Joyce on Canadiens: Getting rid of Gauthier
Posted March 29, 2012 2:30 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Pierre Gauthier’s time at the helm of the Montreal Canadiens was relatively brief but his legacy will endure, all for the worst.
It might seem harsh, but Gauthier’s work deserves criticism and his personal manner scorn.
The end came for Gauthier without ceremony, just a couple of lines of the Canadiens’ website: Pierre Gauthier has been relieved from his duties. The search for a new General Manager is underway.
There wouldn’t have been much of a point in going into excruciating detail about the inevitable move by the franchise’s proprietor Geoff Molson. That it coincided with Montreal’s mathematical elimination from the playoff race is a mere footnote. The Canadiens have been effectively out of the race since Christmas. It is the worst team in the modern history of the Canadiens and would be the worst in the league if it weren’t for the Columbus Blue Jackets (and perhaps the plummeting Toronto Maple Leafs).
“We felt the direction of the club needed to change from a hockey standpoint,” Molson said, at last coming around to the thinking of the majority in the team’s fan base.
At the start of the season the Montreal roster looked to be decent enough to make it into the playoffs if not contend for a top spot in the conference. But the rot ran deep through the team from Day 1 this season and Gauthier was willing to throw anyone under the bus.
It started, improbably, with the firing of assistant coach Perry Pearn, whom Gauthier scapegoated for Montreal’s poor play on special teams. Pearn’s relationship with Gauthier dated back to their time in Ottawa in the ’90s, but no matter. At some point across 15 years or so, Gauthier realized that Pearn wasn’t much of a coach and he had to go.
So did coach Jacques Martin shortly thereafter. Martin utterly lacked charisma but he had managed to squeeze all the juice out of an ordinary roster the previous two seasons in the playoffs. It was hard to imagine another coach getting more out of the Canadiens than Martin did. Again, their relationship dated back 15 years or so but no matter. Gauthier tied a can to Martin even though the GM didn’t have a qualified and experienced head coach to fill the void.
Gauthier bumped up Randy Cunneyworth from assistant to the top bench job — you couldn’t really call it a promotion in these circumstances. Cunneyworth didn’t speak French and had no previous ties to the organization, which only poured gasoline on the pyre. The Montreal media eviscerated Gauthier on the language issue but the GM blithely dismissed it as an issue, the way he dismissed any questions or criticisms of his moves in the front office. In some ways, the issue of Cunneyworth’s lack of French fluency distracted from more substantial issues, namely that he didn’t have any NHL head coaching experience and that he wasn’t given much to work with. Ultimately, he had his knees taken out from under him when Gauthier and Molson declared that a Francophone coach would be coaching the team at the start of the next season. .
Under Cunneyworth’s direction, the players bailed. In January Mike Cammalleri infuriated Gauthier by telling the truth and stating the obvious, that the team was unprepared for games and had a losing attitude. When Gauthier traded him to Calgary a day after the GM got wind of it, Cammalleri had to feel not like he was traded but rather emancipated.
The team Gauthier leaves behind is worse than the one he inherited from Bob Gainey when the Hockey Hall of Famer stepped down a couple of years ago. In the salary cap era, NHL teams can’t afford to make mistakes with big contracts and Gainey had made a monumental if not insurmountable gaffe with Scott Gomez’s. Gauthier managed to compound the error by giving a hefty and lasting commitment to the oft-injured Andrei Markov, a deal that had other GMs in the league shaking their heads. But even if you didn’t factor the Markov deal into the equation, the team is poorer now than it was before simply by virtue of a pervasive malaise in the Habitants’ room.
Molson trotted out the usual banalities at his presser Thursday. Yup, he even mentioned “the storied past” and “a storied franchise.” And yup, he invoked the 24 Stanley Cups and all the nostalgia in the Canadiens’ vast reserve. But Molson had no answers for the present and most pressing question: Who succeeds Gauthier and Gainey, who is also out of his post as an advisor to management? There’s talk about Patrick Roy coming into the fold but though he might work out behind the bench he doesn’t seem to be a fit in the front office. Some will drop Serge Savard’s name and he’s done the job before. But mining the past again might only be good P.R. and buy a few news cycles of relief. The hockey man who would take on arguably the toughest job in hockey at indisputably the worst possible time will work from one advantage: Even if he’s an unknown, from Day 1 people will like him more than the ultimate cold fish, Pierre Gauthier.