It's really a tradition of favoring a certain coaching and management philosophy over players who are talented but difficult to manage. To paraphrase what Bergevin said at his year-end presser, you can have all the talent in the world but if you don't have the right attitude it doesn't matter. To the Habs management group, having "the right attitude" means doing what you're told, when you're told and how you're told without asking questions or in any way appearing to defy their managerial authority. In an earlier era it meant things as seemingly banal as not earning so much money in the off-season and in side businesses that you become less dependent on the salary they pay you and thus more difficult to control. The history of this team is a history of the struggle of management and ownership to control their hired hands. Any player who they feel is getting too big for his britches gets dealt with sooner or later. In the Original Six era the Habs had farm teams good enough to beat other NHL teams so they could afford to punish star players who got out of line. There was always another superstar in waiting on the farm that a difficult-to-manage player could be replaced with. But nowadays the talent pool is thin and the Habs' farm system is mediocre so casually tossing aside talent the way they have over the past 25-30 years almost always comes back to bite them.
But they're not changing their ways any time soon.
Thank you for this.
I get a GM needing to let his coach, coach. But oh my God we have in my view suffered greatly by our GM sticking with the coach at the expense of players.
Tremblay has an issue with superstar goalie Roy ? Hey Mario, figure it out should have been the position.
We had a bunch of young skill guys under Martin but they wouldnt fit into his square holes as they were round pegs, so out they go.
MT. Do I need to say anything ? Play North-South and grind or else. And ...developing players is not my job. Lovely.
And oh yes, the coaches can just go ahead and publicly dump on players. Gainey was not somebody who did that but he let Martin go ahead. And MT and MB were just horrible that way. MB still is.
Anyway. not saying a GM should ever strip down his coach, he shouldnt, but it seems hard to believe the GM was on board with the coaches approach in all these cases, with my thinking they just deferred to the coach.
Case in point, MB gets Briere, PAP, Vanek and MT never gave these guys the time of day before they were cast aside. MB got those guys so he thought they would help.. But he defers to coach. And of course we had heard about the simmering Tremblay-Roy problems.
