Cornwall Ontario – When I worked for the Habs in the 90’s during that one interesting season when we moved into the Bell Centre and nearly upset the Rangers in the playoffs, trades were run by me. At the risk of being humble my reports and advice to Reggie were dead on accurate. It was something I was very proud of and had great feedback from coach Steve Shutt at the time.
Maybe Habs GM Marc Bergevin should give me a phone call and hire me back as he’s blown the dough ball again and made another utterly mystifyingly bad trade in swapping Alex Galchenyuk for “spoiled rich kid” Max Domi.
Montreal has FOUR freaking 2nd round draft picks. I’m sure that Mr. Domi and his rap sheet could have been acquired for a single pick. After all, he’s not large. He’s not scrappy like his dad and appears to be a perimeter forward rather than a meat and potatoes kinda guy. He doesn’t have a high ceiling potential, and of course he’s not a centre or d man which is what the team needs. He doesn’t seem to be a long term solution or an asset to horse trade for a profit either.
Montreal doesn’t have many trade chips this year. It’s not clear what the team is trying to do and that may be fine as long as the team knows what it’s doing, but that’s not apparent either.
As an outsider it appears that we have a well meaning owner that isn’t firing a clearly incompetent GM because either some of those decisions were Mr. Molson’s call or…he simply has a lot of term to pay off for both Bergy and Julien without a good alternative. There really aren’t a lot of GM candidates out there, although considering how bad Bergy’s been I’d give Pierre Mcguire a shot at this point if there isn’t some majestic perfect politically correct one available.
I’m not sure the team can afford another dismally bad season purely because of bad management, or more diminishing asset trades that don’t lead anywhere but lower in the standings?
Galchenyuk’s new team has already stated that he’ll be back at centre, a place he should always have been for the team. The young man has a potential ceiling of 40 goals and being a force offensively. That’s not a bad thing. It’s something the Habs haven’t had in over a freaking decade if not longer! Those would be legitimate first line numbers.
Considering that in his sixth season Bergy hasn’t been able to trade for a centre of that caliber it is boggling to trade Galchenyuk for a forward whose goal totals for the last two seasons didn’t equal what was considered a bad year for Galchenyuk last season.
Boggling. Truly.
It’s time for Mr. Molson to do something as the diminishing assets in a cap age are something that could take years to recover from. That’s a lot of lossed beer sales. And Galchenyuk, if he was to be traded needed to be used in part or whole to acquire an asset that would address team needs.
Note to Mr. Bergevin. When trading the goal is to acquire either more than you give up or …and I know this one might be a surprise, fill a need within your organization.
You failed on both of these counts in this trade, as you failed in the Sergachev trade, and we won’t even discuss the Subban trade in this piece.
What do you think Hab fans? You can post your comments below.