Joyce on Canadiens: Habs lose again with trade
Posted January 13, 2012 2:43 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Michael Cammalleri is out of Montreal because he wasn’t on message.
And with the Canadiens this gawd-awful season, the message is always things as management would like them to be, not things as they truly are.
“We prepare for our games like losers,” Cammalleri told the media in the Canadiens dressing room Wednesday. “We play like losers. So it’s no wonder why we lose.”
That was about as far from the required script as you could possibly stray and there was only one possible outcome: Cammalleri had to be traded.
And he was, to Calgary along with a goaltender Karri Ramo (who’s in Russia) and a fifth-round pick in this year’s draft. In return Montreal, winds up with forwards Rene Bourque and Patrick Holland along with a second-round draft pick in 2013.
Cammalleri is halfway through a five-year, $30-million contract that he signed as a free agent in 2009 and he was one of the Canadiens’ best players during their run to the Eastern Conference final in 2010. Even if Cammalleri doesn’t improve on his ordinary play so far this season, even if he doesn’t make his way back to the 39-goal form of his contract year in his first turn in Calgary, the Flames come away with the best player (by far) in the trade.
This is to say that the Canadiens are losers again. In a delicious irony, the winner to emerge from the latest tempest in Montreal’s gawd-awful season is Cammalleri, the one who waxed about losing.
There had to be a trade and Canadiens GM Pierre Gauthier kept the suspense going for as long as he could, which turned out to be about 40 minutes longer than most insiders expected. Gauthier had Cammalleri pulled off the ice at the end of the second period in Boston Thursday night. By the time his by-then former teammates got back to the dressing room after a 2-1 loss to the Bruins, Cammalleri had taken a last stick of gum off a table in the Canadiens’ dressing room and had been bundled into a taxi for a safe house in advance of making his way to Calgary.
There’s no knowing whether Cammalleri’s name had been taken down from his stall in the visiting dressing room before the game’s end. That would require a call to the Canadiens and if they deigned to provide an answer it would have to be an unlikely case of message intersecting with truth to deserve publication.
Cammalleri is insisting that he didn’t want the Canadiens to trade him. His agent Ian Pulver is singing background to the same tune. And Gauthier did his best to seem dumbfounded at the mere suggestion that he would deal Cammalleri to Calgary because the veteran’s dressing-room confessional had him on the wrong side of management.
“No, not at all,” Gauthier said. “I didn’t make a big deal about all that. There’s emotion around the team, somebody says something, I’d rather see emotion than people that don’t care … He never asked to be traded or anything. He’s part of the team and he cares a lot. That’s why he made those comments.”
For our purposes, Gauthier’s comments will constitute the NHL’s laugh test the rest of the season — at least until Montreal’s front office tries another damage-control gambit, which could be days or even hours away.
In the pages of Sportsnet magazine this week, I wrote about the Canadiens’ descent from their former glories and suggested that they just don’t matter anymore. Some readers will take issue with the screed and protest about my disparaging Les Glorieux. Maybe they’ll be riled by my suggestion that the Canadiens have fallen from the once unchallenged No. 1 among the Original Six to No. 6 in terms of relevance. Maybe it will be my opinion that the franchise today is closer to Columbus than it is to Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Detroit or, horrors, Toronto. Or maybe it will be my argument that the Canadiens are more concerned with the packaging of history rather than dealing with the present and preparing for the future — that this is a franchise of appearances, not realities.
Your Honour, we’d like to call our next witness, Mr. Michael Cammalleri, formerly of Montreal.
Cammalleri’s statements leave no doubt that the players have no confidence in management in the person of Pierre Gauthier. Randy Cunneyworth, who was promoted to the head coach’s job when Gauthier fired the blameless Jacques Martin, hasn’t lost the team — by Cammalleri’s characterization, Cunneyworth never had the team to lose.
It’s a season when what could go wrong has gone wrong: the team’s best defenceman Andrei Markov looks like he won’t play anytime soon, if ever, and captain Brian Gionta is shelved with a biceps tear until next fall.
Things going wrong happens. You can accept a black cloud hovering over a team for a patch. That’s not the problem with the Canadiens circa 2012, though. No, it’s the fact that management, Gauthier, has made a mess of everything he has picked up.
It’s hard to imagine how he could have handled the challenges worse. He scape-goated assistant coach Perry Pearn and Martin. He installed a unilingual Anglophone, Cunneyworth, to work the bench and blew off questions from the French media, saying “languages can be learned.” He over-committed and over-paid Markov in the off-season despite his history of injury. And now he traded Cammalleri for short change. The value in that trade is the second-round draft choice in 2013 coming over to Canadiens.
Montreal fans can take consolation that Gauthier won’t be around to make that pick.
