Okay it is most definitely time to panic about P.K.

By all accounts, negotiations are at a stand-still – with gusts up to completely dead – between Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin and the P.K. Subban camp. So it is now guaranteed that Subban will NOT be in the line-up when the Habs open this shortened season against the Toronto Maple Leafs Saturday night at the Bell Centre.

Just how bad is this? Well I have two words for you – Tomas Kaberle. That’s right, the Kabster is now a card-carrying member of the Habs’s Top Four D-men and that my friends is a truly frightening thought. It just drives home the point that the Canadiens simply can’t afford to lose Subban for any period of time, never mind forever. They simply don’t have the depth on the blueline to even contemplate that.

“It seems like he’s really asking for a lot of money,” said Stéphane Laporte, La Presse columnist and the fellow in charge of the Quebec adaptation of The Voice, La Voix, which debuts Sunday on TVA. “What I heard in the rumour mill is that it’s not his agent Don Meehan who’s asking for all this. It’s really Subban himself. He’s more greedy than his agent.”

I was interviewing Laporte about La Voix – here’s my story in the Gaz – but knowing he’s a huge hockey fan, I had to ask him what he thought of not having Subban in the line-up.

“Yeah it’s especially bad in a short season like this,” said Laporte. “With Markov, those are the two key defencemen. When you look at Kaberle on your second defence pairing, it’s pretty scary. So we need Subban as soon as possible.”

So what’s going on? Is Subban greedy? Or are the Habs following their usual conservative route and simply refusing to deviate from their game plan, which is to give bridge contracts before doling out the big bucks.

Whatever the case, this is close to a worst-case scenario for the Habs. When you have thousands of fans chanting ‘We want P.K.’ Thursday night, you realize this is a freakin’ P.R. disaster. Subban is the total package. Amazing player. Amazing personality. He’s our new poster boy. Which is why I think – within reason – sign him now. Unless of course he’s just asking for nutsoid money. But if the sticking point is length of contract, sign him long-term. Not clear yet? We need P.K. in the line-up. Now.

- Brendan

Chris Nilan wasn’t just a gladiator…he was also a fine hockey player

I have some major issues with the new Chris Nilan documentary The Last Gladiators, grumbling that you can read in all its glory in my review of the Alex Gibney-directed film in The Gazette Friday. The short version? I think it’s irresponsible that Gibney didn’t go deeper into the whole issue of why the NHL encourages the goon mentality and how this impacts so negatively on these guys’ off-ice behaviour.

But one of the most interesting parts of the documentary is the discussion of how this guy who made it into the Big Leagues by punching the biggest, toughest guys he could find rather miraculously became a pretty darn good hockey player somewhere along the way.

Nilan talks of how Habs coach Claude Ruel – who ran the bench from 1979-1981, just when Nilan was starting out in the National Hockey League – worked so hard with him to develop his skills and Jacques Lemaire, who took over from Ruel, was even more engaged in making Knuckles Nilan a better player. In the film, Nilan marvels at how Lemaire would put him on the ice when the team needed a goal and there are some beautiful Nilan goals shown here, including one on a penalty shot!

Nilan also underlines that he learned from his team-mates, who just happened to be some of the greatest players ever to lace-up in the League, including Larry Robinson and Bob Gainey. At one point, someone says of Nilan, ‘it’s his drive” and that’s so true. Think of so many ultra-skilled players who under-perform because they don have 1/100th of the heart of Chris Nilan.

Here’s a fighter – who also happened to be one of the best fighters of the era – who scored 21 goals one year and 19 another year. Compare that to the Habs’ last enforcer, Georges Laraque, who couldn’t score if his life depended on it…..and in fact, by the time he made his way to the Canadiens (in just another horrible Gainey move), wasn’t even willing to fight any more.

Nilan was the real thing, the kind of player you just don’t see in today’s NHL chock-full-of spoiled-brat players. He talks of how devastated he was after the Canadiens traded him to the Rangers, a trade that came after Nilan told coach Jean Perron where to stuff it. Today players change teams like they change underwear. It’s all about the pay-cheque.

Not Nilan.

“It broke me,” he says of the trade from the Habs.

He cared. Now there’s a novel concept. Try explaining that to Tomas Kaberle.

 

Pierre Gauthier brings his ace dealmaking skills – NOT! – to the Chicago Blackhawks

Is it April Fool’s Day? No I guess it ain’t. So OK explain this one. The Chicago Blackhawks have hired Pierre Gauthier as director of player personnel. What? Like does this make any sense?

Did the Blackhawks brain trust notice what happened in Montreal over the past two seasons? Apparently not. When Habs president Geoff Molson decided to toss M. Gauthier on the trash-heap of history this spring, I called Ghost Gauthier ”the most enigmatic of Canadiens’ general managers.”

The man was allergic to the media – hey who can blame him? – but he also seemed allergic to most of humanity. Under his tenure, the Habs became a Soviet-like centralized state, with absolutely no delegation of authority in sight. And that was the upside of the Gauthier era.

Did I mention Tomas Kaberle? Here’s a guy who was so washed-up that the Bruins won the Cup with him and dumped him. Then the Hurricanes – for reasons known only to ‘Canes GM’s Jim Rutherford’s psychiatrist – picked him up and Rutherford soon saw the error of his ways, publicly talking about Kaberle’s poor physical shape and lack of commitment to the team.

So ace dealmaker Gauthier promptly picked up Kaberle – and left the team stuck with another couple of years of the oh-so-soft player’s pricey contract. Ditto for Rene Bourque. Major Major Gauthier trades Michael Cammalleri to Calgary for Bourque when everyone knows Bourque is firing blanks. Everyone except Gauthier. Another disastrous trade that is going to haunt the Canadiens for years to come.

In short, we’re still paying for so many of Gauthier’s moves. And I haven’t even got to the ultimate muck-up – the firing of Jacques Martin and his replacement with a unilingual Anglophone, creating one of the worst crises in the history of the Canadiens. And it could’ve been so easily avoided if Gauthier – or anyone in the Habs’ executive suites for that matter – had been thinking. But ultimately firing the coach is the GM’s responsibility – and Gauthier blew that dossier in classic fashion.

So why did Blackhawks GM Stan Bowman, presumably a bright guy, reach out for Gauthier? No idea. I just feel sorry for my Blackhawks-fan friends.

 

Bob Gainey headed to Dallas Stars to consult

Wow, Elvis really has left the building. Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey has been hired as a consultant to Dallas Stars general manager Joe Nieuwendyk. Dallas is, of course, the place where Mr. Gainey actually had success as a GM, winning the Stanley Cup in 1999 with a little help from Nieuwendyk, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP that year.

The only hiccup is Gainey’s track record since. Obviously Nieuwendyk has fond memories of his old boss – it was Gainey who traded with Calgary to bring Joe down to Texas – but didn’t he notice how What About Bob and his sidekick Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier drove the Canadiens into the ground? Apparently not.

When Gainey abruptly resigned as Habs GM in February, 2010, the team was, to be polite, struggling. Sure it had some limited success on his watch but he was the chief architect of the misguided (eds note: downright pathetic!) strive-for-mediocrity philosophy that came close to destroying the Habs. Making 8th place was always good enough for Bob.

And his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants remake/remodel (eds. note: Isn’t that a Roxy Music album track?) of the team in July, 2009 was an absolute failure. The result of that little bit of electroshock therapy? Last place in the east this season. He made one of the three worst trades in franchise history – right up there with the Patrick Roy and Chris Chelios brain farts – by sending Chris Higgins and defence prospect Ryan McDonagh to the Rangers in return for taking Scott Gomez and his psychotic contract off of Glen Sather’s hands. That one worked out pretty well eh?

Gomez scored……ah forget it, I don’t even wanna go back down that nightmare on La Gauchetiere (eds. note: Ave. les Canadiens!). But the real killer is McDonagh. Have you been watching the terrific Rangers-Capitals series? McDonagh is on the ice whenever something’s on the line. Can you imagine how good he would’ve looked in the Habs line-up this season?

Cammie? He became Rene Bourque. Yeah that worked out well too. And the other big summer 09 pick-up Brian Gionta has been okay but no more.

Then there was the matter of Gainey refusing to vacate his Bell Centre office. He leaves in if not disgrace at least not with his head held high yet he keeps showing up for work every day. How do you spell ‘dysfunctional’? And was he still pulling the strings, the puppet-meister for Ghost Gauthier? Who knows.

Anyway, I’m happy to see Gainey getting some work in Texas. Richard Labbe from La Presse tweeted me to suggest maybe Gainey would try to get Gomez back – a brilliant idea Richard! Then  someone else on Twitter weighed in to say Chatterbox Gainey might also try to trade for Kaberle and, why not, Rene Bourque. Then we all came to the conclusion that he could also bring Pierre ‘Chuckles’ Gauthier, whoopee cushion in hand, down to Dallas to provide a little levity in the Stars’ executive suites. He could be put in charge of handing out one cookie a-piece to the media hacks before games.

I like it. Clearly it’s just a matter of months before the Cup makes its triumphant return to Dallas.

 

My fond memories of Pierre Gauthier

Ah yes, my pleasant thoughts on Mr. Gauthier. Hmmm this is going to be maybe my shortest blog ever.

But seriously, I’m not ready to wade into the debate about who’s the best man for the Habs GM job – all I’ll say for now is ‘stop this Patrick Roy nonsense, right now’. We’ll have plenty of time for that GM chatter in the coming weeks.

No this morning I want to cast a look back at the most enigmatic of Canadiens’ general managers, Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier. Humour me. I’ve spent most of the past year penning a mono-thematic blog that can be summed up in one phrase – ‘Fire the Ghost now!’ So I can’t let him leave town and slink back to his meat-free/journalist-free manor in Burlington without a few parting thoughts.

I learn from the Ottawa Citizen’s Wayne Scanlan column this morning that Gauthier picked-up the ‘Ghost’ monicker from his days at the Ottawa Senators GM, where he had a pretty successful run from 1995 to 1998. That success leads Scanlan to conclude that Gauthier is “a decent hockey man, regardless of the mess he just left.”

I’m not well-placed to weigh in on whether or not he was a decent hockey man when he was running the Sens but he was not a decent hockey man here in Montreal. In fact, ‘decent’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind when looking back at Gauthier’s tenure ici.

What the F happened this year in Montreal? In some ways, the team’s collapse was mysterious. They were able to compete last year. So why were they so broken this season? The answer starts, as it always does, at the top. The players didn’t believe in Gauthier. The media didn’t believe in Gauthier. The fans didn’t believe in Gauthier. This is not good.

Even if he had made one great deal after another – which he didn’t – the Ghost wouldn’t have been much liked. There wasn’t much to like there. Ask anyone who works in the executive suites of the Bell Centre if he ever deigned to say ‘bonjour’. No he didn’t.

He treated the media like crap. He always reminded me of an old-school Quebec priest. ‘I have all the answers. You don’t. So listen up my friends.’ And he is one of those guys who’ll say anything to get out of a room. Media hack: ‘Why’d you pick up underachiever Rene ‘Complete Bust’ Bourque?’ Ghost: ‘Cos we need size upfront’. Not said is that Gauthier and his pal Bob “Elvis Has Finally Left the Building’ Gainey had spent the past few years making the case that size didn’t matter.

So his (lack of) personality didn’t help. But it was his actions that really drove the Habs into the ground this year. Two in particular. The first was signing Andrei ‘Question Mark’ Markov to a three-year deal last summer. The Habs have spent the past two seasons trying – unsuccessfully – to deal with Markov’s absence and that’s been a huge reason for the team’s woes.

Gauthier had the chance to cut Markov free and take that dough and go get an A-list D-man. But he didn’t. Then he spent the whole season telling us how Markov was on his way back…..sooon…..any day now. The tragi-comic soap opera reached its nadir that time in Los Angeles when no one – the Ghost, the coach – seemed to know where Markov was that day.

The other was the way he fired Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin. As Francois Gagnon points out in his column Saturday, the Canadiens were still fighting for a playoff spot when Gauthier chopped Martin on Dec. 17, with a 13-12-7 record.

Now I was a huge critic of Martin’s. I’m not going to start pretending this morning that Marcel Marceau was my idea of a great coach. Playing a trap-like system with a small fast-skating team is just goofy. But what a way to make him walk the plank. The morning of a game. (Well this of course is the same GM who traded Michael Cammalleri between the second and third periods of a game in Boston, telling the seasoned player to go back to his hotel – which the team had already checked out of – and wait for his call to tell him where he was going. You don’t treat the scummiest player in the league like that, never mind a guy who bled bleu-blanc-et-rouge during that miraculous 2010 playoff run! But I digress.)

Then you replace Martin with Randy ‘Parlez-Vous’ Cunneyworth, a unilingual anglophone with no NHL head-coaching experience. Oh yeah and you also announce that he is “interim” head coach. In other words, he’s gonna be toast come the end of the season. And then you’re surprised when the players refuse to take the guy seriously. Why would they?

And you don’t for a second think that his lack of French is going to create an apocalyptic controversy. Of course you don’t Pierre, ’cause you live in Vermont and have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside Quebecers’ heads. What you did that day was treat all of us with contempt. (Though to be fair, let’s admit that Geoff Molson should’ve stopped that madness before it happened.)

But also what’s up with this “interim” thing. That trashed the season right then and there. So why’d Gauthier do that? There is no logical explanation. Actually there is one and it’s real nasty. That he wanted someone behind the bench that he could control. I want to believe that’s not true ’cause it makes me sick to think of it. But you give me a better explanation. It was Dec. 17 for heaven’s sake. The season was imminently save-able. So why he’d have the team commit hari-kari.

I could mention giving away Halak, bringing in pricey disasters Kaberle and Bourque, giving up AK46 for next to nothing…..but I won’t.

No I’m done with my trip down memory lane.

Now that’s off my chest, I’m ready to move on. You too?

 

Gauthier fired – the Habs spring has sprung!

I feel like breaking into song. I know, I know, it’s a frightening thought.

Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey, good-bye!

Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier has officially been tossed on to the trash heap of history by the Canadiens owner and president Geoff ‘My New Hero’ Molson. And not a moment too soon, I might add. Better yet, Molson also made it clear Thursday morning that I need a new nickname for Bob ‘Elvis Has Not Left the Building’ Gainey. That’s right – Bob ‘I’m Always the Last Guy at the Party’ Gainey is in fact leaving the building.

This is – in case you can’t figure it out on your own – great news. The only downside is I will now have to think harder before penning my Top Shelf blogs because I will at last have to retire the ‘Gauthier-must-be-fired’ template. Oh well, life becomes tougher for me as a blogger but I am infinitely more happy as a Habs fan.

The firm of G&G have decimated one of the greatest franchises in professional sports. I got into a bit of a tiff on Twitter Thursday morning when I described the nine years of the Gainey & Gauthier reign of error as a “disastrous” era. Folks pointed out that the team once finished first in the Eastern Conference – a bit of a fluke – and made it to the conference final in 2010 – that entirely due to one man, Jaroslav Halak, a fellow that G&G had actively and openly tried to run out of town earlier in the season.

Fact is G&G’s Habs never won nothing. Worse, their management motto was ‘let’s try not to lose too badly.’ I’m not the world’s biggest Mike Cammalleri fan but man did he nail it when he let it all hang out that day just before he got shipped off – between periods! – to the Flames. Montreal does have a “losing” culture or, if you prefer, a “loser’s” culture. That’s the way it’s been ever since Gainey took-over.

The mantra has been – ‘struggle to make 8th place, so we can keep the fans and media off our backs for another year.’ No one ever talked about winning the Cup. That’s a pathetic excuse for a team philosophy if you’re the New York Islanders. If you’re the Montreal Effin Canadiens, it’s beyond pathetic. It’s a slap in the face to the team’s fans.

But what I heard Thursday morning was something else altogether. Molson, the new kid on the Habs block, talking about winning. Now some are already saying those are empty words but at least he’s saying the right words, something I haven’t much heard since 1993.

“Ownership will accept nothing less than a winning culture in this organization,” said Molson.

Them’s fighting words. And it gets better. Listen to how he describes the Habs culture in recent years.

“The Montreal Canadiens is a storied franchise, often cited as one of the greatest sports organizations in the world. Our 24 Stanley Cups are a testament to this. However the traits that are common to all successful organizations have been lacking in recent years. When one looks to the great organizations of the past or the ones that are performing particularly well currently, the root of their success lies in their consistency and stability.”

With stable owners in place, Molson goes on to suggest the time has come to bring the same stability to the on-ice product.

“It is my responsibility to identify solutions and rebuild the winning culture that this franchise’s fans, its history and its tradition demand.”

Molson wants the Cup. It might be ego on this part. Maybe he wants to go down in history as the guy who brought the Holy Grail back to its rightful home in Montreal. Who cares why he’s doing it. What matters is that he wants to win. And he says he’ll do whatever takes to do it.

Of course, the Habs aren’t out of the woods now by any stretch of the imagination. It’s going to take some time to recover from the G&G mistakes – mistakes named Scott ‘Yikes’ Gomez, Tomas ‘Soft As Cadbury’ Kaberle, Rene ‘Complete Bust’ Bourque. There’s also no getting back the players lost in goofball deals and/or via sheer negligence, like Ryan McDonagh, Mike Ribeiro, Mikhail Grabovski, Mark Streit.

But at least management is finally admitting they messed up badly. That’s the key first step. It’s like the alcoholic admitting he has a problem. You can’t start the cure until you admit you’re sick.

But the worst thing we can do is give Molson a free ride. The culture of the organization has to change. The contempt Gainey and Gauthier showed for both the fans and the media has to end. Management has to be out there answering questions.

Like Molson did Thursday. That press conference was the polar opposite of the botched media event introducing Randy ‘Parlez-Vous’ Cunneyworth – a press conference where all concerned forgot they were holding the event in a mostly French-speaking city and seemed surprised by every question that came their way. Molson spoke at length in the language of Beliveau and handled every media query without missing a beat.

It was light years from the G&G style – Gainey and Gauthier always acted like they couldn’t believe these peasants (aka journalists) had somehow snuck into the castle to pester them with childish inquiries.

So today there is much room for optimism. Now let’s see if Molson – with help from his new adviser, Serge Savard - takes advantage of this great opportunity. I for one am jumping back on the bandwagon. You should too.

 

Who’s coaching the Habs right now?

You might well answer ‘Randy Cunneyworth’ and you might well be wrong. Do you think Cunneyworth really wants to play the remarkably ineffective Rene ‘I Don’t Parlez-Vous Either’ Bourque more than 19 minutes a game, a stat underlined by The Gazette’s Pat Hickey in his column Tuesday?

No I don’t think so either. I was listening to Michel Villeneuve and Martin McGuire on Les Amateurs de sports Monday night – no I don’t have anything resembling a life’ and McGuire was positing the theory that the Bourque ice-time situation was the clearest indication yet that the real coaching decisions are being made upstairs. In other words, it could well be Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier who’s telling his lame-duck “interim” coach who to play when.

Why? For the same reason Gauthier was telling Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin and later Cunneyworth to play Scott ‘Sigh’ Gomez on the power-play – to justify bad trades made by the firm of G&G (Gainey & Gauthier). Mitch Melnick said it best Monday on TSN 990 – “Rene Bourque is a complete bust!” No can argue with that one.

It’s easy to summarize Bourque’s stats – most games, it’s no shots, no goals, no assists, and no hits. And the best part? The Habs are stuck with this guy for four more years at, according to CapGeek, $3 million next year, $4 million the year after that, then two years at $2.5 million. If he continues to play like this, at that price-tag, he is untrade-able. Another classic Ghost trade.

Did I mention that Cammie got a goal and three points Monday night against the Dallas Stars? Yes that’s the same Cammie Gauthier traded – during the intermission for heaven’s sake – to Calgary in return for Bourque.

So the conspiracy theory goes that Gauthier could be pressuring Cunneyworth to play Bourque more in a desperate bid to get him some points – a strategy that’s clearly backfiring. The same type of theories cropped up with Gomer – because why else would the coaches be giving this non-scorer so much quality ice-time?

There was a hilarious exchange between Hickey and Cunneyworth on Monday after the morning skate at Brossard, which began with Hickey reminding Parlez-Vous that a week ago he called-out Bourque for not pulling his weight on the team.

“He acknowledges he’s been playing like a dog,” says Hickey. “He’s still getting 20 minutes a game. Is it discouraging that he doesn’t seem to have responded to that?”

In one of the funnier moments in recent Habs media scrum history, Cunneyworth actually argues that Ghost Bourque has shown some improvement over the last week. (Eds. note: Maybe Parlez-Vous thought Hickey was talking about Raymond Bourque in his prime!) Cunneyworth says – you can’t make this stuff up! – that Bourque is out there with a little more authority, that he likes the way he’s manoeuvring his body. (Eds. note: It’s not Battle of the Blades Randy.)

“He tries to get as far away from the scrums as possible,” counters Hickey. “This guy is supposed to be a tough guy.”

Hats off to Hickey on this one. Once again, I just feel bad for Cunneyworth here. He’s been put into yet another impossible situation by his bosses – the same bosses who threw him under the bus just hours after they made him coach of the Habs.

A few weeks back, La Presse’s Francois Gagnon had a great piece speculating about management interference with the Habs coaches. He suggested that Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey might have been trying to call the bench-decision shots back when Claude Julien was coaching and that Julien didn’t appreciate that one bit.

Gagnon also has a good column in La Presse Tuesday titled ‘Molson doit congedier Gauthier’. (Eds. note: Clearly Gagnon is an avid reader of Top Shelf With BK.) And you have to think Geoff Molson will follow this sound advice.

But Mr. Molson will not be able to fire Bourque. Or Tomas ‘Soft As Cadbury’ Kaberle. Or Gomez. Actually maybe he will “fire” Gomez – by sending him to ride the bus with the folks toiling in Hamilton.

My point is just that even if he does the right thing and sweeps out the stagnant management, it’s still going to take the new GM and coach at least two if not three seasons to mend the wounds inflicted during the the reign of error known as the G&G years.

 

If the Leafs can hire a real coach, why can’t the Habs?

I was having my Saturday morning cafe au lait watching the Brian Burke/Randy Carlyle press conference – really not half as entertaining as our usual Saturday-morning fare, SpongeBob Squarepants – and I couldn’t help thinking – wow this is kind of neat to watch a presser with an NHL general manager who actually talks like a normal human being. This was quite a novel experience for a Habs fan. I don’t think Burke once used the word ‘Mister’!

Burke can be aggressive on occasion but he replies in what seems a pretty honest, straight-forward way to the journalists’ questions, something that just doesn’t come naturally to Pierre ‘Space Cadet’ Gauthier. Gauthier would’ve been calling them Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Wilson – yes I stole Steve ‘Fagstein’ Faguy’s joke! – and would’ve been lecturing the ink-stained wretches and us fans about why he knows so much better than we do what’s best for the Habs. The Ghost has a disconcerting habit of talking down to people. You heard him on Monday, scolding everyone for their hysteria about the Habs. We’re just one or two pieces away from big-time success and all you journalists and fans can do is whine about being in last place.

Burke tells it like it is.

“I never had a team falling off a cliff like that before,” he said. “I don’t know what happened.”

I mean can you imagine Gauthier or Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey being that honest? Me neither.

But that’s not what I wanted to rant and rave about. No what gets me in all this is that Burke, with his team self-destructing, isn’t afraid to fire his old pal Ron Wilson and reach out for another old friend, Randy Carlyle, who is one highly-esteemed, highly-seasoned coach. Burke and Carlyle won the Cup together in 2007 with the Anaheim Ducks.

So why couldn’t the Canadiens hire a real coach? A coach who’s won something. A coach with serious NHL experience. Not to put a fine point on it, why didn’t the Habs hire Carlyle? The Ducks gave him his pink-slip on December 1 and immediately hired former Washington Capitals bench boss Bruce ‘F-Bomb’ Boudreau. Gauthier – or was it Bob ‘Elvis has not left the building’ Gainey? - axed Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin on Dec. 17 and replaced Marcel Marceau with Randy ‘Parlez-vous’ Cunneyworth.

In other words, the other Randy C. was available Dec. 17. So why didn’t Gauthier/Gainey go for the coach with a Cup ring and a record of 273-182-61?

Instead they went for a guy with no NHL head-coaching experience, no French, and no credibility in the room. And then Canadiens president Geoff Molson threw him under the bus just days later when he released a public letter saying they’d be hiring a bilingual coach next season – code for, thanks for nothing Randy, you’re going straight back to the AHL at the end of this dismal season.

Someone told me recently they’d had a chat with a veteran sports agent who said that the seasoned players have no respect for Cunneyworth because he’s won nothing – and worse, came in as the ‘interim coach’.

So why’d management do that rather than, like Burke, forcefully going out to find the best coach available who might actually help the team win?

I honestly don’t have the answer to that question. But it does perhaps lead us back to the conspiracy theory outlined in my last blog – that the Ghost put in a lame-duck coach so that the firm of G&G could secretly run the bench themselves and desperately try to save their own jobs by playing high-priced underachievers like Scott ‘Big bucks equals loopy grin’ Gomez and Tomas ‘Soft as Cadbury’ Kaberle in the hopes they will produce points and justify the crap deals that brought them here.

I know, it sounds crazy. But once again, if that’s not the reason, you explain to me why Burke goes and gets an A-list coach and the Habs go for an ‘interim coach’ – aka lame-duck coach – with zero experience. We all know how that worked out! (Hint: The Habs are dead-last in the East.)

On that note, enjoy the Randy C. versus Randy C. battle of also-rans tonight!

Today might be a good day to fire Pierre Gauthier

It’s just a thought. Here we are, it’s the start of the weekend, time to uncork a bottle of Red Stripe, order in some food, and watch the game. We’re all in a good mood, right?

Exactly. There’s only one problem. The game is Montreal-Washington and, let’s be honest here, this ain’t a meeting at the summit. This is whatever you’d call the opposite of a meeting at the summit. Today us Habs fans woke up to something few of us have ever experienced – the Habs are right at this exact second – at 6:40 p.m. Friday – dead last in the East.

That’s right, they’re officially cellar-dwellers. 15th place. 28th in the 30-team league. The Caps are doing only marginally better. They’re in 10th place in the East, only three points out of 8th. But they’re on a big-time skid, having lost the last three and five of the past six.

When did the Habs last finish at the bottom of the standings? Someone, I think it was Richard Labbe from La Presse, tweeted earlier this week to suggest this has not happened since the ’30s. To state the obvious – this is not good. Hell it’s a freakin’ disaster.

So why not toss Ghost Gauthier overboard tonight? I think the idea has some merit. First off, you fire Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier and he won’t be able to do any more damage to the team between now and the trade deadline.

You don’t think he can do damage? You don’t remember the Tomas ‘Soft as Cadbury’ Kaberle trade? We are stuck with a guy for three years for way too much money and he’s the kind of player who just drags a team down to his heart-less level. Did you see Eric Staal stroll by him the other day to score on Carey ‘What Me Worry’ Price? Every GM in the league – and most every hockey fan – knew Kab was a disaster. Every GM that is except Gauthier and his sidekick – or is it his boss? – Bob ‘What About Bob’ Gainey.

So get rid of him and you’ll save the Habs from trading away Andrei ‘Where’s the Party?’ Kostitsyn for a sack of pucks, only to see AK46 come to Ryder-like life with another smarter team.

The other good thing about setting the Ghost free tonight is it’ll give the folks at TSN, who’re already on hyper-caffeinated pre-trade-deadline overdrive, something to talk about over the weekend.

But the real reason you should give Gauthier his pink slip – and what the heck give one to Bob ‘Elvis Has Not Left the Building’ Gainey while you’re at it – is that the Canadiens are in LAST PLACE in the Eastern Conference today. That’s not just unacceptable. It’s tragic.

The quest for mediocrity has to end now! Actually how about we trade Gauthier for Leafs GM Brian Burke? I became a huge Burke fan when I saw his comments a couple of weeks back about how he could’ve got the Leafs into the playoffs over the past couple of years by trading young players but that he wants to build a championship team.

“I’m not interested in making the playoffs and getting our asses kicked in the first round,” said Burke.

But that’s precisely been the Gainey/Gauthier philosophy in a nutshell. Let’s just squeak into the post-season and we’ll get the fans and media off our backs for another season. Earth to Habs Central – this is what’s called a loser’s philosophy. Cammie was right on that count. This team has been trying not to lose for years now rather than trying to win.

Remember that year when Saku ‘I Know I Was Never a First-Line Centre’ Koivu said, at the start of the season, that the Habs wouldn’t be winning the Cup. He was just reflecting the vibe at head office. Keeps the expensive suds flowing, keep the even more expensive tickets selling, and everything will be okay.

So fire Gauthier now. Please. And let’s bring in new management that will think outside the box. Outside the loser’s box that is.

Here is a classic Seinfeld clip that oh so perfectly captures the spirit of the past couple of decades of Habsdom (courtesy of my Twitter pal Paul Wong).

Why wait? Fire Gauthier now!

How the mighty have fallen. Can you imagine having legendary Habs GM Sam Pollock come out and apologize for making some bone-headed decisions that cost the Canadiens dearly? Exactly. No, what you could much more easily imagine is Pollock coming out to talk about how good it felt to win yet another Stanley Cup.

But flash-forward to 2011 and you have Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier standing in front of the gang of ink-stained wretches looking more and more like, appropriately, a ghost, and dejectedly trying to make amends for the mess he’s created.

“We’re disappointed and we’re sorry if we offended anybody by hiring someone who is not bilingual right now,” said Gauthier. “But when you’re in the middle of the season and you’re trying to effect change and you’re having the difficulties we were having, you evaluate all your options. We felt the best option at this time was to work from within the organization….but having a bilingual coach of the Montreal Canadiens is very important and it will be something that will be part of our decision going forward.”

A couple of things right off the bat. Gauthier shouldn’t be apologizing. He shouldn’t have hired a unilingual coach in the first place. If he knows it’s wrong now, he should’ve known it was wrong a couple of weeks back. The damage that decision has caused to the Habs is impossible to measure.

But I think it’s fair to say it’s the worst move by a Canadiens GM in the past 25 years. And that’s saying something, given that it tops trading Chris Chelios, Patrick Roy, and John Leclair and Eric Desjardins (in the same era-changing deal!), just to name a few horrific moments in the past couple of decades of shoddy Canadiens management. That decision alone should’ve been reason enough to fire Mr. Gauthier.

Then there’s the small detail that Gauthier, on Monday, basically threw coach Randy Cunneyworth under the bus. As Jack Todd points out in yet another blockbuster column, Gauthier’s belated apology saws off the plank behind Cunneyworth. So now the over-priced, under-achieving players and the fans know for sure that Cunneyworth won’t be back next year.

Well actually we always knew that because Gauthier made that clear from day-one by naming him ‘interim’ coach. There have been a lot of coaching changes in the NHL this season but only one GM couldn’t step up to the plate and find a real new coach and resorted to hiring a lame-duck interim guy instead.

But the real reason Canadiens president Geoff Molson should fire Gauthier sooner rather than later is that the Ghost can do so much long-term damage if Molson leaves him in charge of the keys to the Habs for a few more months. The scary thing is that at this stage, Gauthier will do anything to save his butt.

Why did he sign Josh Gorges to a pricey six-year contract on Sunday? Because he was set to give his mid-season briefing to the media troops on Monday and he wanted to try to deflect the heat on his disastrous record by talking about Gorges. But is it a good deal? No. I like Gorges but six years is ridiculous and it still doesn’t solve the Habs No. 1 problem – they don’t have an A+ D-man to replace Andrei Markov.

You like the Tomas ‘Cadbury’ Kaberle deal any better? Montreal has two-and-a-half more years on his contract, paying Kab over $4 million a year. And what’s he done for us? He has seven assists and is -3 on 10 games, and he has done nothing to help the team’s loser power-play.

You really want Gauthier with his sweaty hands on the Bell Centre hotline as we move toward the trading deadline and there are huge decisions to make? When you think about it for more than a few seconds, you realize there is no possible logical reason for Molson to wait any longer. In fact, maybe it’s time for Mr. Molson to not-so-politely tell the Ghost to take a hike and come do the GM job himself. Just a thought.