Don’t sign Carey Price for more than four years

When Los Angeles Kings goalie Jonathan Quick agreed to a ten-year contract extension with his Cup-winning team, my Twitter pal Paul Wong was quick to ask me where I figured that left Carey ‘Gump Cash’ Price.

My answer? It has nothing to do with Price. Quick won the Stanley Cup and nabbed the Conn Smythe Trophy along the way. Price, may I remind you, has won nothing. Ever. In the National Hockey League.

I’m not saying he’s not a good goalie. He is. And he may become a great one. But to paraphrase the great Bachman Turner Overdrive, We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet! (Add in your own ‘b-b-b-b-b-baby’.)

Our beloved Habs, may I remind you, finished last place in the East this past season. Now of course that wasn’t mainly Price’s fault. Heck it was hardly The Man in Black’s fault at all. That was a psycho team from top to bottom, crafted in the image of its strange general manager. But Pricey didn’t pull off any miracles either.

The other thing I said to Paul is that those ten, eleven, twelve-year deals are just stoopid. D-U-M-B, as the Ramones put it so memorably. Just look at the Roberto Luongo situation. Here is a netminder with ten years left on his ridiculous 12-year, $64 million contract with the Vancouver Canucks and he’s not even the team’s No. 1 goalie anymore, with Cory Schneider effectively in that spot right now after Luongo choked in the playoffs yet again. But Vancouver is stuck with Luongo since no sane general manager wants to pick up that kind of contract for a goalie who keeps underwhelming.

There are reports that the Habs might be contemplating a six or seven-year deal for Price for something in the range of $6 million or $7 million a year.

Well I have just one piece of advice for the Habs’ new, much-improved GM Marc ‘Dashing Man’ Bergevin – don’t give Price more than four years. He’s still an unproven commodity. I’m not saying don’t sign him. I’m not saying think way outside the box and instead go for the season’s most surprising free agent – Marty ‘Old Man’ Brodeur. (Though wouldn’t that be a great story, eh? Brodeur returns to his hometown to finish his career with the Canadiens? Hey a guy can dream.)

I’m not saying trade Price to St. Louis to get Jaroslav Halak back – though that too is a cool idea.

No I’m just saying don’t go for more than four years. Let Mr. Country Music bring us a Cup – or even a couple of dominant playoff-series wins – and then we’ll talk about ten-year deals.

Liking the NHL Awards – Pacioretty wins, Chara loses, Halak takes Jennings

On the eve of the most important draft for the Canadiens in a few decades, let’s celebrate a great night for us Habs fans at the NHL Awards.

The big news, of course, was that Max Pacioretty nabbed the Bill Masterton Trophy, beating out Joffrey Lupul from the Maple Leafs and favourite Daniel Alfredsson from the Senators. The award is for the player who is the best example in the past season of perseverance and sportsmanship.

Patch told The Gazette’s Dave Stubbs that “It doesn’t sound real right now but this is definitely the best thing in the world.”

Indeed. I’ll just say that I was listening to sports radio Wednesday – it does happen sometimes when my radio dial veers off CBC Radio One by mistake – and I heard the “experts” – who will remain un-named to protect the guilty – saying there was simply no chance that Pacioretty would win the Masterton. The argument was that it’s voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association and that hockey scribes have radically divided views on the infamous Zdeno Chara hit on Pacioretty – when the Brunis D-man crushed Patch’s head into a stanchion at the Bell Centre in the spring 0f 2011, sending the Hab to the hospital in a stretcher with a fractured cervical vertebra.

So I take the win as something of a vindication for our take on this hit – that it was an ugly incident, that seasoned vet Chara knew exactly what he was doing when he rammed Pacioretty’s upper body into the stanchion. This is a story with a happy ending too – Patch bounced back from this potentially-career-threatening injury to play his best-ever season in the big leagues, notching 33 goals and 32 assists on the only happening line on a C-list team going nowhere fast (that would be our beloved Habs!).

But the NHL Awards story gets even better – cos Chara lost in the Norris trophy race to Senators defenceman Erik Karlsson. Poor old Zdeno – he has to watch Pacioretty win, he loses and he gets to sit there in the crowd thinking long and hard about how far the Bruins have fallen since their Cup victory the year before!

Last but not least, my main man Jaroslav Halak won the Jennings Trophy with fellow Blues netminder Brian Elliott for allowing the fewest goals during the regular season. Their numbers are just mind blowing – Elliott had a 1.56 goals-against-average and Halak had a 1.97 GAA.

So you know what? I like Carey ‘The Man in Black’ Price as much as the next Montrealer but let’s just admit that Jaro remains an effin amazing goalie!

And stay tuned. We’ll talk more about the 2012 NHL draft and the Habs third-overall pick shortly!

A Habs fan’s take on the playoffs

It’s all about the Habs right? I know Les Boys haven’t played for a couple of weeks but you just know that all us Habs fans are watching the post-season with our Habs-coloured glasses.

So what’s the Habs’ fanatic take on the 2012 playoffs? Well first-off we’re in a celebratory mood today. The Big Bad Bruins are gone. I mean, how sweet is that? Boston loses in overtime in game seven of the first round. It just doesn’t get any better than that. They have to swallow the same punishment the Canadiens and their fans went through last year – with the Bs knocking off Montreal in game seven OT of the first round. The Habs were one Subban slapshot away from advancing to the second round.

Last night, it was fun to see the Bruins dealing with the same sort of failure. But it was even worse of course for them given that they won the Cup last spring. The good news? Zdeno Chara – who apparently doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, if you believe the unbiased views of Don Cherry – will not be hoisting the Cup this season. Oh well.

On to who us Habs nuts are backing. Well St. Louis of course. Why? ‘Cause of Jaroslav Halak. I know he’s still injured – apparently he will not be available for the first two games of the second-round series against Los Angeles. But he’ll be back. Count on it. And how cool would that be to see the Blues win it all and have Jaro sipping from the Cup – clip that photo out and mail it down to Ghost Gauthier’s manor in Burlington.

Our other team – well the Preds. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if les freres Kostitsyn made it all the way – two very talented snipers tossed on to the trash heap of history by the firm of Gainey & Gauthier.

In short, us Habs obsessives take our pleasures where we can find ‘em. Of course, we’d rather be watching our team. But you know what? The sad-sack 2011-2012 Habs would be smoked by even the worst team in these playoffs.

- Brendan

 

The Habs don’t know how to develop talent

You probably already suspected this – that the current Habs are clueless when it comes to developing players. The Firm of G&G – Gainey & Gauthier – are infamous for trading away talented players who then flourish elsewhere. We all kinda already, in our bones, knew this.

But a terrific column by Francois Gagnon in La Presse a couple of days back really puts this in focus. Gagnon’s piece is inspired by a study undertaken by Ed Willes evaluating the drafting track records of NHL teams between 2000 and 2009. He rather improbably has Your Montreal Canadiens coming out in first place on the drafting chart, which I think will come as a shocker to most of you.

“Sorry, can’t explain this but the numbers don’t lie,” writes Willes.

But here’s where Gagnon’s column comes into play. His point is that yes the Habs did indeed draft lots of quality players during that decade but the cream of the crop then went on to thrive elsewhere.

Gagnon notes that of the 26 players drafted by the Canadiens since 2000, only seven are still with the team – Louis ‘I might become a good player’ Leblanc  from the 2009 draft, Max ‘Hero’ Pacioretty, Yanick ‘Huh?’ Weber and P.K. ‘I feel good’ Subban from what was obviously a pretty good drafting session for the Habs in 2007, Ryan ‘Fisticuffs’ White from 2006, Carey ‘What me worry’ Price from 2005, and Tomas ‘Under-achiever’ Plekanec from 2001.

That’s the good news. The bad news, as detailed by Gagnon, is all the quality players we drafted and then gave up for almost nothing in return. Yes Mr. Gainey and Mr. Gauthier, take a sip of your high-end coffee and take a look at this. Ryan ‘Hello Mr. Gainey’ McDonagh. A throw-in in the now infamous Scott Gomez-Chris Higgins trade. He’s now one of the New York Rangers’ top blue-liners. Dumping McDonagh is right up there with Reggie ‘This is my claim to fame’ Houle throwing in the great Mike Keane – hey I even named my son after him – in the Patrick Roy deal with Colorado. How many Cups did Keane go on to win? Don’t ask. And maybe McDonagh will win the Cup this year. But I digress.

Gagnon continues with the list of shame. The ‘Where’s the party’ Kostitsyn brothers, both to Nashville. Mikhail Grabovski, who is now a key player with the Maple Leafs. Given up for a song. Jaroslav Halak. The less said the better, okay? And he’s now team-mates on the Blues with another former Hab draft pick, Matt d’Agostini.

Mark Streit. That’s one that kills me. Captain of the Islanders. We all knew he was great when he was here but the Firm of G&G just let him slip away. And the Gagnon list goes on – read his column to see how many decent players the Habs brain-trust dumped like yesterday’s papers.

Then the fine La Presse columnist moves on to the guys we could’ve picked up in drafts past but didn’t, including a couple of French-Canadian stars, Claude Giroux – No. 2 in the points standing as we speak – and Simon Gagne.

So how did Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey and Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier do such a cruddy job of developing the talent they had right there on the bench? Good question. I don’t have the answer. I can’t get inside these two guys’ minds to know why – and that I’m thinking is probably a good thing!

That’s the mysterious part of this story. The less mysterious part – it’s downright crystal-clear actually – is the fact that G&G have mismanaged the team. That’s not up for debate. At every turn, they’ve made the wrong moves. (And we haven’t even got to how they mismanaged the coaching situation. Let’s leave that for another blog.)

Urgggghhh!

Trade Gauthier, not Kostitsyn

Look I don’t much like Andrei ‘Where’s the Party?’ Kostitsyn either. He’s a whiner. Most nights, he looks like he’d rather be hanging with his buddies at the bar doing God knows what and his play reflects that sadsack attitude.

But the guy has loads of talent and a smart team would know how to get him to perform. And me I’m thinking that smart team is the Nashville Predators, who picked up AK46 Monday morning in return for a second-round pick next year and the conditional fifth-round 2013 pick that they nabbed in the Hal Gill trade with the same team.

Kostitsyn will score 30 goals next year for the Preds. You read it here first. Remember what my Habs-obsessed accountant Randall Huberman said on the weekend? Players always play worse when they arrive in Montreal and always improve when the Habs trade them to another team.

(Goon filmmaker Michael Dowse – who’s the man behind the No. 1 movie in the land this weekend – took time off his champagne drinking today to tweet to underline that AK is an unrestricted free agent this summer. So he may be scoring those 30 goals somewhere else. But it won’t be for the Habs.)

Look at Andrei’s little brother Sergei who was dealt by the Canadiens to the Predators a couple of years back. He scored 23 goals and had 50 points last season, and already has 15 goals this year. Those are big numbers by the Habs (kind of sad) standards. And no he never produced for us.

Sure AK is sucking it out big-time this year, with 12 goals and 12 assists, but remember this is a team where no one is producing except for the Patch/Desharnais/Cole line. Kostitsyn has talent. We’ve seen it. Remember 07-08 when he was on the team’s best line, alongside Tomas Plekanec and Alex Kovalev? He can play. You just have to figure out how to get him inspired.

Also, is Preds GM David Poile the only general manager that Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier knows? Does he have phone numbers for any other GMs? The Ghost is infamous for not offering players right ’round the league. Did he check with everyone re AK46? Because by all accounts, he did not phone all of his colleagues when he was quickly dealing Halak to St. Louis.

Here’s an idea. Why not trade the Goat? Maybe a straight-up deal with the Leafs – Gauthier for Burke! I like it. In one transaction, the Loafs get the worst GM in the league and we finally get a guy in Montreal who isn’t afraid to talk to the media.

For heaven’s sake, our GM would even be on Twitter. What? You don’t think Toronto would go for it? Okay, throw in Bob ‘Elvis Has Not Left the Building’ Gainey. And then we’ll pick up free agent George Costanza as Burke’s assistant. C’mon it’s a great plan.

Hey you gotta laugh man! What’s the alternative? The alternative is treating this as the tragedy it is. And I can’t face that right at this second. I got enough problems pal.

 

St. Louis netminder Jaroslav Halak back on his game

I never doubted. After a just-awful start to the season, St. Louis goalie – and former Habs hero – Jaroslav Halak is back at the top of his game. Halak is 2-1-1 in his last four games including Thursday night’s key 4-1 victory over the Florida Panthers. His goals-against-average in those four games is an amazing 1.23 and his save percentage is .950.

The result is there’s now a goaltending debate in St. Louis. Does new coach Ken Hitchcock stick with the newly-hot Halak or switch back-and-forth between Halak and back-up goalie Brian Elliott who has a .947 save percentage on the season and has done stellar work between the pipes when called in while Halak was struggling.

Halak’s record is 3-6-1 with a GAA of 2.60 and a save percentage of .889. Elliott is 7-1 with an eye-catching GAA of 1.43 and a save percentage of .947. Clearly Elliott’s stats are way better but what you have to look at is this week rather than the whole season. Halak is the hot guy right now and, much more than Elliott, Halak is the guy who’s proven he can stop pucks as well as any goalie in the National Hockey League. If you doubt that, you must’ve slept through the 2010 playoffs when he pulled a middling Habs team almost single-handedly to the Eastern Conference final. You remember the Pittsburgh and Washington series? Les Boys would’ve never ever won those without Halak quite simply standing on his head. (And yes Habs management rewarded Halak for heroics by promptly dumping him, sending him that summer to the Blues in return for Lars Eller, who has a pitiful one goal and five points so far this season.)

So I’m saying Hitchcock is going to be sticking with Halak and I’m also saying that’s the right decision. Let’s check back on this at Christmas.

A look at tonight’s games

Games to look forward to tonight – the Habs could clinch a playoff spot vs the Hawks, the Buffalo Sabres take on the Tampa Bay Lightning, the fighting Maple Leafs battle the Capitals, the Pens who have clinched a playoff spot vs the eliminated NJ Devils, the Flyers vs the Senators. In the West, the Blues and the Avalanche meet, the Atlanta Thrashers take on the Nashville Predators, the Blue Jackets vs the Dallas Stars, and first vs worst, the Oilers meet again with the top-dog Canucks (the last time they met, the Oilers crushed Vancouver 4-1).

- Keane

 

The Playoff Race

In the Eastern Conference, the Philadelphia Flyers, Washington Capitals, Boston Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins, and the Tampa Bay Lightning have all clinched a playoff spot. In 9th place in the Eastern Conference are the Carolina Huricanes, with 87 points, 2 points behind the 8th place Rangers, who have 89 points. Both those teams have 3 games remaining in the regular season.

The Toronto Maple Leafs also have a slight chance of being a contender in the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs. The Leafs have 84 points and are 5 points behind the Rangers. Toronto would have to win all of their last 3 games and the Rangers would have to lose their last 3 games. The teams eliminated in the Eastern Conference are the Florida Panthers, Ottawa Senators, NY Islanders, New Jersey Devils, and the Atlanta Thrashers. All the Montreal Canadiens have to do to clinch a playoff spot is to win one of their last 3.

The only teams in the West who have clinched a playoff spot are the Vancouver Canucks –  who have also clinched there Division and won the President’s Trophy – the Detroit Red Wings, and the San Jose Sharks. The Calgary Flames have 91 points, 1 point behind the 8th place Hawks who have two games in hand over the Flames. The Dallas Stars are also fighting for a playoff spot – the Stars are 3 points behind the Hawks. The Edmonton Oilers, Colorado Avalanche, Columbus Blue Jackets, St. Louis Blues, and Minnesota Wild are all eliminated from the playoffs.

-Keane