Why The Canadiens Lose

I don't know the definitive answer to this question. But I do have a feeling it is a little more subtle than two too many games in September.

Did the Canadiens preseason hurt the team? It's conceivable. But one then thinks back two years earlier, when even more players had to be integrated and a new coach had to set up a new system and notices a team that battled, had two centres scoring and a defensive scheme that put their goalie in the elite of the stats class.


Generally, I think we as fans have to take a cold shower and admit some things about this group of players that the organization has assembled:


1) They are not good enough to play the systems they have been asked to play
When they are asked to play with more energy than the other team, their lack of physical fitness is visible. Line changes are slow as exhausted players walk to the bench. This fitness thing takes a long time to correct, but how long?

Also, let's admit that they can't make up for fitness gaps with skill. There are now players that try on some moves, but just as often as not the puck is lost in the process. And game in, game out, we see how the key to the slot scoring positions elude the forwards on the ice.


2) The systems are stock systems, not custom

It's easy to lay all the blame at the players' feet. But the fact of the matter is that a coach, with a shelf life of two to three seasons, has to face up to the reality that over a tenure, 70% of the players he inherits will make up his core.

We talk about the coach's system and how the coach is trying to impose the way he thinks on the team. But have we yet seen a coach figure out a smart way to use Kostitsyn's slow, big frame with heavy accurate shot? Have we seen in two years a coach who takes advantage of Gomez's zone gaining ability, or Subban's? No. Not fully.

Rather we see the coach restraining or reforming these pieces in order to fit a set mould.

It can work, but it's the more difficult way to do things, and it takes time, and it results in seasons like this one.


3) There's not a star in sight

With all due respect to Tomas Plekanec, Carey Price, PK Subban and Erik Cole, the Canadiens simply do not possess the star power that probably a fair 20 teams in the league do (16 make the playoffs...). There's no natural goalscorer, there's no clutch playmaker, there's no one who turns a game with any regularity, there's no showstopper.

It's worse when one looks through the list of futures. It's possible that Gallagher is a diamond in the rough, but beyond him, it seems like a long list of "more of the same".

What's there is a lot of competent players who are willing to work hard, but who are prone to losing if a bounce goes the wrong way.


4) There's a lot of dead weight

A team of hard working competent players can win many Cups in a row with the right coach. But something that will limit these efforts (and would even limit a Gretzky led team) is players who don't really contribute.

For me, there are too many players for whom you could say a good game is getting more attempts (on net or not) than their equivalents on the other team and just mitigate the damage. I don't need to name the players, we've all got a feeling for this.

Having too many players that are net equals at their best asks those with more skill and talent to outdo their counterparts (the skilled and talented of the other teams. And remembering that some other teams have legitimate superstars, over a season this becomes a very heavy burden for the players it's being asked of.


5) Not enough commitment to development

This is probably the most unforgivable aspect of their neuroses. It is free to develop players well, it costs nothing towards the cap.

The Canadiens, with their warped vision of how much they stand apart from the other 29 franchises in the league make things awfully complicated for themselves when they jettison players for reasons not related to hockey.

A commitment to development for me would mean investing in those players the organization has invested their scouting and picks on. Not only on-ice development, but also off-ice. And importantly, not to expect that minimal effort will achieve enormous changes. One need only think of Mike Ribeiro to understand my meaning. A clear talent who liked to party and was acting up. Too much trouble for the team he was shipped out. And while the addition by subtraction probably paid for short term gains, the loss in quality could be seen as soon as months later.

Through some miracle, the Canadiens have managed to pick a lot of the pieces they needed to compete over the years. But a fear of hard work, or whatever it is, on the part of the organizations overall development mechanism has stripped it of scorers, playmakers and gamesavers over the years.


6) The goal is set too low

Playoff participation? Then anything can happen?

The margin for error when the goal posted on the locker-room wall is playoff participation is harsh. If you come within two points of the 94 you aimed for, you can be on the outside looking in. Teams that aim to win 60 games can fail and still cruise through the last ten games as they ready for April.

For too long the Canadiens have been too satisfied by just making the playoffs. For a while this was reinforced behaviour, because the team did indeed beat unlikely paths to higher rounds. Over the long run, this strategy is bound to turn up a few losing seasons, though.



From the looks of this, it seems that I am being pretty negative. But I prefer to say realistic.

I guess the important distinction is that winning more the 40 games in a season does not necessarily make you a winner. The Montreal team that made the playoffs and were swept aside by Boston in four a few seasons back were certainly not treated as such.

The silver lining is that there are probably fewer than a handful of teams at the moment who don't need to admit to one or all of these flaws. In a league where a small relative gain means leapfrogging over 10 mediocre franchises, the ground to cover isn't immense, at least for playoff participation.

But, as you know we dream of the highest standards on this blog. We fantasize about a time when the Canadiens, inspired by their great past (managerially speaking) will outstrip their rivals in every allowable department not directly related to restricted spending limits. In the realm of the salary cap, I think this is how a dynasty would have to be built, to get out of the Oiler-Penguin cycle of lottery luck.

Sure, we can paper over the cracks and say there was some bad luck, a few injuries and a busy fall. It is factually accurate. But in your heart of hearts, wouldn't you admit that even a team that started 5-3 with Andrei Markov was never going to post a 120 point season?

Other Things Kovy Probably Should Have Said

While he was about it, why didn't Kovalev empty out all the other thoughts that might have been crossing his mind.

Through my own private Russian scrambler, this is what I heard him musing:

On Summer 2011:

"I guess I should have signed with Florida on Day 1 of free agency..."

"People say I've been banished to Hockey's Siberia. It could have been worse, it could have been Long Island."

On Ottawa:

"I really should take the lion's share of responsibility for the Senators woes. It really had nothing to do with Nick Foligno being on the top line."

On "hard working" NHL players

"If every player worked as hard to learn to skate efficiently as they purportedly do on every shift maybe the enigmas of the NHL wouldn't have to coast just so they could keep up."

"If I came to play every night like Steve Begin, people would still complain. And, I'd have wasted my time and talents..."

On NHL coaching methods:

"Is there anyone other than NHL coaches who thinks benching is a useful teaching tool?"

On tactical excellence:

"Spot the outlier: Defending -- track and chase. Attacking -- dump and chase. Enigmatic play -- hold onto the puck until an opportunity arises."

On increasing scoring:

"Memo to NHL: maybe if you want more goals, the trapezoid isn't the problem. 82 games, 12 serious practices, do the math."

"Memo to Junior hockey: see memo to NHL."

On playoff hockey:

"Why does the NHL feel it has to pander to the Don Cherrys of the hockey world?"

"Why does the NHL change its own rules in the playoffs to the advantage of the unskilled players in the league?"

Kovy's Corner

We know from watching the Montreal years and from the brief flirtation with Russian daily newspapers that Kovalev says entertaining things. One minute he's playing till he's 50, the next he's solving all the NHL's problems.

It sounds like another hockey pundit we know, vastly overpaid by the CBC for his out of date opinions.

Wouldn't it be fun if the CBC ran a second intermission slot called "Kovy's Corner" to juxtapose the views of a 2-game NHL fighter?

Livingston Ends Search For Stanley

It was in 1871 that explorer Henry Stanley finally stumbled upon his ailing friend and famed African adventurer Dr. Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. While Stanley had the chance to greet Dr. Livingstone; don’t expect to hear Scott Livingston uttering the reciprocal “Stanley, I presume” anytime soon.

Livingston’s “withdrawal” from the Canadiens organization is the news of the month for the Habs (slow month). I feel it comes at a good time for the team – as it looks set to take on a new coach, many new players and maybe even a new approach, it may be a blessing that the conditioning coach (always good, never great) could see a replacement.


Paying for results

It appears that 2009 is the year that members of the Canadiens coaching organization will be held to account over the results they provide.

Carbonneau
First, it was Carbonneau. He who was too stubborn (or unskilled in the art) to go out on a limb to communicate with difficult players in the dressing room. He who was too focused on wooing the media to get embroiled in the details of strategic developments.

Livingston
Now, Livingston. Dave Stubbs at HI/O, clearly mourning the loss of a favourite quote, heaps praise on the departing coach:
In addition to tending to the daily fitness and rehabilitation needs of the players, he has sent the athletes into the summer with specific training programs to get them back to training camp in excellent shape. Arrive early at a practice at the Bell Centre or the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard and chances are you'd see Scotty on the ice working an injured player back into the lineup.

Even so, I don’t think many will end up describing the Canadiens of Scott’s tenure as the fittest team in the league. It might be a stretch to call them fit at times (visions of Koivu chasing Kobasew come to mind…).

In the pursuit of excellence, there isn’t room for sentiment or hesitation. Livingston should be scrutinized for his record. He should be held up and compared to his peers around the league: why were Boston so much fitter than the Canadiens? He should be questioned for not only his rehab work on Tanguay, Latendresse, Koivu and Higgins, but also for his role in the work ethic issues on this team. No one on the Canadiens could be accused of fitness fanaticism (a la Slava Kozlov, via Detroit – aka the only modern dynasty).

Indeed, that’s why I hope it was at the Canadiens request that he decide to go gracefully into the world of personal training. “Have you ever thought about how much money you could make by going private, Scott?”, asks Gainey…

Melanson
The next logical candidate to declare the need to search his soul and options should be goalie coach Roland Melanson. Like Livingston, he has been good, but seems stuck there. Bringing in a new coach may not right the ship completely, but could it possibly hurt? I don’t see the evidence that it could.



The news about Scott Livingston is about the only thing I appear to have missed during my very nice sejour in the south of France. A trip that meant I missed the chance to comment on more ridiculous Russian reports – the disappointment of having suffered wine over rumours, believe me, is hard to take.

Panic Stations?Things On the Habs Worth Fretting Over

Oh, you could see we were all dying for a loss. So many topics we had been raring to blog about, so many things more than lamenting Kovalev's line only scoring 0.6 PPG. A loss is a good tonic. It brings it all out.

But as with all things, the Canadiens are never quite as bad as they appeared in a loss – never quite as good as we rave they are after a win. So, although the defence was bad in Saturday night's game, the fact is that they often play just as poorly and get away with (both on the scoresheet and the broadsheet). And, another fact is that Anaheim's defence (one we would all be envious to have on paper) was pretty piss poor as well.


For me, the underlying lesson from all this is that defence in this league is difficult. Very difficult. Talking about keeping a child fist-sized piece of rubber out of a sumo wrestler-sized net is hard – more so when people actually shoot straight. Blocking 90 mph shots and rooting the puck out of the corner when 230 lb behemoths are barreling down on you is no walk in the park either.

On most occasions, the team gets away with it, usually through a combination of luck, timing and goalkeeper skill. Occasionally, two or more of these things go the wrong way and it all goes pear-shaped.

Saturday night, all three things went in the wrong direction as far as I could see. The Canadiens hit posts and legs, the Ducks (by and large) did not, the Ducks anticipated their breaks well with many players jumping in and Halak and Price were unusually useless allies.

I do believe a lot of the fault lies at the feet of the defencemen for this one. In trying to be philosophical about the loss, I mostly give them the benefit of several players all having bad nights at once.

JT at The H Does Not Stand For Habs does a fine job at calling the issues with players. For my part, I wanted to supplement her views with some views on a couple of issues that go deeper than bad luck and miscues. In my mind these are:

1) The defensive system
2) The Brisebois situation

The system of defence
From the beginning of the season, one thing was very clear to me – we would need a good goalie this year. The Canadiens coaches seem to have gone with old faithful in terms of Habs strategies – hedge your bets on goaltending. From the my first memories of hockey until now, this has been the strategy employed by management.

One can hardly argue with the idea: get a good goalie and let him stop the shots. It is both cost effective and more reliable than trying to get the job done with 6 different guys paid at variable rates. And, in Halak and Price, the Canadiens have two reliable and efficient netminders.

The problem is not with the overall premise for me, but rather with the lack of much planning beyond the initial choice of “goalie or bust”.

Signing Hamrlik was a nice move to try and instill a second tier to the plan. But it kind of stopped short there. With Roman and Markov it means that for large parts of the game we can have 5 dependable players on the ice. The problem (as we saw Saturday) was that when one of them (the lynch-pin piece, no less) goes AWOL, then 4 dependable pieces just isn’t enough.

The system is naïve, as well. Over-reliance on a goaltender hasn’t been in style since Hasek left the Sabres. Even NJ, with the best insurance policy of all, have a system to fall back on.

If the Canadiens are to achieve any kind of meaningful success this year, it will happen through improvement to this, their greatest deficiency. Someone will have to help Komisarek take the next step in development (i.e., playing the puck to the forwards) and oversee the progress of Gorges and O’Byrne.

The question of who this person will be has been raised (again by JT):

Doug Jarvis isn't necessarily doing a bad job with the D, but I can't help thinking it would be better all around to have a guy who's actually played the position offering instruction.

It’s been an issue on my mind for some time. Personally, I’m not sure if a change in personnel is necessary – possibly just a renewed focus. Teach the defencemen to be consistent, how to trust themselves in possession, how to make time and room for themselves by anticipating the play, and teach them some safe rescue manoeuvres that don’t include dumping it up the middle. The system Detroit teaches is simple: it is patience over panic.

This is salvageable. Even with the current group. They are intelligent enough, can skate and have shown they can improve. Hopefully this game will highlight that this needs to be the focus of a season’s work – readying their system for April.


Brisebois
This, unlike the former is no minor indictment. It is major in my mind. This situation keeps on rearing its head and little is done to remedy it. The fact that it took until the Anaheim game to become apparent that Brisebois is still Brisebois is surprising. The fact that he had a game like he did is not.

Now, I can rant with the best of them on how much I dislike the moments where I have to sit through 60 seconds of a Brisebois shift, but this time, that’s kind of beside the point. He is what he is. He’s trying as hard as he ever did, and his skills are diminished now (if that’s even imaginable).


This whole situation is the responsibility of the management who continues to sign this player and the coaching staff that continues to play him. The fixation on Patrice, whatever it is, is and will continue to be the Achilles’ heel of this team.

As one fan in a throng who sees things on this dossier in the same light, I am puzzled. Of course I defer to the judgment of these men on hockey specifics. But in my mind, this is not a matter of expertise, this is basic: Patrice has glaring deficiencies, he is a free agent – don’t sign him…

(The fact that Anaheim, only two days earlier, had signed Bret Hedican (+17 on a team that scored 4 more goals than they allowed) was a reminder that our signing strategy on defence was haphazard to say the least. Far from being an advocate of signing another washed-up defenceman – Hedican while not a real option perhaps just highlights how silly our own signing, so early in the summer was.)

I much prefer the idea of promoting from within because it allows for two important benefits: cheap salary and open mind. In the case of the Canadiens, they actually did have the chance to promote from within. An opportunity missed as it turns out. Shawn Belle is a former Team Canada member, has NHL experience and is good enough to be a 7th defenceman. Opinions may vary, but both Valentenko and Weber could have handled the odd assignment in the NHL too, as far as I’m concerned.

If I accept that Brisebois should have been signed (and I don’t), I still object to him starting every game, playing every game and playing in every situation. I thought he was insurance. I thought he was a fall-back position – at worst.

The problem is, while management talk about Patrice in those terms many times, they use him very differently when it comes to action time. We are not privy to the private conversations between Gainey, Gauthier, Carbonneau, Jarvis and Muller. We can only guess. But it is certain now that one of this braintrust is a Brisebois-believer, and at the very least the other 4 are not adamantly against him. I have a feeling this decision falls to the coaches, and I have an inkling which of the three it might be. In any case, that is irrelevant.

And, to be honest, Saturday represents the least of my concerns here. Although young Ryan O’Byrne, a defenceman with half a year of NHL experience, was probably wrongly benched for poor play vs. Florida, it is the memory of the playoffs that makes me uneasy here.

Last season, after the most successful run the club had had in more than a decade, the coaches decided on the eve of the playoffs to shuffle the deck. In come veterans (because that’s a winning formula in the playoffs). Even when the experiment went awry with 3 losses against a team we had (and should have continued to) dominated all season, the coaches stuck with Brisebois. The lineup was contorted to fit him in. A goalscorer was benched when we needed goals, two defenceman moved up front when we needed goals and Brisebois played and played when we couldn’t really afford to let up more than 3 goals a game.

What troubled me last playoffs is now troubling me again: Is this management or coaching staff capable of learning from the mistakes of their collective past?

The signing showed that Gainey was still prone to a soft spot with Patrice. And, the first seven games of the season show me that Carbonneau and co. are no less immune. Heaven help us…

Outlook
In a way it was fortuitous that Brisebois played spectacularly badly in this case in a loss. And that he did not score on a knuckler to cloud affairs. If we could ever hope for this group to learn and question their ways, it will take a loss like the one we had on Saturday.

I look on now with interest to tomorrow morning for the announcement on who will be playing. I look forward to seeing how the staff reacts in their plans and game-tme decision-making.

Instead of Mats: Better Ways To Spend The Cap Money

I don't know about anyone else, but I am thoroughly impressed with Michael Phelps.

Early this morning in China, he became the best Olympic athlete of all time capturing his 10th gold medal. Oh, he then got his 11th an hour later...

Not astounded enough yet. He has set a world record in every event he has swam in. In 8 individual swims, he has set Olympic records in 6, before going of course to bettering all those for world records when he was going for the medal.

Now, obviously the Canadiens are running into trouble using up their $7 million in cap space. It would be a massive shame to leave it unspent just so the Colorado ski chalets could get bigger.

The Canadiens should get a hold of Michael Phelps' coach, psychologist, anyone. Any person associated with this guy must be a hell of a great motivator. To take nothing away from Michael himself, it does take some help to stay focussed through your long training 3 years ahead off an Olympics. But, the way he has revolutionised swimming and rewritten the rules of speed, he clearly didn't miss a beat over the last 4, 8, who knows how many years.

As good as the Scott Livingstone's of the NHL think they are, NHL athletes have come nowhere near the fitness of Olympians at any point in the history of the league. Heck, it was seen as a revolution a couple of years ago to see players doing fitness work on a game day. Get some serious coaching going and 45 second shifts could be a thing of the past.

Millions are a lot to spend on coaching, but it would be better than keeping it for deadline pipedream or throwing it at a couple of eighth defencemen...