I don’t like losing Erik Cole

O.K. I can see that on paper this looks like a good trade. It’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny, as Grandmaster Flash said so many years ago. Erik Cole is traded to Dallas for Michael Ryder and Montreal saves a shite load of dough.

Cole has two more years on his contract, at $4.5 million a year. Ryder’s contract is up this year. So next season, the Habs have $4.5 million more to spend and they’ve also now got another $4.5 million the next season. That’s great for the team. Ryder will only cost them $3.5 million and they don’t have to keep him after this year.

So it’s a smart move on the part of Marc Bergevin. Folks were calling in to TSN 690 to say that Bergevin fleeced the Stars and their trusted advisor Bob Gainey. And I’d be happy to see Gainey lose out on this one after all the damage he’s done to this team. And the Stars probably are the losers here.

But I have a bad feeling on this one. I really like Erik Cole. I know he’s had a crap start to the year but he always has crap starts. But he’s a character guy on a team that doesn’t have many characters guys.

Like you tell me who gets up in the dressing room and tells the guys what’s what. After that horrendous 6-0 loss to the Leafs, it was, so we’re told, Cole who rallied the boys, by new-media no less. Like who gives that pep talk if it isn’t Cole? Markov? I don’t think so. Gorges? No.

And I love the way Cole plays. You gotta love a guy who never stick handles. He just barrels his way down on the right boards, smashing his way through the opposing players and ends up scoring a bunch of goals.

Hey I like Ryder too. I have a soft spot for Newfoundland. My brother lives in St. John’s and he’s living at my house right now with his pure laine Newfoundland family and so I’m happy to have a guy from The Rock on Les Habs. And he did score 30 goals a couple of times for Les Boys.

But I’ll miss Erik Cole, that’s all I’m saying.

And you know what? Why the hell do you make a major trade when you’re in first place in your conference? That’s effin crazy stuff. That’s almost Gauthier-like nuttiness. There I said it. I have bad feeling on this. Man I hope I’m wrong.

 

And so the Habs line-juggling begins

Michel Therrien. Courtesy of RDS.

I was just listening to CBC Radio – it does happen sometimes, in spite of what Shawn Apel thinks (which is that I’m addicted to rock radio and jock radio) – and there was my pal Andie Bennett telling Sue Smith about the new lines designed to cure all the Habs woes. Sue, by the way, who sounded like she still hadn’t recovered from Saturday night’s massacre on Habs Ave.

So it appears kindly ole coach Michel Therrien has matched the wonder kids – Brendan Gallagher and Alex Galchenyuk – with Max ‘Bite-Sized’ Pacioretty, while Brandon Prust is demoted to the No. 1 underachieving line with Erik ‘Can I retire now?’ Cole and David ‘I’m acting like I’ve already retired’ Desharnais.

You like the changes? No I don’t either. That Brendan/Brandon line was a good one – from the name on down, with Prust providing the muscle to protect the young skill guys, and they were always dangerous. They will probably still find the back of the net with Patch but what has me more worried is the so-called first line (that’s obviously no longer the first line).

Cole has four points after 11 games and mostly looks like he just can’t compete at anywhere near last year’s level. M. Desharnais isn’t much better, with just five points so far this season. And now they’re gonna be playing with a less talented guy on the wing.

Well you can’t blame Therrien for trying to do something. You look at Saturday night’s shell-shocking and you can’t just sit there. But I fear that the team will return to the bad old days when the lines changed from shift to shift as the bench-meister desperately tries to find a magic formula to transform a just-OK team into something more.

To return to my favourite theme (of the month), is Ryan White really the only player on this team that deserves to be benched? You could probably bench any Hab after Saturday night.

What Therrien really has to do is motivate a club that’s looked a little like last year’s sad-sack team for at least part of the last three games (and all of the last game). Last time he got mad, he turned off the 24CH cameras (as he admitted on Tout le monde en parle). He should actually tell the boys he’ll leave the RDS cameras in the room and running while he chews them out next time they suck out the joint. Then the whole country can watch them facing the wrath of Therrien. Hey Michel, consider this suggestion a free gift from a Habs fan happy to do anything to help bring a couple of points the team’s way.

The wheels are off the Habs bus…..

And the million-dollar question is – can Coach Therrien get the bus repaired by the time the Habs lace-up Tuesday in sunny Florida to face the Lightning?

Saturday night’s 6-0 humiliation at the hands of the Leafs leaves the Canadiens in seventh place in the east and Toronto in fifth. Worse Montreal is just two points out of 11th place. Worse yet that’s three straight losses for Les Boys, making them just about as mediocre and uninspiring as that faux reality show 24CH.

If only Michel Therrien had followed my advice and let Ryan White play Saturday! Before you fire off an angry email, that last line was my attempt at a little gallows humour. Though even the new tougher Habs seemed small compared to these Leafs and when wee Brendan Gallagher has to get into the fisticuffs, well you know you have a problem in the tough-guy department. (Though you have to love this rookie. He crashes the net, scores beautiful goals, is willing to go mano-a-mano with much bigger guys. He’s effin amazing.)

But other than Gallagher’s spirit, there were simply no positive to take home from this Nightmare on Canadiens Ave. Erik Cole looked horrible. Andrei Markov made big mistakes. Subban had the big shots but they just couldn’t get beyond Optimus Reim. (To be honest, James Reimer was fairly spectacular, particularly in the second when he faced 20 shots, many of them quite dangerous. Montreal out-shot T.O. 37-27 and Reimer got a shutout so clearly he was on his game.)

At the other end, Carey Price was just ordinary. Oh and why did Therrien keep him in when it was 4-zip and the Habs were going nowhere fast? That’s one that folks will be talking about in the coming days, just like they second-guessed his poor choice of snipers in the shootout Thursday in Buffalo. Is the Therrien honeymoon over? To ask the question is to answer it.

Leave it to ‘What Me Worry’ Price to put it in perspective. Mr. Chill Out was his usual West Coast surfer dude personality in the room after the loss, saying: “That was a tough one but we can’t let it get us down.”

He’s right but I preferred Josh Gorges’s anger. He was just livid and maybe that’s what these Habs need to be. Did you hear what he said about Grabovski (apparently) biting Pacioretty?

“If you get in there, stand up for yourself, be a man, drop your gloves, and you’ll have respect. But bite somebody? That doesn’t belong in our league.”

I like that. As John Lydon memorably sang with PiL, “Anger is an energy” and heaven knows this team needs a little energy right now.

If there’s a silver lining here (and there isn’t really but let’s stretch reality), it’s that the Leafs proved to be their usual classless selves late in this game. Did you see Don Cherry’s best friend Colton Orr trying to end Plekanec’s career by going knee-to-knee? And then there’s Michael Kostka pounding out the much smaller Gallagher. Yeah you’re a tough guy! Orr also takes a run at Brian Gionta, who’s the same pint-size as Gallagher. Then there’s Grabovski doing his vampire routine. Franchement. It is nice to be reminded why we loathe these Leafs so much.

But if the silver lining is that we’re reminded we hate the Loafs, that’s not much of a silver lining. It was brutal.

Let’s give the last word to Bob Dylan.

“She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all.”

You need it in simpler terms?

#FAIL

Erik Cole might retire

Yeah, you’ve got one more thing to thank Gary ‘I hate hockey’ Bettman for.

In an interview with La Presse hockey scribe Marc Antoine Godin, Cole – who just might’ve been the Habs best player during that hellish last season – said he may just hang up his skates for good if this labour dispute continues to keep hockey in limbo.

“If the conflict keeps dragging on, I’m going to have to ask myself if I want to keep being part of this thing,” said a remarkably bitter-sounding Cole. “If the whole season is cancelled and that its return looks uncertain, I’m going to look toward Europe or maybe just simply retire. In any case, I’m going to think seriously about my future this summer. I’m not going to stay forever at the mercy of the owners.”

(That’s my translation, by the way. Hilariously enough, Cole obviously spoke to M. Godin in the language of Shutt, Godin translated it into the language of Lafleur and now I’m putting Cole’s words back into English.)

Those are fighting words and give you a pretty good sense of just how p.o.’d the players are with Bettman’s hardline union-busting attitude. If Cole were to retire, that would be an unmitigated disaster for the Canadiens given that the Pacioretty-Cole-Desharnais line was about the only good thing the team’s had going for it in the past 12 months.

I love Cole – and so do you. As someone you know might’ve said, Cole brings his lunch-bucket to the rink every night. He’s not the most talented guy – heck I don’t think he even knows how to stick-handle – but he just barrels up the side and bangs through anyone stupid enough to get in his way. And he scores goals, something in short supply on the Habs in the past couple of decades.

(An aside. What the eff is up with that? Why spend 25 years not bothering to go try to find goal-scorers for your team? But I digress. Let’s talk about that another day.)

Cole scored 35 goals and notched 26 assists last season, his first with the Habs, one of the few bright-lights on a seriously psychotic team. The left winger has three years left on his $18 million contract with the Habs.

Is he seriously thinking of retiring? Probably not. Hopefully not. But he did say this and so if you’re a Habs fan, you should be worried.

He also had something interesting to say about Habs owner Geoff Molson.

“I know we have an owner who’d rather see us playing hockey than lock us out,” said Cole.

He went on to say that yes he’d like to see Molson put some pressure on the owners to take a more moderate stance but he quite rightly noted that Bettman has set things up so he doesn’t need to worry about the cooler heads prevailing. He only needs the backing of eight owners and so he can keep the lock-out going indefinitely with the support of a small cabal of extremists.

But Cole was saying what many have been saying for months under their breath – Molson can’t like this lockout one bit. Instead of selling out 41 games at the largest arena in the league, he’s sitting twiddling his thumbs staring at 21,000 empty seats.

 

Can the Canadiens start dreaming of a playoff berth?

Yes they can. Really. I know, I know, I’m supposed to be bitterly negative all day every day but let’s just dream a little dream this morning okay?

The best line on Wednesday night’s Bell Centre Miracle on Ice came from Daybreak mainman Mike Finnerty who said to hairy sportscaster Doug Gelevan, and I paraphrase: A team dressed up as the Canadiens beat the Red Wings at the Bell Centre last night.

Or as the La Presse A1 headline put it – ‘Dr. Canadien et Mr. Hyde’. Who were these masked men Wednesday at the Bell Centre? Surely not the same Habs who’ve looked downright psycho for most of the season, more depressed and neurotic than a roomful of middle-aged journalists. Any how, we’ll take it – a nutsoid 7-2 crushing of the Detroit Red Wings, who just happen to be the team with the most points in the league and who are one of the top candidates to win the Cup.

So should we all be booking the spot for our deck-chair on the parade route – which will, of course, follow the usual route – this June? Uhhhh no. Keep in mind that the Red Wings were in town Tuesday, always a bad idea for visiting clubs, and that led me to wonder aloud on Twitter Wednesday if the Wings weren’t suffering from the Chez Paree effect, nudge nudge, wink wink.

After the game, Wings coach – and former McGill Redmen captain – Mike Babcock said: “I’m not going to look at video on this at all. I’m going to go have a drink, actually.” Which had me thinking that his players may have followed his advice – the night before!

But Montreal has played two consecutive very strong games – against the Red Wings Wednesday and Toronto Saturday, and they played half of a good game against Pittsburgh Friday before reverting to their trademark third-period collapse. Still they collected five out of a possible six points from those three games.

So we can dream. This morning, Montreal has 47 points after 49 games, putting them in 11th place in the East, just eight points behind 8th place Florida Panthers. So they have 33 games left and the rule-of-thumb is that you need 90 points to make the post-season party. That means they need to likely win around 22 of their last 33 games.

Sure it’s a tall order. But if they play like they did the last two games, it might just happen. If that freakin’ amazing Patch-Desharnais-Cole line keeps producing, if Rene ‘Tasse-Toi” Bourque keeps crashing the net, if Carey ‘What Me Worry’ Price keeps his cool between the pipes, if P.K. Subban stops playing like a novice third-liner……in short, if you believe in miracles. Hey a guy can dream, no?

 

Good vibrations, for a change, at the Bell Centre Sunday

Carey Price being interviewed at the Canadiens fan practice. Photo by Brendan Kelly.

It was the Canadiens fan practice and some 15,000 folks schlepped down to the Bell Centre on a chilly Sunday morning to celebrate Nos Habs. You gotta hand it to the Canadiens fans. Here’s the team in the midst of maybe it’s suckiest season in 50 years and 15,000 brave souls are still willing to take some valuable time out of their weekend to cheer on Les Boys. You know what? Habs fans are a classy bunch, in spite of what many people have said over the years.

P.K. Subban, Yannick Webber

Above is my pic of P.K. Subban and Yannick Weber after Subban won the hardest-slapshot contest. What was so cool is that Weber won the contest and when he was being interviewed, he said that he thought P.K. likely had the hardest shot on the team. Subban had not been part of the contest but with the crowd going nuts, chanting ‘P.K. P.K.’, they brought him to shoot and he ended up topping Weber’s score. It was just an unbelievably classy move by Weber.

 

Carey Price in the corridor leading to the ice.

Carey Price did not take to the ice, much to the disappointment of everyone there. My photo shows him waiting in the corridor, just a couple of feet from our seats, prior to being interviewed. He looked remarkably pensive as he watched the action on the ice. He said he wasn’t lacing up as a preventative measure. Report is he was cut near the end of Saturday night’s game in Toronto, likely to his foot. But The Gazette’s Dave Stubbs writes that he is expected to be ready for Wednesday’s game against the Detroit Red Wings and to play in the All-Star game next weekend.

 

Carey Price.

Above is another shot of the moody mystery man that is Carey Price.

 

Hal Gill, Scott Gomez

There you see Hal Gill and Scott ‘Big Bucks = Loopy Grin’ Gomez. I kid you not. As he walked by, the guy right in front of us shouted at Gomer – ‘Hey 14 days Gomez!’, referring to the upcoming one-year anniversary of Mr. Gomez’s last goal in the NHL. Yikes! I’m not sure if Gomez heard it.

 

Brian Gionta

There’s what I think – in my oh-so-objective view – is a pretty cool photo of Habs captain Brian Gionta, who, of course, did not take to the ice at the practice.

 

Lars Eller

There’s my pic of our fave Danish Hab Lars Eller, talking about his win in the skate race. Great skater!

 

Raphael Diaz, Peter Budaj

And there’s Raphael Diaz and Peter Budaj, who were the first two Habs to join the practice, about a half-hour before all of their team-mates. Yeah that’s right, they drew the short straw – they had to get up Sunday morning before everyone elese, following two consecutive-night road games.

 

All in all, it was a real fun morning. There hasn’t been much to cheer about during this hellish Habs season and so it was a blast to just forget about that for a couple of hours and rekindle the love affair between Montreal and our hockey club.

Seeing 15,000 people cheering P.K. Subban, Carey Price and Erik Cole, I was struck by just how much the city cares about its hockey team. We live for the Habs, which is why we’re so upset about how things have gone. But for one winter morning, we forgot all that and once again showed our love for les Canadiens. They say hockey is a religion ’round these parts but that doesn’t even capture the intensity of this love affair. And for the first time in a long, long time, it felt good to be a Habs fan.

 

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.

Jacques Martin had to go but Habs waited too long to fire him

This is very much a good-news/bad-news scenario. The good news? You really need to ask? The great news is that Jacques ‘Mr. Personality’ Martin was finally thrown overboard. He had to go and it seemed in the last couple of weeks that everyone in Montreal except Geoff Molson and Pierre ‘Major Major’ Gauthier knew that.

The bad news is that Molson and Gauthier waited too long to give Marcel Marceau Martin the heave-ho. By waiting, they lost the chance to bring in Kirk Muller to replace the hapless Martin. That was a huge mistake – and you read it here first, it’s a mistake that could well cost Mr. Gauther his job before the season is out. Will Randy Cunneyworth get the job done? Maybe. But he’s hardly the best coaching talent available on the market and he comes in with the stigma of being a longtime pal of Martin’s.

And why did they have to wait so long? It was obvious as early as last spring that Martin was not the man for the job. The Habs could’ve won that series against Boston. Really. You know they could’ve. The Good Guys were up 2-0 – after two games in Boston for heaven’s sake! – and then the team blew it. That’s the Martin story in a nutshell – blowing leads! The Canadiens would go up on the Bruins and go into to the infamous defensive shell that is Trapman Martin’s trademark style.

Then this season starts off and Martin’s first major move is to publicly humiliate Erik Cole, the guy that Ghost Gauthier had gone out to get as his big free-agent acquisition in the summer, finally bringing a bona fide power forward to the team. So what does Martin do? He starts by keeping Cole off the power-play as often as possible and when asked why he’s putting on Mathieu ‘I’m a Nice Guy But I Can’t Score If My Life Depends On It’ Darche instead of Cole, Martin tells the press scrum that Cole’s not good on the PP and Darche is.

The one problem with that logic? Darche has scored three power-play goals in career. Cole has scored 43 PP goals. Also remember the context of that exchange. It was the rookie TSN 990 reporter Jessica Rusnak who asked the question and tearing a page from the macho sports rulebook, Martin openly mocked the female journalist. Even worse, he was dead wrong. That was around the same time that Martin said that Cole was no “saviour”. So what was that all about? For some reason Coach Martin was in a battle of the egos with a guy who, by the way, just happens to be leading the team in goal-scoring. Pathetic.

Then there was Martin’s obnoxious habit of blaming every defeat on the “youngsters”. Marc Antoine Godin has a good piece in La Presse Saturday that begins with the question: ‘Where would the Canadiens be without the David Desharnais line?’ And Godin is oh-so-right. Cole has 12 goals, Max Pacioretty has 11 and it could be argued that diminutive centre David Desharnais might be the team’s best forward. Desharnais is a rookie and Patch has yet to play a full season with the Habs. So it’s the kids who are the problem Mr. Martin? Meanwhile Brian Gionta and Mike Cammalleri are firing blanks and look like they’d rather be playing on any other team.

But the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when Martin took his anti-youth stance to the extreme Thursday night and benched hometown hero Louis Leblanc immediately following the rookie’s first-ever goal in the National Hockey League. What a classy move! It was just goofy. Fact was the veterans weren’t scoring and Leblanc could’ve done as much as anyone else to light a spark under the Habs and maybe tie that game up against the Flyers. In the end, the Habs lost.

Fact was the Martin “system” just wasn’t working. The team is languishing in last place in its division and shows a frightening tendency to blow leads. He was just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here he was helming a young team and yet he had absolutely no faith in anyone who isn’t a grizzled veteran. He’s a big believer in trapping the fans into a sleepy haze and yet this is a team just exploding at the seams with wild offensive talent. I mean look at P.K. Subban this year. The guy doesn’t know what to do. He takes the puck behind his own net, begins revving up for one of his patented zigzags up the ice and then he realizes Mr. Personality has told him he has to stay home. So he stops, thinks for a second, and usually ends up losing the puck right in front of Carey Price.

So firing Martin is a good first step in the right direction. Now let’s see how Mr. Cunneyworth fares, starting with tonight’s bout with the New Jersey Devils. I’m just hoping Pete Townsend didn’t get it right all those years ago when he penned the classic line: ‘Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.’

 

What’s up with giving Erik Cole so little ice time?

So Erik Cole played just over a minute on the power play in the Canadiens first game. What’s that all about? Is Jacques Martn pulling a Mario Tremblay macho move to try to let Cole know who’s boss?
Cos why else would the coach risk irritating the Habs star off-season acquisition in his first game with the team?
Word is that Cole was moved to the first power-play line at practice today so maybe someone had a word with M. Martin.
– Brendan