With the Canadiens's acquisition of Dominic Moore for a second-round pick this past week, the Pierre Gauthier era in Montreal unofficially began. Clearly, especially with the trade deadline drawing closer, he has a lot more work ahead of him to ensure that the Habs make the playoffs.
While it is open to debate, he does indeed have big shoes to fill following Bob Gainey's departure. Gainey did have his share of critics, but it is undeniable that many of them have memory spans the same lengths of those of goldfish (or at least very, very selective memories), conveniently forgetting all the good moves he made over the past half-decade. Here are the top five (again, in my humble opinion):
5) Trading Jose Theodore: Yes, they got David "Wholly Goaltender, Batman" Aebischer in return ("Swiss Cheese" was taken as a nickname by Martin Gerber), but the key to this deal was getting Theodore and his $4,500,000 salary off the books (a salary which would have jumped to $5,500,000 the following season in 2006-2007 and $6,000,000 the year after), while only having to take on Aebischer's $1,900,000 per year. The fact is Theodore's contract was like a cancer to the team's long-term potential and, seeing as Huet had emerged as the Habs's number-one goalie (and Theodore a very distant number-two), getting rid of the contract was a miracle. Getting something back in return was like the second coming of you-know-who.
The stats speak for themselves: In 2001-2002, when Theodore won the Hart Memorial and Vezina Trophies, he had a 30-24-7 record, a 2.11 goals against average, and a .931 save percentage (which also won him the league's Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award). In 2005-2006, he had a still-decent 17-15-5-0 record, a 3.46 GAA, and an .881 save percentage. Meanwhile, Huet had an 18-11-4-7 record, a 2.20 GAA, and a .929 save percentage. They just didn't need "No Way" Jose (who was quickly becoming "Let Me Step Out of the Way" Jose) any more.
4) Acquiring Huet and Radek Bonk: In a three-way deal in the summer of 2004, the Habs got Huet and Bonk, from the Los Angeles Kings and Ottawa Senators respectively, giving up just Mathieu Garon and a third-round draft pick. In Huet, they got a supposed back-up goalie, but who turned out to be so much more, to replace Garon and Bonk, who turned out to be a decent checking-line center.
In two seasons with Montreal, Bonk earned 23 and 29 points, which wasn't bad, considering the new role in which he had been placed. Following years of underachieving in Ottawa, he finally found his place, if only for two years, before moving on to the Nashville Predators. Huet, meanwhile, played a total of 117 games for the Habs over three seasons, earning a total record of 58-39-13-11, GAAs of 2.55, 2.81, and 2.20, and a total save percentage of .920. Some back-up goalie, eh?
3) Trading Guillaume Latendresse for Benoit Pouliot: Sure, Latendresse has been great for the Minnesota Wild, notching an impressive 25 points (17 goals) in 35 games with his new team this year. But Pouliot had been just as impressive before going down with injury a few games ago with Montreal. In 20 games with the Habs, Pouliot scored 11 goals to go along with three assists.
Considering each player had been playing as lost souls prior to the trade, Minnesota GM Chuck Fletcher deserves a lot of credit as well, getting rid of a player who arguably wasn't going to amount to much in a Wild uniform for one who similarly had become a waste of a Habs jersey. In both cases, neither GM had anything to lose. They each did gain a whole lot, though.
2) Acquiring Alex Kovalev: I am not a fan of Kovalev's… really, there's no love lost between the two of us: I think he's an inconsistent and overrated player, and he doesn't even know I exist. That being said, I can still admit that he is a very good player, who helped and not hindered the Habs in each of the five seasons he was with the team. Considering Gainey gave up just Josef Balej and a second-round pick for him in 2004 and Gainey was able to keep him in the fold up until he left for Ottawa this past off-season, his acquisition ranks right up there as one of the best steals ever.
His 84-point season in 2007-2008 is undoubtedly the most spirited campaign by a Montreal Canadien I have personally ever witnessed. For that year alone, he and Gainey deserve all the credit in the world.
1) Engineering the 2007-2008 team: No, the 2007-2008 edition of the Canadiens did not win the Stanley Cup. No, the team didn't even make it past the second round of the playoffs that year. Still, of all the hockey experts out there (we're talking the entire planet, here), few picked the team to make the playoffs to begin with. Fewer still picked them to make them comfortably. Not one picked them to win their division. I'm guessing minus two or three of them picked them to win the conference in the regular season. But they did (nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah).
So, what went right for the Canadiens in the regular season? In a word, everything. They had seven players score 50 or more points. All of their star players had few if any games lost to injury. They even came back from a 5-0 deficit against the New York Rangers one game to win in a shootout.
That season represented Gainey's fourth as the GM, and, if everything had gone according to plan, the team would have been perfectly placed to contend for the Stanley Cup a year later, what would have been the end of his five-year plan. Unfortunately, except for making the playoffs, that next season resembled almost the exact opposite of the picture-perfect campaign a year earlier. But it was through little fault of Gainey's.
He traded for Alex Tanguay, who turned out to be a bust, traded for Mathieu Schneider, who resurrected his career, if only for a half-season, after almost losing it altogether with the Atlanta Thrashers, and also traded for Robert Lang, who, at least for a time, was the big center Montreal had been looking for for a decade.
Meanwhile, Mike Komisarek faded into a shadow of the player he had been a year before, following an early-season embarrassment of a fight to Boston Bruin Milan Lucic. Furthermore, Kovalev and Tomas Plekanec each had come-back-down-to-Earth years following near-career ones in 2007-2008. The injuries also piled up to Tanguay, Lang, Komisarek, Saku Koivu, and Chris Higgins. All in all, a nightmare of a season.
If Gainey is to be remembered for anything at all, it should be that he had most pieces in place on schedule for a Stanley Cup run that should have taken place in 2008-2009, but didn't. Come that off-season, with all the unrestricted free agents Montreal had, it is little wonder that the team couldn't come right back where they had left off two seasons earlier. He had little choice but to rebuild the team from scratch… and then pass it off to the next man who would be Montreal Canadiens GM, Gauthier.
To all those Habs fans who believe Gainey was a bad general manager, I implore you to remember that 2007-2008 season and think: Even with Montreal losing in that second round to the Philadelphia Flyers, had Gainey resigned after that season, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. He, in most everyone's minds, would have been a great GM, who just left a year early. He was a great GM, period.