There's an Opening...but the Opening Move Was Fatal

I absolutely abhor the way the Canadiens have been coached since a few hours before the puck was dropped on the opening faceoff of this series. Without being the biggest proponent of coaching tactics as means to win a hockey game, one thing will remain abundantly clear when all of this is said and done: Claude Julien will not have made a single move to manufacture four victories over the Habs, but Gainey's, at best, strange decisions will have killed the team.

Gainey made a terrible decision and sent the wrong message to his own players. By catapulting Georges Laraque to the first line, a player who played so rarely and poorly all year, Gainey tells his team that they're going to take on a brand new appearance before the start of the most important sequence of the year. By way of ricochet, he dismantels the only line that was doing anything in the last MONTH of the season. The team is then expected to adjust to this radically different alignment, with a new first line that will now have to play a completely different style. No time to practice, no sense of how it may turn out because it wasn't tried in the regular season for more than, say, 5 minutes. But Game 1 of the playoffs, that's a great time to experiment.

That's not the worst part of it. In moving Laraque to the first and taking Tanguay off it, Gainey is telling the players we're going to play the Boston Bruins and we're not going to do it by playing our game, Montreal Canadiens hockey. Now let's not kid ourselves, Montreal Canadiens hockey hasn't looked like a Rembrandt painting this year, but totally disfiguring the potency of the first line is too far a stretch. Before the puck is dropped, Gainey makes the statement that he's going to stray from the team's identity. You want to put Latendresse on the Koivu line, there won't be an argument here. You want to offer another line Alex Tanguay to create better balance, that's fine.

But how do you take the only sign of life this team has emitted in the last couple of months and completely dilute its strength? I like Georges Laraque. I like his persona, I love his charisma, I find him to be a gentleman who happens to have taken on a less than gentlemanly role in this league, but he's made a career out of doing what will keep him in the NHL. I admire that. But in calling a spade a spade, one cannot debate the fact that Georges cannot skate, shoot and pass with the likes of Alex Kovalev or Saku Koivu. They compute the game from a different motherboard. 

Sure, you can argue that Georges played a solid first game and controlled the play behind the net, but if I'm Claude Julien I love the way it all pans out. Control whatever you want along the boards, as long as you don't get a whiff of the slot. And if you want to call that "control" be my guest.

After having neutralized his own first line, which as a collective unit came up with a lovely goose egg in Game 1, what does Gainey do? He does it again.

And so for Game 3, the incentive to play Laraque in that position again must surely be gone, above and beyond the fact that it's just not working at all. Milan Lucic will sit Game 3 out after a terrible judgment call at the end of the last game. In doing so, he may have opened the door to a reversal that Montreal badly needs. It's a new game plan if it's Boston sans Lucic on the menu.

But win or lose on Monday night, Gainey has to close the book on the Laraque experiment. Of course, Price was ordinary again on Saturday and that will never take you anywhere in the playoffs. And while the total absence of a second line will prove to be just as fatal, and let's face it, how can you blame the GM for players who refuse to manifest any type of interest (yes, you, Andrei Kostistyn and Tomas Plekanec), Gainey's coup d'envoi set the wrong tone and gave the team an allure that may only be described as weird.