The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Remember back after the Habs got demolished in the playoffs and some reporter told Bob Gainey all about how even his wife was questioning Gainey’s use of Carey Price in the playoffs?

Well now I gotta wonder if the Habs can get her signed up to be GM, because Jesus tapdancing Christ on a grizzly bear, Bob Gainey has lost his goddamn mind.

We all thought he was a little bit thick for taking Scott Gomez’s retardo contract off Glen Sather’s hands, giving up New York native Chris Higgins and extremely promising defensive prospect Ryan McDonagh in the process.

“But hey,” the few Habs fans who weren’t cutting letters for death threats out of magazines might’ve been saying at the time, “Gomez is still a pretty decent player, and if they can get him a decent trigger man, it might be worth it.”

Well Gainey heard those calls, then went out and dropped $11 million a year on Brian Gionta — no doubt hoping to rekindle what my Devils fan friend calls “that ‘03 magic” — and Mike Cammalleri. So they now have a quote-unquote top line that makes 18.357 million dollars combined against the cap but only scored 75 combined goals, which, you will note, is about $244,760 per goal. Which, you will further note, sucks.

And maybe the staunchest of Habs supporters would say even that’s not SO terrible, all things considered because, hey, Alex Ovechkin makes $9.538 against the cap and he scored 56 goals this year, which means he was paid about $170,321 per goal. The dropoff’s not THAT precipitous.

But can the Habs really afford to drop that much per goal for an entire top line, especially one that’s taking like 30 percent of your cap space away, when their defense last season had more holes in it than the average kitchen sponge? Before the real Habs diehards (i.e. members of Gainey’s immediate family) say oui, let’s not forget that Gainey replaced a 27-year-old Mike Komisarek with a 35-year-old Jaro Spacek, and at a discount of just $700k per year, and 34-year-old Hal Gill, who is awful.

And maybe even that would be fine IF HE HADN’T ALREADY TRADED RYAN MCDONAGH LIKE A LUNATIC IDIOT.

By Christmastime, when the Habs are 12 points out of the playoffs, Gainey better be praying he can pick up a new vocation. Maybe that reporter’s wife can teach him to be a baker.

Elsewhere…

A couple other signings of note took place (obviously).

The biggest of the day, which was, for the most part, ruled by illogic, in much the same way as Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, was Marian Hossa torpedoing Martin Havlat’s hopes of re-signing with Chicago, signing a 12-year contract that will pay him an average of $5.23 million until he’s 43. Havlat, for his part, seemed devastated — his Twittering was full of talk about honor and respect, or, more specifically, a lack thereof — and instead signed with Minnesota, who traded their MSG-bound, frail-boned Slovak (Marian Gaborik, who immediately took up Gomez’s $7.5 million worth of cap space) for a frail-boned Czech. Few people will notice, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, there was an mad, poorly-conceived dash for talent in the Northwest division. Vancouver, which also lost Mattias Ohlund to Tampa, got both Sedins back, though it would have been funnier if Mike Gillis had kept Daniel and told Henrik to take a hike, if only for the weepy interviews that would have surely followed. This was, of course, necessitated by Calgary’s signing Jay Bouwmeester to a semi-reasonable contract the prior day (though the number of semi-reasonable contracts for legitimate stars in Calgary is reaching a critical mass, at least insofar as when you look at it, really, they’re spending $32.something million on five players, which is a ludicrous number).

And the Northwest also featured Edmonton and Colorado, the two adorable toe-headed children of the division, playing dressing up as mommy and daddy, carrying around a small brief case full of old credit cards and pretending to cook plastic cupcakes in a Playskool stove. The Oilers, in their adorablely misguided attempt to keep pace with the bigger, better Western Canadian clubs, made up for the loss of Dwayne Roloson to the Islanders by signing Nikolai Khabibulin to a somewhat reasonable contract. For the next FOUR years, which, of course, makes it instantly unreasonable. And those loveable Avs made a huge dent in the Southeast by stealing away with 1b goalie Craig Anderson and talentless thug David Koci.

I’m sure I missed a few, but I’m pushing 800 words now, and really, at that point, who cares? Just go under the assumption that your favorite team spent far too much money on players they drastically overvalued. You’re probably not going to be that far off.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:38 am and is filed under Good night. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.