It’s time for the moderate owners to take a stand

We are very close to losing the hockey season. Believe it.

And no it’s not the fault of one person, who, for the sake of our story, we’ll call Gary ‘I hate hockey’ Bettman. No it’s the fault of 31 very wealthy individuals – the 30 National Hockey League owners and Bettman. I’m sick and tired of the discourse suggesting it’s the fault of both sides, both of whom are spoiled rich kids. False!

Think about it for a second. What kind of business locks out its employees every single time the collective agreement ends? Imagine if – oh let me pick a company name out of a hat – Molson Coors did that. That it locked out its staffers every time the contract expired instead of negotiating.

Just imagine how Canadians would feel about that. It would be totally unacceptable. It goes against everything we believe in. Unions have a right to exist Gary and it’s is totally despicable that you’re trying to crush one. This is the third straight time Bettman has responded to the end of a collective agreement with the sledgehammer that is a lockout.

The argument goes that the players are millionaire whiners. That they should just shut up and play.  But if they are exceptionally well-paid, it’s because they make money for the owners. The owners make money. You know that. Revenue has been on the rise big-time since the last collective agreement was put in place.

Sure there are teams that lose money – but that’s because Bettman has been pushing hockey into places like Phoenix and Nashville where the sport will never be a money-maker. All the signs prove that but Bettman refuses to budge because……well because he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t back down once he takes a decision.

Habs owner Geoff Molson says he has full confidence in Mr. Bettman: “Gary’s in charge of our league, he’s doing a good job, and it’s a process that’s underway that I’m not going to get involved with publicly.”

In the same piece by Gazette sports scribe Dave Stubbs, Molson says he is not actively involved in the negotiations, confirming many of our worst fears. In other words, Bettman is running the show Captain Queeg-style – ask your dad about the character, the oppressive leader in Herman Wouk’s great novel The Caine Mutiny – with the support of a small cabal of the most radical anti-union leaders. People like Jeremy Jacobs in Boston who, as Pat Hickey writes in his column Saturday, “appears to be motivated by greed. He’d like to pad his profit margin without having to share with any of his less fortunate players.”

On Friday, Bettman and his union-bashers cancelled games through Dec. 14, along with the All-Star game, which was set to take place in Columbus. (Again, kudos to Bettman. Here you have a great chance to boost the sport in a place like Columbus, Ohio that needs all the convincing possible to watch hockey and you nuke that opportunity. Way to go pal!)

Richard Labbe in La Presse notes that the owners have now cancelled 34.3-percent of the season. Meanwhile Donald Fehr mentions once again that the two sides are only $182 million apart and that each day of the lockout, per the owners’ stats, the league is losing between $18 and $20 million. So, Fehr adds, those two weeks just cancelled represents more than the $182 million that separates the two sides.

Get it? It’s not about money. The NHLPA has already lost this negotiation. They have agreed to a 50-50 split of revenue, which will cost the players hundreds of millions of dollars given that the players right now take home 57-percent of the revenue. $182 million is maybe two big player contracts. So no this isn’t a fight about bucks. It’s an attempt to destroy Fehr and his union. And that frankly is a repulsive thing to do and you don’t have to be a hockey fan to realize that this is not the kind of behaviour our society should be condoning.

So yeah, great job Gary.

- Brendan

 

I’m sorry to see Mathieu Darche go

I am. I always liked the guy. But let’s face facts – he didn’t add much to the Habs equation over the past season.

The Gazette and La Presse are both reporting Thursday morning that Darche has worn the fabled CH jersey for the last time. Both papers report that the Habs offered him a two-way contract – one salary if he plays in the Big Leagues and another one if he is sent down to play alongside Scott ‘Loopy Grin’ Gomez with the Hamilton Bulldogs.

Darche has spent a good chunk of his career on two-way contracts and clearly he feels like – been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

Rockeur-turned-hockey-scribe Richard Labbé managed to reach Darche on the phone Wednesday and here’s some of what Darche told the La Presse columnist (my translation).

“I’m disappointed,” Darche told Labbé. “I was seeing that the Canadiens were making changes but I didn’t think I would be part of those changes. I wanted to take part in the renaissance of the club.”

He went on to say: “I’ve had enough of these two-way contracts. It proves to me that management is not really into keeping me. I just wasn’t ready to say ‘yes’ to that. I’d rather try my luck on the free agents market.”

Labbe reports that the Habs offered Darche less money than he got last season, when he was toiling on the third or fourth line for $700,000. (Eds note: How does a fellow scrape by with a minimum-wage salary like that? Just asking.)

This time last year, the brain-trust at Top Shelf was mighty happy when the Habs re-signed Darche but then he was coming off a strong season, with 12 goals and 14 assists. This year, he had just 5 goals and 7 assists. He did miss the last 21 games of the season with a concussion but even when he was healthy, he never looked particularly effective.

A year ago, I wrote that ‘Darche doesn’t have enormous skill, but he’s all heart and grit, something in short supply on the bleu-blanc-et-rouge.’ But that was then, this was now. Nos Boys still need a lot more heart and grit but they’re going to have to get it elsewhere.

The other skill Darche has that’s in short supply on the team is a proficiency in the language of Lafleur. With his departure, the team spokesman in the French media officially becomes Wee David Desharnais. But I’m sure M. Bergevin is gonna doing something about that lack of parley-vous on the ice in the coming days.

- Brendan

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’.

 

New Canadien Erik Cole makes his Montreal debut

The newest addition to the Montreal Canadiens, power forward Erik Cole, is splashed all over the local papers Friday morning. That’s cos he was at the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard on Thursday to meet the meeting for the first since signing as a free agent with the Habs a couple of weeks back.

Click here for Pat Hickey’s story on Cole in The Gazette and click ici for the piece by Richard Labbe in La Presse, in which Cole suggests that the 2011 Habs have a lot in common with the 2006 Carolina Hurricanes…..who just happened to win the Stanley Cup that year.

And then click here for ctv.ca columnist Arpon Basu’s typically thoughtful piece on Cole, focusing on whether or not it’s fair to say he’s injury-prone and looking at his less-than-spectacular year with the Edmonton Oilers. And click here for Associated Press article on Cole’s visit to Montreal.

Reading all this, one thing came to mind – we shouldn’t pin all of our hopes on one forward. Cole is a good addition for a team desperately short of power forwards but a 26-goal-scorer is not going to carry the team on his shoulders.

- Brendan