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Faithful and attentive readers know what I think of the Habs’ communication/marketing strategy of trying to get it into our heads with a lot of media hype, and even TV series (!), that we’re in year three (four in 2024-2025?) of the rebuild.
Pure delirium. An Orwellian rewriting of history!
“How many fingers do you see, Winston?”
To that end, I was very, very happy to hear the always lucid and pertinent Martin Leclerc on the Tellement hockey podcast very clearly remind us at the 37th minute that there had already been quite a bit of rebuilding work… before the rebuilding!
Finally, someone else who says it, who dares to talk about it, who deconstructs the myth, who understands that it’s not because you repeat a false idea that it becomes true!
In fact, if you have ten fingers (or close to it), can count just a little better than the crows and go back to the 2017-2018 season – which ended with a3rd-place selection (Kotkaniemi) – you’ll see that we’re in exactly the seventh rebuilding season in the last eight!
2017-2018: The Habs trade Plekanec to the Leafs, draft 3rd, then trade Pacioretty for Suzuki in September. There’s no photo, these are all rebuilding moves.
2018-2019: The team only wants to be competitive, but surprises in season with 96 points and misses the playoffs in a cruelly competitive Eastern Association. The Habs were in the mix against all odds. The players have remained healthy and many have had the season of their career or close to it. Caufield was drafted 15th overall, a pick that many had expected to be a top-10 pick. Caufield quickly became a key part of the reset on the fly. A strange rebuilding year. A year the Habs would no doubt have liked to have had this season…
2019-2020: The Habs campaign isn’t going anywhere. It’s cracking up everywhere. With 11 games to go, Montreal has the 9th-worst record in the NHL – 24th in the standings – when the season comes to a halt in March. Now, Bettman invents a bizarre summer tournament to make a quick buck. Montreal, a big market, took part, surprising Pittsburgh before losing in the first round to Philadelphia. They drafted Guhle 16th, but would normally have entered the lottery for Lafrenière! Clearly a year of rebuilding somewhat thwarted by, let’s say , uh, Fate?
2020-2021: Last year of Bergevin’s contract, filling his club with veterans and muscle: Anderson, Perry, Toffoli, Edmundson, Chiarot and Staal. Clearly not a rebuilding season in the GM’s mind. The 56-game “COVID” season begins in January. This is the year of the “Canadian Division”. The Habs, 18th overall, once again make the playoffs through a quirk of fate and, to everyone’s surprise, make it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. But what 99.8% of people have forgotten is that the Rangers and Stars, who missed the playoffs, seemed to have better clubs than the Habs this season…
We all know the rest. Bergevin leaves. Gorton and Hughes take over. We trade a bunch of valuable players and tank, tank and tank some more.
2024-2025: We talk about the “mix” almost like a marketing slogan, we hope with our lips, but everything points to a top-10 draft, and top-5 is really not that unlikely once again!
So, in reality, dear Winston, we’re in year 7 of 8 of the rebuild… and there may be one more before the submarine rises to the surface.
That’s a lot less marketing than “we’re in year three”!
But marketing, as in Mad Men, is exactly that: illusions, make-believe, half-truths…
A goatshow, in French.
Despite one of the most bizarre and unexpected Stanley Cup finals in history in 2021, a final that’s becoming a bit like the tree that hides the forest, the traces of thereset on the fly, Marc Bergevin’s mini-reconstruction, are still very tangible.
Many of the team’s young pillars come directly from this phase!
So where does this collective amnesia come from? Where does this collective blindness come from?
Don’t think so.
If, say, the Habs hadn’t slightly overperformed in 2018-2019, drafting him Cole Caufield at #15, would we be as hesitant to include him in the rebuild?
Then, if, say, the Habs had drafted 8thin 2020, as they were set to do, would there be as much hesitation in setting the start of the rebuild before 2022?
I don’t think so.
In short, if we go back to the summer of 2018 with KK and Suzuki, see Caufield as a top-10 in 2019, count 2020 as another top-10 (without COVID), and then anticipate another top-10/top-5 in a few months, we’ll then be at our 7th top-10 or top-10-equivalentdraft in the last eight seasons.
Doesn’t that give us a MUCH more accurate picture of the Habs rebuild as a whole?
No shame in that, it’s NORMAL and it’s SO MUCH BETTER!
But, let’s face it, it’s a picture he shouldn’t be ashamed of, because it’s a normal process for anyone who isn’t drafting Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin along the way…
It takes what it takes, and SO MUCH the better if we’re in year 7 of 8 of the rebuild!
That means the plants are growing and it’s harvest time.
If we were only in year three or four, we’d still be spreading manure…
The norm for a reasonably successful rebuild is between 8 and 14 years, with no guarantee of a Stanley Cup, as we’re seeing with the Oilers, 9 years after the McDavid draft and over 13 years after the Ryan Nugent-Hopkins draft.
You only need to reread Bill Armstrong, former employee of the St. Louis Blues, winners in 2019, 11 years after Alex Pietrangelo was drafted4th overall, to convince yourself of this…
