What the Puck: Kudos to Molson for cleaning the Canadiens house

Habs president Geoff Molson did the right thing by firing general manager Marc Bergevin and hiring Jeff Gorton as head of hockey operations.

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Geoff Molson did the right thing. He fired Marc Bergevin. And Trevor Timmins. And Paul Wilson.

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I’ve had some tough words for the Montreal Canadiens president and CEO over the past few years, so when he steps up and makes a tough decision, that’s just what it takes, I’m happy to congratulate him fully.

But it gets better. Molson also made an even tougher decision by signing Jeff Gorton to a long-term contract with the organization as executive vice president of hockey operations. As Molson explained during his hour-long press conference Monday morning, this will be a two-headed hockey department with Gorton as executive vice president and someone who speaks English and French as general manager.

This is nothing short of a revolution for an organization that, for decades, has insisted that the person running hockey operations be bilingual. Molson’s move here is deft sleight of hand. Gorton will be the chief of hockey operations. The new GM will have his say, but when the time comes, it will be the older guy who makes the final decision, and that older guy was born and raised outside of Boston. Chew that one for a second.

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Molson landed a hockey person who he believes is the best for the job, not the best bilingual candidate. That is a radical change. And I think it’s a good thing. Gorton can then hire Mathieu Darche or Martin Madden or Patrick Roy or someone else as general manager and they can communicate with the media in the Beliveau language. It’s a win-win situation for the team and Molson deserves all the credit for doing it, even if some of the usual suspects in the French-speaking media are likely to criticize him for it.

Molson said it was time to start over, and it is.

Now in the Bergevin era, or should I say Bergevin “mistake”. He was Molson’s first appointed GM after he led a consortium to buy the CH in 2009 and picked the wrong guy. Bergevin made some good trades: the best was the one that sent Max Pacioretty to Las Vegas and gave the Habs Nick Suzuki and Tomas Tatar, and the second best was the Chicago Blackhawks road robbery that gave the team of Bergevin, Phillip Danault.

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But Bergevin never had a coherent plan. He improvised and made one panic movement after another. He got into endless male fights with his star players (Pacioretty, PK Subban, Andrei Markov, Alexander Radulov) and, most significantly, inherited a team in 2012 with a superb core and just screwed it up. That group included Carey Price, Subban, Brendan Gallagher, and Pacioretty. That team should have done some damage.

His lack of planning is best summed up in the Subban for Shea-Weber trade in 2016. That was a win-now move and the team under Weber’s leadership stayed in lose mode now until these past playoffs. And the 2021 playoff race was a fluke, period. Even Molson hinted at that Monday morning, noting how terrible the regular season was last year and how terrible the first four games of Toronto’s series were.

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Bergevin also showed blind loyalty to Timmins and that was a fatal mistake. I loved the fact that Molson said Monday that Timmins had a No. 3 overall pick twice and that neither worked. Boom! That is a triggered offense. So was the writing of Logan Mailloux. Bergevin and Timmins thought that people could live with the team that wrote a young man who had been charged and fined in Sweden for abusive behavior towards a woman. That deeply embarrassed Molson and I think it was the last straw.

Let’s give the new regime a chance. Molson said Gorton will be in town in a couple of days and will soon find out just how tough the local media can be. What’s encouraging is that Gorton did a great job orchestrating a quick mini rebuild with the New York Rangers and that’s just what it takes ici.

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The downside is that you are inheriting a Bergevin team that is in shambles. It’s a team loaded with a bunch of terrible long-term contracts for players who are seriously depreciating in value, particularly Price, Gallagher and Jeff Petry. Those agreements will make reconstruction difficult.

But no one said it would be easy.

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Reference-montrealgazette.com

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