GDT: Game #5 - Los Angeles Kings Vs Montreal Canadiens - Oct 17th 2024, 7:00pm EST - TSN2, RDS - In Memoriam

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Apoplectic Habs Fan

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Aug 17, 2002
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At some point the team needs to learn how to defend. Players are young, we get it but some just dont seem to be improving. Its not all on the coaches as some are just not in the chairs they should be but its worrying to see Jackeye and Barron stagnate

Hopefully Struble does see steady improvement as we have seen so far

Really 3 out of the 4 games were tire fires defensively. Hopefully this weeks practices will help as it was a quick start, 4 in 6 that hasnt given much time to fix things

Guhle has been a stud with all that said.
 

Tyson

Registered User
Mar 1, 2007
50,248
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Texas
At some point the team needs to learn how to defend. Players are young, we get it but some just dont seem to be improving. Its not all on the coaches as some are just not in the chairs they should be but its worrying to see Jackeye and Barron stagnate

Hopefully Struble does see steady improvement as we have seen so far

Really 3 out of the 4 games were tire fires defensively. Hopefully this weeks practices will help as it was a quick start, 4 in 6 that hasnt given much time to fix things

Guhle has been a stud with all that said.
Do the Habs play man to man, zone or both? I wonder if the players even know.
 

Apoplectic Habs Fan

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Aug 17, 2002
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Do the Habs play man to man, zone or both? I wonder if the players even know.

Thats a good question. As a team i wonder as its been 3 yrs with many of the same players who cant seem to figure out this 4D chess system MSL and Robidas want them to play
 

Team_Spirit

95% Elliotte
Jul 3, 2002
39,799
22,093
Subban era had 900k tv ratings. Bergevin destroyed everything and now they are happy with half that.

But it's coming back in the Hutson era baby. Boxscore watching is over.

This meme didn't make the cut? All he had to do is punt the Sherbak, Juulsen, McCarron picks.

1000000094.jpg
 

Tyson

Registered User
Mar 1, 2007
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Thats a good question. As a team i wonder as its been 3 yrs with many of the same players who cant seem to figure out this 4D chess system MSL and Robidas want them to play
One thing is becoming clear- the same or mostly the same Dmen have played this system like you said for almost 3 years and they still look like a train wreck in their zone. Either the players aren't very good or have stopped developing. Guhle is the only 3rd year Dman who has improved.
 
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Grate n Colorful Oz

The Hutson Hawk
Jun 12, 2007
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Subban era had 900k tv ratings. Bergevin destroyed everything and now they are happy with half that.

But it's coming back in the Hutson era baby. Boxscore watching is over.

This meme didn't make the cut? All he had to do is punt the Sherbak, Juulsen, McCarron picks.

View attachment 917738

I could only put what I had accumulated over the years. I just simply missed out on seeing/saving this one and many others.

But I did mention both those comments in the eulogy.
 

WeThreeKings

Demidov is a HAB
Sep 19, 2006
95,645
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Halifax
Do the Habs play man to man, zone or both? I wonder if the players even know.

It's hybrid.

When the puck is down low and they have a chance to outnumber, they will go in and play man plus try to win the puck back and transition. When the puck goes high, they fan out into a zone concept.

The change this year is the zone is tighter in the home plate area.
 

SwiftyHab

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Apr 18, 2004
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presentationbergevin.png


In Memoriam

Ahum.. *taps mic, mic blares*

As we all gather here tonight, let us take a few minutes to honor someone. Please follow all the way to the end, it'll be worth it. I promise.

The L.A. Kings are in town and our erstwhile General Manager, Marc Bergevin, is probably in tow. We never gave him a proper send-off as he was unceremoniously fired at the end of November 2021, so I thought we might do this on this most solemn of nights.

I will not bore you with a full retrospective of his time here, as most of us know the story all too well. What I will rather do, is talk about the man, the myth, the legend, and his time in Montreal as general manager.

Bergy had his critics, myself included, but what can't be taken away from him was his sense of style and his capacity to reinvent his looks. Through his time here, we've seen him transform and shed one skin after another while also becoming quite the fashionista. The chronology of his time in Montreal could straightforwardly be done through the lense of his wardrobe alterations, if one was so inclined.

He started off with the dry and pseudo-intellectual limo driver look (1) and wore it so well you'd swear he could've replaced Richard Belzer in any role. Stimulated by both his early success on the ice and being a media darling, he quickly metamorphisized into Bergy à la mode (2), turning heads at NHL red carpet events. This all burgeoned later in Bergy going into full Derek Zoolander mode (3). The look was so similar, some of us hunted down old tapes of Bergy on skates to see if he could actually turnaround and spin in both directions.

phase1bergy.png


These specific styles progressed from one to the other through his first 3 years in Montreal where he garnered most of his success. It was smooth sailing in those halcyon days. Then Carey Price had a freak injury and missed most of the 15-16 season and everything tumbled down after that, partly due to Bergevin's negligence in suitably replacing Price. This culminated in Bergevin publicly doubling down on his dinosaur coach, the truly despicable Michel Therrien, in the infamous "it's on me" press conference in January 2016, where he uttered the phrase that forever tarnished his tenure; the 'foxhole' comment.

He lost a great deal of the fandom at that point, by not canning the irredeemable bully, and you could see the pressure starting to get to him. He went on to register so many ridiculous comments, it's hard to enumerate them all. The four pillars of a winning team (we only heard two), the playstation comment, trades are hard, Toews not a #1 center, #1 centers are never available, Morgan Rielly is a stud, the defense is better than last year, diamond in the rough, the answer is in the room, and so on... Almost every sentence he spoke out in that period was a treasure trove of comedy material. You could literally feel the rug sliding from under his feet. Afterward, his sense of style crumbled like his team did, offering us the sometimes disheveled and always gruffy Hobo-Bergevin, or as he's more commonly known, Bargainbin. After Belzer, he could now replace late-career Mel Gibson:

phase2bergy.png


It didn't take long for Uncle Geoff and his 'hungry eyes' to leap to Bergy's rescue in his own infamous press conference, known by most as the aptly dubbed 'fan experience' PC. Later that summer, a lone bright spot came along, Alexander Radulov, amidst a sea of sideway and wretched moves in succession that spanned 14 months, in which we saw him trading away notre beau Lars, trading fan favorite PK Subban, trading for Drouin, snobbing both Radulov and lifer Andrei the General Markov, along with strongman Emelin, signing Snow Angel Picklejar Alzner, all of which turned the team from perennial playoff locks to bottom of the barrel shitsville. The fandom's impatience and distaste for the Canadiens' executive grew to outpace their love for the team. Molson's support seemed to have emboldened Bergevin as he got out of the doldrums to kick off a new era with some major beefcake; Bro-gevin (and the biceps club):

phase3bergy.png


The ostentatious bravado and flexing, bulging biceps weren't enough, with the team teetering on the edge of the precipice, to save him from becoming the greatest villain in the history of NHL managers and executives. As a matter of fact, the muscles and boldness only fitted and reinforced his growing reputation as the ultimate heel of hockey, slightly mirroring Vince McMahon's path (not the salacious criminality part, mind you), but without the noble intention to simply entertain. You could've almost called him Mr. Bergevin at that point. One could effortlessly write a pop-psychology article about meatheads hitting rock bottom and solving their woes by intensily pumping iron to mend their bruised egos, but I won't go there.

The pressure inevitably came back to haunt him, along with Covid. We then saw a stark deterioration of the derided biceps persona. I'm willing to bet he earned more than half his grey hair between 2017 and 2021. He also let his hair grow without mercy. Halfway through this new transformation, he almost kinda looked like he could've been Anton Chigurh's old man:

antonbergydaddy.png


The unkempt hobo look made a type of resurgence as his hair kept growing to epic, mad scientist-like proportions. You could tell by simply seeing him that Bergevin felt defeated and could see his end nearing, as the job had finally taken its toll:

phase4bergy.png


We can fault him for all his shortcomings, but in the summer of 2020, he used all the experience he had gained to patch up the team to a standard that saw Price and Weber offer the greatest of swan songs that lifted us to our first finals appearance since 1993. It seemed to have somewhat rejuvinated old man Bergy, sporting his best attires from his à la mode period:

bergyfinals.jpg


Unfortunetly for Marc, this was to be the highest peak he would reach, without the ultimate prize at the end, and it cost him everything. From losing his two franchise players to permanent LTIR, to losing his job a few months later when the team completely cratered because the talent well to replace them ran completely dry. Due mostly of his own doing.

I left out a lot of stuff, for the sake of brevity. It's still lenghty despite my efforts. I prefered to leave some space to remember him in images. I previously alluded to Geoff's 'hungry eyes', to symbolize how enamoured the owner seemed to be towards Bergevin. It always felt like Geoff wasn't the only one who starred lovingly at his mug and muscles. Use the following link if you need a refresher to what comes next:

(Go to 1:00 for the verse)


So in the spirit of this, let's watch a diaporama of Bergevin's time here:

*presses play at verse of 'hungry eyes' on turntable*:

memeorama02.jpg

sga-Y1-LQ-1.gif

zRzFTfQ.gif

j4aSze1.gif

grinderhoarding.gif

2hl0yq.gif

memeorama01.jpg



*abruptly stops the disk, major screeching*

I would be remiss in not offering a farewell gift to our former GM. After spitballing a few ideas, it was deemed essential that we bestow upon him a kind of lifetime achievement award. He has captured our attention for almost 10 years and sort of made his mark in the media world. It's just crazy the number of pics that will pop-up in a google image search of Bergevin. Unparalleled in the world of hockey executives, if you don't count pics from their playing days. Truly a GM for the digital age. I mean, you know you've made it when clones/proxies of yourself start appearing in major works:

elendilbergy.png


So without further ado, we at HFHabs would like to offer to Marc Bergevin this prestigious trophy. An accomplishment that will probably never be surpassed nor equalled:

clownaward.png


Farewell Marc. Best of luck.

We lay your personas to rest.

A-f***ing-men

And Habslelluia for Gorton, Hughes & St-Louis. May they save us from the horrors of the past and guide us to a better future.




(1-Marc Bergevin was unfortunately unavailable to receive his award. It seems that he doesn't want to talk to anyone anymore in the public arena of the province. Look-up JDQ article. 2-Sorry for the meme-o-rama size, there's a limit of 18 images for an OP 3-I included Bergevin's minions in the meme-o-rama because they were ultimately his creation)




Soooo... here comes the ending I promised. At the beginning of this, uhm, eugoogoly(?), I said I wanted to honor someone, but as it should've become obvious by now, it wasn't Bergevin I was looking to honor, nor celebrate. Sorry if I fooled anyone, but if there's a trophy to have, to give, it should go to people like @MoenInGlory (username not found?), @Bloumeister, @Runner77 and anyone else who made memes and jokes in the Bergevin era (some names that I lamely forget), because they made this a place worth coming to, despite the pervasive antagonism among factions and lamentable state of the team. So I wanna hear a huge collective shoutout to them! That ginormous wall of memes is not only a testament to Bergevin's supreme memeability, but stands as a towering monument to the great level of humor and passion that persists on this Sub of HF. Not only did they bring a much needed dose of levity, they also inspired others, like myself, to follow in their footsteps. You were the anti-Bergevins, bringing joy and humor, rather than the gloom and hopelessness that permeated his tenure. The trophy shouldn't be limited to them, au contraire. It belongs as much to all those who make GDTs and other interesting threads, the moderators (yes, even them!), and the whole of you, each and every poster, for coming day in and day out to dish it out about the Habs in here. For all of us, for making this the best damn board on HF. Cuz, really, I've traveled the boards, far and wide, and compared to here, most of the other ones feel like you're in a damn funeral!!

Game on!!!

Lineups will be added shortly


Since this is a funeral of sorts, I will gladly accept any requests for individual full-sized replications of the memes (gifs, jpegs and pngs) that appear in the meme-o-ramas.

Game over. This GDT win the game already
 

Fatbiggie

Unregistered User
Jul 30, 2005
2,144
3,241
Hopefully we start the game on time...can't accept these slow starts anymore

Now go get that win. Hutson will score his first tonight (I said that the last 2 games)
 

Tyson

Registered User
Mar 1, 2007
50,248
73,011
Texas
It's hybrid.

When the puck is down low and they have a chance to outnumber, they will go in and play man plus try to win the puck back and transition. When the puck goes high, they fan out into a zone concept.

The change this year is the zone is tighter in the home plate area.
Yeah but the results haven't changed...they still can't play sound D
 
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The Gr8 Dane

L'harceleur
Jan 19, 2018
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Yeah but the results haven't changed...they still can't play sound D
Meh , look at scores around the league right now , if we are getting hemmed in caved in and blown out mid season then I'll worry but everybody is getting their feet wet right now around the league, Lots of 5 and 6 pieces are getting hung on teams head to start the season
 
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Tyson

Registered User
Mar 1, 2007
50,248
73,011
Texas
Meh , look at scores around the league right now , if we are getting hemmed in caved in and blown out mid season then I'll worry but everybody is getting their feet wet right now around the league
Going on 3 years...should we expect some improvements?
 

WeThreeKings

Demidov is a HAB
Sep 19, 2006
95,645
107,249
Halifax
Yeah but the results haven't changed...they still can't play sound D

Too early to call, they didn't have a good pre-season and then had to play 4 games in 6 nights, 2 of which against top tier teams in the NHL.

I don't see the issues as a result of a structure right now, the issue is that they are doing a terrible job of getting the puck out when it's on their sticks and we will see if that stops when they get their timing back and have more cohesion as a unit.
 
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