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A legend in the sport

You don’t get to tread water for long when you’re the head coach in Montreal. The Canadiens had one of the best records in the league through October and November, fell on hard times in December, and now find themselves toiling for a new head coach in the middle of January.

Bob Gainey, the team’s general manager, fired head coach Claude Julien (along with assistant coach Rick Green) last weekend, and announced that he would step behind the bench for the rest of the season. Joining Gainey was Guy Carbonneau, who has been named associate coach and will take over the top job for the 2006/07 season.

And with those two leading the team, watch for anyone taking a night off on the ice to find themselves taking the next night off in the stands. Gainey was a four-time winner of the Selke Trophy in the late seventies/early eighties, while Carbonneau won that same trophy three times in the late eighties/early nineties.

Carbonneau’s role will be to learn the job and evaluate personnel for the rest of the season; Carbonneau has never coached at the NHL level, although he was an assistant coach with the Habs during the 2001/02 season. He had been acting as the assistant general manager in Dallas prior to last week.

Gainey has 5 1/2 seasons of NHL coaching experience on his resume, including three years with the Minnesota North Stars and another 2 1/2 years after the franchise was relocated to Dallas. Gainey guided Minnesota to the Stanley Cup finals in his first year with the team (1990/91), where they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins. Surprisingly, the North Stars went only 27-39-14 that year; in fact, Gainey-coached teams have had losing records in five of his six seasons.

Claude Julien was 72-62-10-5 in 1 1/2 years as head coach of the Canadiens at the time of his firing, and led the team to the second-round of the playoffs in 2003/04 (after compiling a 41-30-7-4 record during the regular season). Prior to coaching the Habs, Julien toiled for 2 1/2 seasons as the head man with their farm team in Hamilton.

But a 4-6-2 record in the month of December, followed by three losses in four games to start January, did in Julien. Also a factor in the firing was Julien’s decision to bench starting goaltender Jose Theodore in consecutive games early in the month, playing backup Cristobal Huet instead. Huet had been announced as the starting goalie against the San Jose Sharks on January 14 too, a decision which Gainey quickly reversed upon taking the reins.

And the result? A fine performance by Theodore, and a 6-2 win for the Canadiens in Gainey’s debut. Theodore followed up that performance with another strong effort in Gainey’s second game behind the bench, a 4-2 win versus the Stars. However, Theodore’s numbers remain well off his career average, and he’ll need to turn in a string of strong starts to boost them back to a respectable level.

Not that Theodore has been the only trouble spot for the Canadiens this season. Mike Ribeiro has an ugly plus/minus rating this year, while frequent linemate Pierre Dagenais was shipped to the minor leagues after managing to score only five goals in 32 games. Radek Bonk was either injured or invisible for the first half of the season, and Mike Komisarek has failed to make the jump to full-time, impact defenseman.

As well, injuries to top-line forwards Saku Koivu, Alexei Kovalev, and Richard Zednik at various points have kept the Canadiens from icing their best lineup for much of the season, and now top defenseman Andrei Markov will be on the shelf for at least three weeks as he recovers from a torn rotator cuff.

However, the points accumulated during their fast start has kept the Canadiens within striking distance of the final playoff spot (they were three points behind both seventh-place Toronto and eighth-place New Jersey going into play Thursday night). If they can right the ship prior to the Olympic break, and then come back strong when play resumes, they’ll still be in the hunt. And Gainey knows about performing in the postseason; he won the Conn Smythe trophy in 1978/79 for a Cup-winning Habs club.

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