What the Puck: Patrick Roy and the polarization of Canadian fans

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A friend asked me this week how I stay interested during this hellish Canadiens season in which the team is destined to finish near the bottom of the National Hockey League standings.

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I said it’s easy. It’s just that the drama isn’t on ice, it’s behind the scenes, and wow, it’s exploding.

Let’s start with the main story, which is the search for a general manager to replace Marc Bergevin by the recently appointed executive vice president of hockey operations, Jeff Gorton. The most talked about potential candidate is, in my opinion, the one who is least likely to get the job.

That would be former Habs goalie Patrick Roy. At the end of last week, I was on Tony Marinaro’s podcast and we were both saying how shocked we were that Canadians hadn’t even bothered to do a single interview with Casseau. Over the weekend, news broke that the controversial star had been interviewed by the team’s top brass last week, yet during a press conference on Thursday, he denied having been interviewed.

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When he finally confessed, he told TVA Sports’ Renaud Lavoie that he had lied because he wasn’t sure he could make the information public. What a joker. Another former star goalkeeper for the Canadiens, Jose Teodoro , had a good line in his Monday column in Le Journal de Montréal, calling it DG Académie, a reference to the hit Quebec reality show Star Académie. (DG is short for directeur général, French for general manager).

And Théodore is right. It’s like Star Académie or Survivor. If you were looking for a new GM in Los Angeles, hardly anyone would pay attention to you. But here is front-page news.

The funniest wrinkle is that the French-speaking media and a good portion of the French-speaking fan base think that Roy would be a great fit to land the job. Meanwhile, most of us can’t think of a worse candidate than a mic-obsessed hothead like Roy. My take on Day 1 has been that Canadiens president Geoff Molson will never sign No. 33. Roy is too wild card for a simple manager like Molson.

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I think the best candidate is Émilie Castonguay. She has it all. She has a BA in finance from the University of Niagara, a BA in law from the Université de Montréal, and is one of the NHL’s first female player agents, with a client roster that includes budding Quebec star Alexis Lafrenière.

It’s an unconventional choice, but remember what Gorton said when the search began: “Maybe it’s a person who doesn’t have a lot of experience as a general manager, but what else do they have that they could bring to the table? Let’s go find someone. that maybe it’s a bit out of the box, that it helps us move on and complements me ”.

From Bergevin to Los Angeles: It had been rumored for months that Bergevin’s old friend, LA Kings president Luc Robitaille, would give him a job, and he did. Over the weekend, it was announced that Robitaille had hired former Habs GM as a senior advisor to Kings GM Rob Blake.

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The move has already sparked controversy in Los Angeles, with Lisa Dillman, lead writer for The Athletic in Los Angeles, wondering how the organization would be so happy to give a job to the guy who signed on Logan Mailloux’s writing, who was fined in Sweden. for sharing an intimate photo of a woman without her consent.

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Dillman’s tweet about hiring Bergevin included a link to a story in The Athletic last summer by Arpon Basu with the headline: Montreal Canadiens should be ashamed of their wrong and irresponsible draft decision.

The rehabilitation of Paul Wilson: All the local media applauded Molson’s decision to hire Chantal Machabée as the team’s vice president of communications, replacing Wilson. He was fired the same day as Bergevin and assistant general manager Trevor Timmins.

But some are coming out of nowhere in the media and on social media, like my friend Jean-Michel Dufaux, to defend Wilson’s legacy, suggesting that Molson unfairly defamed him. He applauded TVA Sports host Jean-Charles Lajoie for defending Wilson.

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That’s absurd. When Wilson was hired in 2018, I pointed out in this column that he was the last member of the old man’s club and the last guy who could bring transparency to the team’s public relations department. He had been in the corporate media business for a couple of decades and was very close to the Molson brothers.

And I was right. Molson had promised transparency and instead we got more obfuscation, culminating in a crucial videoconference from Molson on Mailloux’s election last summer that blocked many media outlets. Machabée’s hiring is great news because she is a seasoned hockey journalist and broadcaster who I don’t think dreams of trying to muzzle the media.

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