The Two-Line Pass

It’s tough being an NHL player, we all know that.

The business is cutthroat, and where one day you can be the toast of the town, the next day you can be out on your ass in a matter of half an ineffective season.

Georges Laraque found that out the hard way today, as the Canadiens, clearly tired of his being of Haitian descent and not the fact that he’s a tough guy that doesn’t fight or hit anyone any more, sent him home for the remainder of the season with an eye toward being bought out once the Habs are able to do so.

Wait.. what? That Haitian thing seems out of place. Well, I mean, not if you’re Laraque. The money quote (emphasis obviously mine):

“Classless,” Laraque said angrily. “To do this in the midst of all I’m dealing with in Haiti, the timing is awful. I’m not going to sugar coat anything.”

Yes, all he’s dealing with.

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Good night

“Troubled,” they said. “Disappointing,” too. And “unhappy.” “Disgruntled,” as well. “Unwilling” got tossed around. And those are some of the tamer adjectives that were applied to Guillaume Latendresse during and then immediately after his time in Montreal.

So when Bob Gainey traded him to Minnesota for another troubled, disappointing, unhappy, disgruntled, unwilling former highly-regarded pick in Benoit Pouliot (presumably because his name sounds French-Canadian and that should keep the vultures from picking at the slowly-dying body that is Gainey’s remaining time with the Canadiens), there was.. well I guess to say there was rejoicing is overstating things. But there was a general agreement that this was a trade that had to be made even if the return was uninspiring.

And while Pouliot has yet to play for his new club, which was so badly embarrassed by Toronto(?!) last night that Kyle Chipchura got traded immediately thereafter as though that would do anything for the Habs, tonight was just Latendresse’s third game with the Wild, so I imagine there was a bit of curiosity in both cities as to how the kid, who has never come close to living up to the high standards placed upon him by the Montreal press, would do.

How’s “best player on the ice” sound?

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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.

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The Lead

A word problem with a multiple choice answer:

Say you’re the Montreal Canadiens, right?

You’ve got four games left and you’ve got a tenuous hold on the No. 7 slot in the East, three points ahead of both the Rangers and Panthers. Your remaining games are against the lowly Senators, the aforementioned Rangers with whom you are competing for playoff position, and a pair of unstoppable juggernauts in Boston and Pittsburgh.

Do you want to at least TRY to win the easiest game on your remaining schedule?

Circle one:

a) Yes.

b) Obviously.

c) Of course.

d) No thanks, because we are coached by a complete idiot stupid moron retard who wants to have our team play unwatchable hockey in the third period of a one-goal game so we can give up two goals on five shots in the third period and we’ll lose 3-2.

FOR ZERO BONUS POINTS: Do you also want to go 0 for 4 on the power play and miss a penalty shot?

If you answered selected Choice D (”No thanks, because we are coached by a complete idiot stupid moron retard who wants to have his team play unwatchable hockey in the third period of a one-goal game so they can give up two goals on five shots in the third period and we’ll lose 3-2.”), you’re…………

…..

….

…

..

BOB GAINEY!

Yup, ol’ man Gainey and the boys pooched it against a bad team that’ll be golfing by this time next week. Even if it doesn’t happen (it probably won’t; New York has the Habs then two with the Flyers and Florida has Philly, Atlanta and Washington), the Habs deserve to miss the playoffs for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is losing this fairly important game.

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The Lead

Uhhhhh… what happened to Montreal?

Around this time last month the Canadiens were in a stretch in which they won nine of 11 and had just one regulation loss. Now, they’re on a four-game losing streak to teams like Atlanta, New Jersey (not so embarrassing, but more on the Devs later), Tampa last night and Florida tonight, the latter by a 5-1 margin.

How’s that even happen? It’s not like they’re unhealthy, though Alex Tanguay’s going to be out another two weeks or so, and there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for this mortifying skid. They’re just playing awful hockey.

Does this underscore the need to trade for a guy like Lecavalier to shake up a stale dressing room and light a fire under everyone’s ass? Does it say something about the improvement of the East in general that the team which was so dominant last year is so, I dunno, “blah” now? Christ, they’re only six points above the ninth-place Hurricanes and Florida and Pittsburgh seem to be gaining fast too.

Maybe the problem is that Carey Price gave up five goals on 36 shots tonight, five on 24 last night and four on 33 on Jan. 21.

Yeah. That’s probably it.

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The Lead

I knew the Flames would lose this game the second the Sportsnet broadcast compared the first two games of the team’s four-game road trip to the infamous six-game trip from last season that saw them win all six and outscore their opponents something like 25-16 (of course they ignored the fact that none of those six teams made the playoffs last year. That was neither here nor there). Calgary had, after all, beaten St. Louis in overtime and shut out the so-so Rangers.

What, then, could possibly go wrong against a team like the Canadiens that are, y’know, good? Oh, right, the Calgary Flames played after winning two in a row and coming off a dominant performance. Any time this year the Flames have played a good opponent after a dominant performance, they have lost because they just don’t show up every night.

Tonight, in a 4-1 loss to Montreal that, coupled with a Canucks win, saw them drop out of first place in the Northwest, the Flames were victimized by not only an outstanding performance by Canadiens backup Jaroslav Halak, but also their own disappointing lack of hockey sense and puck luck.

Halak saw 14 shots in the first period and stopped all of them, which, based upon the quality of those shots, was the only reason it wasn’t 3-1 through 20 minutes. Instead, Robert Lang scored off a goofy bounce on a centering feed that hit Mark Giordano’s leg and got behind Kiprusoff.

The second bad bounce came in the second period when a shot from Calgary’s point hit a shinpad and bounced back to center ice like it had been shot out of a cannon to spring Matt D’Agostini for a breakaway and his fourth goal in as many career NHL games. Dustin Boyd pulled the Flames back within one just over two minutes later but Lang added an insurance goal to double the Montreal lead late in the period.

But when Calgary got a power play early in the third, the game was officially put out of reach by Calgary’s own stupidity. A Habs forward broke his stick while on the PK, but instead of forcing the puck to that side and trying to draw him out to the point and create space in front of the net, Calgary kept it on the strong side and passed back and forth between the point and the man on the halfboards before eventually sending it down low. Not the worst idea in the world but it should’ve been on the other side of the ice. However, when the puck comes down low, the other Canadiens forward trips a Calgary player to draw a 5 on 3.

And this is where the insane part comes in. With 28 seconds left in the original penalty, instead of giving Montreal the puck or putting something low at the net to hope for a scrum, a rebound or Montreal control, Todd Bertuzzi backs out and tries to uncork one from a goofy angle, only to see the puck sail about a mile high and wide and bounce out of the zone and to center ice. At this point, it still doesn’t occur to the Flame that retrieved it to just give the puck to Montreal. Instead, all six Flames CLEAR THE ZONE and regroup for a rush down the center of the ice that somehow doesn’t get a shot on net. By this time, Alex Tanguay, who took the original penalty, has come out of the box and is the first Hab to touch the puck. The game was lost right there. The fact that Andrei Markov scored 39 seconds after Montreal killed the second penalty was just hilarious salt-rubbing.

This was just another game Calgary simply wasn’t prepared for and, no matter how well they played on Sunday or Friday, you have to come to play against good opponents. I would’ve thought Calgary got that note by now, but they pull this all the time. Oh and Detroit’s tomorrow night? Yeah, that should go well.

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My internet and television have both been spotty as hell tonight so I didn’t watch any hockey games. I did, however, get this sent to me by reader “Lexus Prime,” which I am assuming is his real name. As a consequence, you will get no Good Night. Settle for this and take your issues with my lack of posting up with Comcast.

Check this out: On a delayed call for the Habs, Ryan O’Byrne is pressured by Doug Weight back into his own zone and puts the puck into his own net. O’Byrne’s side of the story is that he was unaware of the delayed call and thought he could pass it back to Carey Price, who was enjoying some Gatorade on the bench. You see where this is going. Bill Guerin was credited with the goal.

The goal tied the game at 3-all inside of five minutes to go in the third period and the Habs ended up losing to the Islanders in the shootout. Also, it’s important to note that this happened IN Montreal, and the fans understandably got on him for the rest of the game.

This could be the best thing that ever happened. O’Byrne’s reaction is my new all-time favorite gesture. But he has to be traded now, right? He’s been awful all season, but this must be the end of the Ryan O’Byrne era with Les Habitants.

So yesterday the Habs’ Tom Kostopoulos was given a three-game suspension after he demolished Mike Van Ryn from behind along the endboards, which was a perfectly reasonable suspension.

But how is there no action being taken against the Canadiens for the way they treated former teammate Mikhail Grabovski?

I hate to be the one that is constantly calling for this player or that player to be suspended or fined or whatever and I’m not doing so here, but it’s pretty clearly a team directive to punish Grabovski for the crap he pulled with Montreal last year. Not that he helped his own cause by taunting various Habs players over the course of the night, but again, this strikes me as something that came down from the top.

Watch that video around 1:10 into it. Right before Koivu gets in his face about something, he makes a point to not pull up short of Grabovski even though he is clearly prone on the ice after having been drilled just after the whistle on an offside call.

For those that don’t know the full story here, Grabovski spent much of the season as a healthy scratch and one day, before a road game in Phoenix for which he was once again going to be watching from the press box, he flew to Los Angeles instead to meet with his agent. Neither the Habs players nor front office types took too kindly to that and now that Grabovski has been traded to the Leafs, even his lifelong friends the Kostitsyn brothers are lining up against him.

According to La Presse (click for moon language.. translation from HFBoards):

“He is not my friend anymore,” said Kostitsyn on Monday. “I do not have respect for him. He’s not even a team player.”

…

”I have a good memory, we’ll see each other again,” when thinking about the next game between the two team on January 8th.

Other pertinent quotes followed.

Alex Kovalev: “No, don’t talk to me about him. He’s in Toronto and I am here. I’ve got nothing to say.”

Chris Higgins: “He’s not here anymore. I don’t care about him.”

Guy Carbonneau: “He’s playing a lot and he’s happy in Toronto. Good for him.”

Now I’m not saying Grabovski’s actions were justified because they weren’t, but they were taking run after run at him on Saturday with very little recourse from the Leafs and surprisingly no action from the league, especially in light of that second Kostitsyn quote. Even Grabovski seems to imply that he believes the orders came down from Carbonneau.

It will be interesting to see how everything shakes out on Jan. 8.

You’re probably going to hear a lot tomorrow about the hit Detroit’s Tomas Kopecky laid on Montreal defenseman Mathieu Carle (not to be confused with Tampa’s Matt Carle, though they play the same position. Someone pass that info to the Detroit color commentator).

Just five minutes into the Habs’ exhibition game, Carle carried the puck through the neutral zone down the right wing, dumped the puck in and less than a second later got demolished by a totally clean hit from Kopecky that he never saw coming. He was knocked unconcious and came back around about 15 minutes later while they were still working on him on the ice. He was taken off on a stretcher and brought to a Detroit hospital for further testing.

Watch the video for yourselves.

Some (namely Habs fans) will find the hit to be egregiously dirty. Others (namely objective observers who understand the sport) will say that it was perfectly clean, and that’s why players are taught to keep their friggin’ heads up in the neutral zone.

Anything that’s made of this is a total non-story. Even if the term “headhunting” is thrown around, it’s crazy talk. Don’t wanna get drilled, don’t put your head down. It’s that simple. Really.

Later in the game, Nicklas Lidstrom took a puck in the face and was also brought to the hospital. Yeesh. That could be bad, bad news for Detroit.

Now that the Canadiens have gotten rid of Cristobal Huet, it’s Carey Price’s show up in Montreal for the next several years (that is, until the press and fans alike show up at his door with pitchforks and torches a la Jose Theodore. Halak’s the future!).

But when Price showed up at a Montreal golf tournament looking like this:

Hey now!

People were pretty amazed.

Turns out, Price has dropped between 20 and 25 pounds from his robust weight of last season (226!?) and is now down to an ideal playing weight. While it may make him a little smaller in net, and boy did he look big last year, no amount of padding can’t be added to correct that problem.

This Canadiens team is leaner. Goalie Carey Price, having learned  the evil of chocolate bars at midnight, says he’s lost 20-25 pounds since the spring.

“When you’re packin’ an extra 20 pounds, it’s kinda hard to get  around,” said Price, eager for his sophomore season.

Price also told the Canadian Press he felt tired from playing two straight years, neglecting to mention that he was also walking around with the equivalent of a fat baby on his back.

Similarly, Habs forward Alex Kovalev has also dropped 12 pounds. Why do I get the feeling that, with Georges Laraque coming in this year, the team wanted to save money on catering for the other players?

“With Georges, I think everybody gained a little bit of weight,” said rugged forward Steve Bégin, who is used to skating over or through the opposition.