim’ tag ensured that the players would not take Cunneyworth seriously. Looking back, it was the perfect formula for failure.

But apparently there was no conspiracy. As usual, the conspiracy theorists are wrong. The disaster that is the 2011-2012 Habs season is the result of sheer incompetence on the part of Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier and the rest of the Habs brain-trust not any Machiavellian plot to ‘Fail For Nail’.

 

More Habs dreaming. Is 2012 1971 all over again?

Ummmm no. But it sure is a good talking point. This started with my old pal David Winch, who just might be the biggest Habs fan residing in Geneva, who started talking 1971 in response to my recent post about this year’s sad-sack Hab-nots maybe actually making the playoffs. David started a word association game in the plethora of comments on my Facebook page about the blog, writing; ’1971, MacNeil, and…???’ Then he went on to say: ‘I was daydreaming. Outsider team, 2nd half surge, upset Bruins, Anglo coach fired….ha’

If you are not a regular Red Fisher reader, Nos Canadiens de Montreal stunned the hockey world – and my Bruins-crazed older brother Dermot – in the 1971 playoffs by upsetting the Stanley Cup champ Bruins in the first round and going on to win the Cup. That would a Bruins team led by, as Mr. Fisher might put it, chaps named Orr, Esposito and Cheevers. In the final, the Canadiens beat-out another pretty decent hockey club in the Chicago Blackhawks, that included folks like Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita and my hero at the time, goalie Tony Esposito. (I still have my Espo-style mask that I wore for street hockey!)

The common wisdom is that that extraordinary 1971 playoff run was all about a rookie netminder in Montreal, Ken Dryden. But Mr. Winch was quick to underline that his man Frank Mahovlich also had a word or two to say in that Cup win. David’s point is, in part, that Mahovlich doesn’t get the credit he deserves for that playoff run just like Cammalleri doesn’t get enough respect for his goal-scoring surge in the 2010 post-season (a run that we all routinely attribute entirely to another phenomenal netminder, my man Jaroslav Halak). Mahovlich scored 14 goals and notched 27 points in the 1971 playoffs, with Cammie winning the playoff scoring title in 2010 with 13 goals (in spite of the fact that his team only went to the conference final!).

Now I have a soft spot for David Winch but I’m afraid the 2012 Habs just ain’t the 1971 Habs. Brian Gionta ain’t Jean Beliveau, Carey Price ain’t Ken Dryden, and…..well you get the idea.

But where this comparison gets interesting is in the coaching department. In 1970-71, Claude Ruel was head coach at the start of the season, but he stepped down when it looked like they might not make the playoffs and assistant coach Al MacNeil took-over. With MacNeil running the bench, they won the Cup – and it was in large part because he played a hunch and rolled the dice on a young goalie who’d only played six games during the regular season.

Habs management thanked MacNeil by promptly firing him that summer and sending him down to coach the Habs’ farm team in Nova Scotia. MacNeil, a unilingual anglophone, had clashed in a very public manner with Henri Richard that year and was said to have a bad relationship with many of the franco players.

MacNeil was the last unilingual anglo coach of the Habs…..until this fellow Randy ‘Parley-vous’ Cunneyworth came along this year. (Bob Berry, who coached the Habs in the early 80s, was not fluently bilingual but could carry on a conversation in the language of Beliveau.)

So maybe there’s something to this whole ’2012-is-the-new-1971′. Imagine. Following the All-Star game, building on improbable wins against Toronto and Detroit, the Habs go on a major-league second-half upswing, sneak into the playoffs in 8th place, use their speed to beat the Big Bad Cup champion Bruins in the first round, and take it all in a classic seven-game series against the heavily-favoured Chicago Blackhawks (who are back-stopped by former Bruin Timmy Thomas who was traded to the Hawks at the trade deadline following his controversial decision to snub President Barack Obama).

Then the day after the parade – which follows the usual route – manager Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier fires Cunneyworth, sending him back down to the farm-team in Hamilton. (Team president Geoff Molson has already made it clear the coach next year will need to be bilingual…..so it won’t be Mr. Cunneyworth.) May the All-Star-weekend dreaming continue…..

Ghost Gauthier shows total lack of class with Cammalleri trade

Okay the trade itself might turn out to be a good one for the Habs. On paper, Rene Bourque for Michael Cammalleri looks more or less equal, if you’re just looking at the stats. Bourque got 27 goals in each of his past two seasons with the Calgary Flames whereas Cammalleri had 19 goals last season and 26 goals the year before.

This year has been a hellish season for Cammy. He has only nine goals and has looked like a shadow of his former self on the ice. Bourque has 13 goals thus far. And Bourque brings size to a team sadly lack in that department – he’s six-foot-two and 205 pounds versus five-foot-nine and 190 pounds for Cammy after a big spaghetti dinner. But just remember there’s always what I like to call the Habs discount – if you score 27 goals for the Flames, you’ll probably score 19 or 20 for us.

So Bourque’s size is a plus. The big minus for the Habs is that Cammy was a playoff monster – remember that magical 2010 run. Yes Jaro Halak was the hero between the pipes but Cammalleri scored 13 goals and won the goal-scoring race for the playoffs even though the Canadiens didn’t make the finals and were shut out in three of five games against the Flyers in the conference final. He also had 10 points in the seven-game series against the Bruins in last year’s playoffs.

So it might be an equal trade. We’ll see. Jury’s out on that. At first I thought it was a great trade – but that was when I was under the mistaken impression that the Habs had received Calgary transplant Terry DiMonte in return for Cammy. But it turned out that the CHOM morning-man came home via a completely different transaction!

Jury however is very much in on how Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier handled the trade – that was just so classless. To fire Cammalleri between the second and third periods of a game is simply unacceptable. It’s like firing a radio morning-man right in the middle of his show.

The message was clear. Gauthier was telling Cammy – and all the other players – if you open your mouth and criticize the organization, I’ll crush you like a bug! The trade comes just hours after La Presse published an explosive piece by Francois Gagnon in which Cammalleri blasts the team for having a culture of “losers”. His comments were an open attack on Gauthier and the entire coaching staff.

Why did he have to send Cammy home mid-way through the game? Why couldn’t it wait til 10 p.m.? It was all about humiliating Cammalleri. Nice. And Montreal might well have lost the game to Boston ’cause of the timing of Gauthier’s move – can you imagine how the players felt on the bench in the third period?

And why did Ghost Gauthier have to rush the deal? If you’ve decided you’re going to deal the winger, why not try to create a bidding war? Here is a guy who – even if he’s struggling this season – has proven to be a money player when it counts, in the playoffs. You’re telling me there aren’t some teams who’re potential Cup contenders who wouldn’t pay quite the price to nab this guy closer to the trade deadline? Many in the media are already reporting that other NHL GMs are calling them to say that they had no idea Cammalleri was on the market and that they would’ve been interested in making an offer to the Canadiens. So why wouldn’t Burlington, Vermont’s greatest hockey mind let everyone know a star forward was on the trading block? Only the vegan insiders know for sure.

But no! Gauthier is all about the panic-button moves. He fires assistant coach Perry ‘What Did I Do Wrong?’ Pearn just minutes before a game to give head coach Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin a jolt. Then he throws Marcel Marceau Martin out the window just as hastily and brings in his man, Randy ‘Parley Vous’ Cunneyworth, without even pausing to think – ‘Oh yeah, we live in Quebec, maybe we should tell Randy to mumble a couple of phrases in the language of Lafleur’.

The press is all over the team for its cruddy power-play so Major Major rushed to pick-up Tomas ‘Soft As Cadbury’ Kaberle to quarterback the PP. Haven’t heard much about Kab lately eh? He brings a rich three-year contract that the Habs have to pay for and has proved to be just about as soft and heart-less as most of his team-mates here.

Gauthier will do anything, absolutely anything, to save his job, and that’s a scary thought. Just imagine the damage he can inflict on the team between now and the end of the season. The joke here is that he’s gonna lose his job one way or the other. It’s just a question of when it happens.

There are going to be some huge decisions to make as a playoff berth slowly but surely fades from sight and I can’t think of anyone less equipped to deal with this crisis.

- Brendan

 

Michael Cammalleri needs a wake-up call

Disgruntled Montreal Canadiens winger Michael Cammalleri has just unloaded on his team, calling them – to summarize – a bunch of losers. The sound you’re hearing is the wheels coming off the bus.

If you didn’t know it already, now you do. This season is toast – and it’s a couple of slices of POM bread burned beyond recognition. Really. A hapless GM, a lame-duck “interim” coach, a captain – Brian Gionta – who is now likely out for the season, and…..well you know what I could go on but it’s simply too depressing. Oh yeah but Scotty ‘Big Bucks = Loopy Grin’ Gomer is coming back this week, so all is well! But I digress….

Here’s what Cammie said to La Presse reporter Francois Gagnon and Arpon Basu from nhl.com. Gagnon has the lion’s share of the juicy quotes, so everything here is from his piece. (Translated from the French by me. So you have the odd concept that Gagnon talked to Cammie in English, wrote his piece in French and now I’m translating his quotes back into the language of Gretzky!)

“I can’t accept that we have an attitude of losers,” Cammalleri said. “We prepare for the games as losers. We play like losers. So you don’t have to ask why we lose. We look at the games coming and we say that we have to follow the letter of the game-plan if we want to have a chance of winning. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s all well and good to watch videos of other teams. It’s good to look at the notes on the board. But at a certain point, you also have to play. And you should play without having to always worry about making mistakes.”

This is clearly an open shot across the bow at coach Randy ‘Parley Vous’ Cunneyworth who, if we believe what Cammie is saying, is following the same conservative Martin “system”. That system is – was – all about limiting mistakes, playing defensively and desperately hanging on to leads. How’d that work out? Not so great.

Continues Cammie, in La Presse: “I’ve played for some good and less good teams. When you have a losers attitude, you lose more often that you win and you go down in the standings. When you have a winners attitude, when you’re worried about making mistakes and you react to a mistake by making 15 great plays, you win and you get out of your misery.”

Yikes!

The first point is – obviously there is a lot of truth to what Cammie is saying. This “losers” attitude has been the philosophy of the team ever since Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin took over and it could be argued that it’s been the rallying cry of the whole Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey era. I like to call it ‘the quest for mediocrity’. Try not to lose and maybe, just maybe, we’ll squeak into 8th place and then get lucky – perhaps meet a choker team – and we might get two playoff series and the team owners will get a few million bucks in profit. But maybe, on the other hand, we’ll meet the Leafs on the final game of the season, the Loafs will win 6-5 and we’ll end up with an early tee-up on the golf course.

But the second more important point is that Cammalleri has absolutely no right to blast his coaches and team-mates. Earth to Cammie - you have nine goals and 13 assists in 37 games this season and you’re -6. In other words, you are very much part of the problem. So don’t whine about ice-time. Earn it.

The scuttlebutt on Cammalleri is that he’s a selfish player and he certainly is giving a lot of ammunition to his critics with this outburst.

So what does the team do? If I was Cunneyworth, I’d bench him for the Bruins game Thursday. But really the ideal solution is for one of his team-mates to come up and clock him in the head – figuratively of course! They should tell him to put up or shut up and that he can come back and whine once he’s scored a few game-winning goals. The problem is that I can’t imagine who on this heart-less squad is up for such a job. Maybe Chris Nilan. Oh yeah he hasn’t played for the Habs for a couple of decades.

And yes Cammalleri is practically begging for a trade. The problem there is that Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier rather improbably still holds the keys to the Habs mansion and I – like most everyone else in the city – have zero faith that the Ghost has the savoir-faire to clinch a good deal for Cammie or anyone else.

Last but not least, can you imagine the hilarity in the Bruins dressing room Thursday morning as they yuk up the dissent in the Habs ranks and plot just how they’re going to bust some heads tonight?

Here is something we haven’t seen often this year:

I think it’s a good idea to protest outside the Bell Centre but….

I know that lots of you aren’t going to agree with me on this one. But I think it’s perfectly alright for folks to take to the streets outside the Bell Centre to protest the fact that Habs management decided to hire a unilingual Anglo coach. It was a bone-headed decision and it’s still unclear if the Montreal Canadiens brain trust gets just why so many Quebecers are seriously peeved over this.

A Leger Marketing poll in December discovered that 83-percent of francophones found it unacceptable that the Habs hired a coach – Randy Cunneyworth – who doesn’t speak any French and 69-percent of all respondents also felt the decision was unacceptable.

But – and it’s a big but – I have no interest in hanging out with the folks from the Mouvement Quebec francais, a bunch of old-school French-only nationalists. Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier – who calls Burlington home – showed himself to be totally out-of-touch with contemporary Quebec reality when he picked a coach who can’t converse in the language of Rocket Richard – underlining that out-of-it-ness further when Ghost Gauthier made it oh-so-clear he had no clue this move would ignite a firestorm of controversy chez nous.

But these folks are protesting by handing out Fleur-de-lys flags? I mean am I missing something here? The Quebec flag is not supposed to be a synonym for the French language. I rather naively thought it was supposed to represent all Quebecers and some of us – hello! – speak the language of Cunneyworth!

That said, this whole mess comes courtesy of the Habs bosses and no one else. They’re the ones that gave all the ammunition to the Mouvement Quebec francais – by fielding a team with almost no franco players, by hiring a coach who doesn’t parley-vous, and who were so clueless that they didn’t even suggest to Cunneyworth that he should try to win friends and influence folks in the local media by saying ’Bonjour, ca va?’ at that introductory press conference.

 

Habs fans a lot less cranky this morning

You know what? I could get to like this Randy Cunneyworth guy. After Tuesday night’s victory – with the Habs topping the Ottawa Senators 6-2 – I could get to like most anybody. Well okay I’m still a little sore with Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey. But let’s focus on the positive for a second here.

Ottawa Citizen sports scribe Wayne Scanlan has a good profile of the newish Habs coach in the Gaz Wednesday, underlining how Cunneyworth paid his dues coaching eight years with the Buffalo Sabres farm club the Rochester Americans, another two as an assistant with the Atlanta Thrashers, and yet another year behind the bench with the Canadiens farm team the Hamilton Bulldogs.

It’s nice to see someone finally saying something about Cunneyworth other than that he hasn’t mastered the language of Giroux. And before you go and call me a hypocrite, let me make one thing clear. I haven’t changed my view on this – the coach of the Habs has to speak some French. He doesn’t have to be fluently bilingual but he has to do at least a little of the parlez-vous thing.

So guess what was the first thing Cunneyworth said to the RDS reporter Tuesday night after his first win as the Habs’ head coach? “Je suis tres content,” said Cunneyworth.

Now how hard was that Randy? And it just had me thinking – once again – that the Canadiens brass – yes that’s you Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier – threw Cunneyworth to the lions – yes that’s you Montreal media types – by not telling him to say a few words en francais when he was introduced as Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin’s replacement a a couple of weeks back.

Yesterday I was blasting Cunneyworth for sitting Lars Eller and P.K. Subban last week in Winnipeg but today the move looks like sheer genius. Subban returned to action and scored a goal – an absolute beaut, set up by Erik Cole, after he faked a shot – and added an assist, ending his evening with a +2 rating. Eller also scored a very nice goal, a shorthanded marker which also happened to be the goal that brought Montreal back into the game after they let the Senators score only 1:42 into the game.

“It’s great to get that win,” said Subban. “It’s been a tough couple of weeks for everybody.”

Carey ‘What Me Worry’ Price was saying they won this one for the coach.

“He’s been doing a good job for us and we haven’t been playing up to par,” said Alfred E. Neuman Price.

Short version? We like coach Cunneyworth this morning, which is why we’re not calling him Martin-lite. At least not today.

Here’s something we haven’t seen much of lately – the Habs celebrating a victory.

Dark holiday season for the Habs nation

There is no silver lining. That’s not light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a train-wreck of a hockey season hurtling along the tracks towards us. These are dark, dark days for the Montreal Canadiens and there is no sign that things are going to get any brighter any time soon.

Jack Todd - who’s just rocking on Monday mornings these days – had a great column in the Gazette on Boxing Day, an open letter to Habs president Geoff Molson, in which he suggested Mr. Molson tell Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier to make sure not “to let the door hit his butt on the way out”. Todd also said Molson should politely send new coach in town Randy ‘Martin-lite’ Cunneyworth packing.

Couldn’t agree more Jack but, sadly, it ain’t gonna happen right now. Clearly Molson has backed Ghost Gauthier on these moves and the owner is not about to do a 180-degree turn.

So get ready for the worst crisis to face the Canadiens in decades to continue…..at least for the rest of this season.

How low have we sunk? Well here’s the joke I just heard at the hockey-gear store. ‘How bad are sales for Habs sweaters? Well we were trying to give them away for free before Christmas and no one was taking them.’

Meanwhile have you noticed folks proudly sporting Flyers and Bruins shirts around town? The closet Habs-haters have crawled out from under the woodwork like vermin and boy are they loving the way the Habs brass are systematically dismantling one of the greatest teams in all of professional sports.

Can things get better? Certainly not with Gauthier and Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey still running the Habs ship. Elliotte Friedman had this blog a couple of days back suggesting one thing Molson could do was bring Gainey back. But Elliotte, Gainey hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still there in the closet behind Gauthier pulling the puppet strings. Gainey was in Winnipeg the other night for heaven’s sake, underlining that he was probably the one who told Cunneyworth to bench P.K. Subban and Lars Eller.

The result of that brilliant thought-process? The worst game the Canadiens played in the 21st century. Worse, with that bone-headed decision, Cunneyworth/Gainey/Gauthier in one foul swoop brought back what was maybe the ugliest element of the fin-du-regime Martin days – when you don’t know what the heck else to do, blame the kids. That’s so reprehensible. Here you have virtually all of your veterans – with the exception of Erik Cole and Josh Gorges – playing like they’d rather be anywhere else, yet you pick on the easiest target – the youngsters. We have a word for that kind of behaviour Randy (and Jacques) – it’s called bullying and it’s totally unacceptable in the schoolyard and just as bloody unacceptable at the hockey rink.

Harsh words? Yeah well it’s not my fault all us Habs fans are in such a sour far-from-festive mood. You know whose fault it is.

Was Randy Cunneyworth really the best man available?

To ask the question is to answer it. No Randy Cunneyworth is obviously not the best coach available to bring the Habs back to life. He’s just the guy that GM Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier happens to like.

He’s Gauthier’s man. But why wouldn’t the Canadiens go out and find an A-list coach to do the job? Good question. And honestly I don’t have the answer. Maybe it’s just part of the culture of mediocrity that’s ruled the Habs thinking for the past 18 years.

You don’t like Serge Savard who’s brought you two Stanley Cups? Well why not bring in Rejean Houle who’s a nice guy but is totally unequipped to manage a National Hockey League team. You’ve decided Jacques Demers is finished. Okay why not bring in fourth-liner Mario Tremblay to run the bench and alienate your only superstar?

In fact, the new parlour game in Habs-fan circles is to try to decide if the Gainey/Gauthier era is as dire as the Houle era. That’s one tough debate. Why do I refer to the Gainey/Gauthier era? Well because Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey is still hanging out at the Bell Centre doing God knows what. Has anyone asked either president Geoff Molson or Gauthier if they had a pow-wow with Gainey before they threw Martin to the sharks? If he’s not advising them on decisions like this, what’s he doing coming to work at the rink? Just asking.

And Molson came out Monday with a statement in support of the hiring of unilingual anglo coach Cunneyworth, something that is igniting a veritable firestorm of protest here in Quebec.  Molson says that Cunneyworth was hired with the objective of giving the team “a much-needed spark after disappointing results since the start of the 2011-2012 season.”

But why is Cunneyworth the best guy to provide that spark? I’m convinced that if he was the best coach in hockey, there wouldn’t be nearly as much griping about the fact he doesn’t speak the language of Tremblay. But he’s not the best coach in hockey by any stretch of the imagination. So if you’re going to get someone who’s not A-list material, why not get one who speaks a little French.

Let’s face it. People aren’t objecting to the fact the coach is an anglophone. They’re objecting to the fact that he doesn’t speak a word of French. And they have a point. If Cunneyworth had designs on the big job in Montreal, he should’ve switched on the Premiere Chaine or TVA and picked up a little French. I believe that if he could even provide a little small-talk en francais, it would make a huge difference.

That’s what soured Franco Montreal on Saku Koivu. It was the fact he never even bothered to work up a couple of phrases in French. It’s called showing a little respect for the city that you live and work in.