Carey Price wanted a new coach four years ago and he wants a new coach now. And Price gets what he wants.
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• Montreal Gazette
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For the second time in four years, Carey Price has succeeded in having a head coach of the Montreal Canadiens fired.
Claude Julien’s fate was sealed when Brady Tkachuk, who is a Marvel Comics-like villain for us Habs fans, raced in on the right side late in the third period in Ottawa on Tuesday and shot a puck past our all-world goalie with one hand on his stick. If that wasn’t a clear enough message to general manager Marc Bergevin, Price underlined his point by going down way too early on Josh Norris in the shootout to make absolutely sure that the Ottawa Senators won and Bergevin got the message.
Price has been playing almost absurdly bad, and never great, which reminded me a lot of how he was playing in early 2017 during the last days of the Michel Therrien regime. Therrien was fired by Bergevin on Valentine’s Day in 2017. Price wanted a new coach four years ago and he wants a new coach now. And Price gets what he wants.
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Remember the infamous meeting that Bergevin had only days before giving Therrien the pink slip? He met privately with Price, Shea Weber and captain Max Pacioretty, and without the coach. When the veterans make it clear they no longer believe in the bench boss, that’s the end of the coach’s tenure.
Count on this: Price will look way better the next time he’s between the pipes, whether that’s Thursday or Saturday in Winnipeg.
However, Bergevin did the right thing Wednesday. With two straight losses to the Sens, who are tied for the record in the National Hockey League, it was clear the boys had given up on Julien. It’s tough on someone who is by all accounts a stand-up fellow, but he’d lost the room and the team.
As I’ve been saying for a while Julien was out of ideas. He is a very static coach, a very old-school coach. He doesn’t adjust. Boston Bruins management figured that one out. He just keeps doing the same thing and hopes for a miracle, ideally from Saint Carey. The team has not played a good game since that loss to the same lowly Senators on Feb. 4 and yet he did almost nothing to try to stop the slide.
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He switched Tyler Toffoli for Tomas Tatar on the “top” line. That’s it. It wasn’t enough and it was a dumb move. You need to get Toffoli scoring again and you don’t achieve that by pairing him with a centre, Phillip Danault, who is playing as badly as Price.
He also was going back to the defence-first system he loves and the high-flying players clearly hate.
Instead of innovation, Julien played the blame game. When I saw him after Saturday’s loss to the Maple Leafs angrily knocking his players, I felt that the end was near. I knew Bergevin couldn’t let this continue. The GM went out and got the pieces to build a competitive team for the first time since 2014 and the GM had explicitly stated that he felt he had a team that could not only make the playoffs but could do some damage.
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And Bergevin knows his job is on the line, too. He has one more year on his contract after this season and his boss, CH president Geoff Molson, easygoing as he is, isn’t going to look kindly on missing the playoffs after spending to the salary cap.
Julien had to go and so did Kirk Muller. One of the mysteries of life in the Habs Nation has been how Kirk Is Work has been the Teflon Man in recent years, feeling little heat despite the fact he has consistently run one of the worst power plays in hockey.
Dominique Ducharme was hired as an assistant in order to be groomed to be the head coach and it was a no-brainer that he’d get the gig. Molson is committed to having a coach and a GM who are bilingual and there just aren’t a load of NHL-ready coaches out there who fit that bill and are not named Patrick Roy. And, by the way, Molson will never let Roy get that job.
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Will Ducharme do a good job? Who knows. He’s never been an NHL head coach. But the move should almost certainly work. It’s electroshock therapy for the players and they’ll respond.
The real question is where this leaves Bergevin. He just fired his second coach, so it’s put-up or shut-up time for the dude with the flowing locks and a penchant for powder-blue suits. He needs success and he needs it now. I’d say this team, at the very least, has to get into the second round and make a series of the all-Canada division final.
And the team will have to make it there with a rookie head coach and three of four centres who have very little experience. It should be interesting.
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2021-02-24 17:54:28Z
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