Every Habs GM Candidate is Bad
Ironic how the most restrictive hiring process has the least qualified candidates
Welcome to the Montréal Canadiens where we shrink the pool of possible General Manager candidates by 80% and then interview complete bozos who are not remotely qualified for one of the toughest jobs in professional sports management.
The leaked list is a real who’s-who of nobodies and never-beens.
In terms of ex-NHLers we have heard mention of Mathieu Darche, Daniel Brière, Marc Denis, Roberto Luongo, Stephane Quintal, and Patrick Roy.
Other names: player agent Émilie Castonguay, Canada women’s national team head coach Danièle Sauvageau, and another player agent in Kent Hughes.
First, the former NHLers
Mathieu Darche
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — Yes
What has Mathieu Darche accomplished in his playing and post-playing career to merit an interview for the GM position of the most important hockey club in the history of the sport? He’s some sort of front-office guy with the Tampa Bay Lightning… but what does that even mean?
His candidacy reminds me of a certain other bozo who was Director of Player Personnel of the winning Chicago Blackhawks team; years later, during the Kyle Beach depositions, it would be revealed that Marc Bergevin was essentially a mail room clerk and his presence was negligible in important meetings and he was totally out of the loop of important decisions. It totally exonerated him from the charges of the Kyle Beach case but revealed (and reinforced) the notion that he was underqualified for the GM position he got with the Habs in 2012 and his contribution to the success of the Chicago Blackhawks was therefore minimal.
He was a glorified scout + mail room clerk who liked to joke around the office and he should’ve never been the GM of the Habs.
I see no reason to credit Mathieu Darche for a single thing the Tampa Bay Lightning have accomplished — considering the architect of their success, their former GM Steve Yzerman, is now managing Detroit and reassembling yet another hockey team with his standards of excellence.
Following Yzerman’s departure, former Habs Assistant GM Julien BriseBois took the reigns and successfully shepherded the team to two consecutive Stanley Cups — one of which came at the expense of the Bergevin’s Habs who were thoroughly and easily dismantled in five short games.
BriseBois can take some credit and deserves some plaudits, though most in the know would give a lion’s share of credit to Yzerman for building a hockey club that has been praised for striving for excellence in all facets.
So where the heck does Mathieu Darche come in?
His playing experience was as a sub-journeyman who toiled in the AHL, he’s a graduate of McGill Business School which is not a top ranked program like Columbia or Imperial College Business School (and quite average really), and when he was a talking head on hockey media (RDS, etc) he lacked worthwhile insight or input and was notably boring. In short: he’s underqualified.
I wish I could find any evidence that this man has any qualifications to manage the city of Montreal, the religion of the Canadiens, or the players therein. I can’t find any reason to give the keys of a tricky rebuild with an awful set of prospects and a bad cap situation to a guy who worked at a medium sized shipping and logistics company after retirement and supposedly sucked at even that.
Daniel Brière
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — Yes
This guy is the current manager of an ECHL team. He’s not sufficiently experienced to manage the jewel of all hockey teams.
He also infamously two-timed the Habs during contract negotiations when he was a highly desired Free Agent in the summer of 2007 — more power to him for doing it and getting paid, but a respectable hcokey club would never entertain this guy again. Under Marc Bergevin’s leadership the Habs gave Danny Brière, at the end of his career, an 8,000,000 USD contract to produce 25 points (37 pts total after trading him).
Marc Denis
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — Yes, he’s a part of it
A TV commentator is not qualified for the Habs GM position no matter how erudite he seems. Raise your damn standards.
On the other hand, he is involved in a committee which seeks to modernize the Québec Major Junior Hockey League so maybe he can have some ideas. That said, he’s not remotely qualified to be the GM even if he’s got good ideas. A GM has to have a slew of skills and experiences - Denis seems like an “ideas man” at best.
Roberto Luongo
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — No
Luongo is a child of Montreal and as a professional has seen it all — he’s won medals with Team Canada and he’s been to the Cup Finals with Vancouver. His playing experience is second to none. Currently his title is Special Advisor to the GM which means… I don’t know what it means.
He’s not very experienced in this role having been there less than five years and I’m not sure how much input he has in scouting and player development. Given his playing experience and personality, he seems interesting and resilient enough to merit a look but he nonetheless seems underqualified to run the whole show.
If he gets the GM position it will be because Gorton will run a lot of the hard skill tasks such as Contracts, Scouting, and the Draft while eg. Luongo would get the soft skill tasks such as managing the coaches and players, convincing players about “the Project” (whatever that may be), and setting the tone for the organization.
Stephane Quintal
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — Yes
Quintal is a bizarre choice. He was part of NHL hockey ops (player safety) and did a… not notable job. He’s been since succeeded by hypocrite and former punching bag George Parros.
I don’t know anything about his post-playing career but he seems straight out of the Bergevin Mold as a player. A journeyman who started in the “Old School Era”… I’m not convinced he has anything worthwhile to offer the club.
Maybe he’s a very very nice guy, who knows, but he certainly doesn’t seem ambitious.
Patrick Roy
Tightly Connected to the QC Hockey Old Boy’s Club (ie Media) — No, they fear him
Patrick Roy is the only “winner” on this list - while Brière and Luongo have hit some highs in their career, it is only Patrick Roy who is a real living legend.
That superlative level of success and his personal audacity affects everything else about Patrick Roy. While he is connected to the QC Hockey Mafia he’s also way out of their league so as far as I can tell they hold no influence over him. Contrast with Mathieu Darche and it is not even a comparison — we know who would wilt under the media pressure and who wouldn’t.
If Jeff Gorton is interviewing Patrick Roy it wouldn’t be for nothing. I don’t need to go over everybody’s misgivings of Patrick Roy — that he’s a hothead, that he quit on the Avalanche while head coach, that his character is “too strong”.
I have no defense of those aspects… but I pose this question: who embodies No Excuses more than Patrick Roy?
Under Bozo Marc Bergevin the Habs suffered under 10 years of lowered and lowering expectations, “stakeholder management” and hypocrisy. Bozo Bergevin instilled a culture of hockey incoherence in Montreal — the team was neither skilled, nor fast, nor tough, nor “gritty”. Some players were favoured childs and others were given tough treatment. There was no identity because Bergevin wasn’t capable of defining, much less imposing, a coherent concept to the organization. The club was highly reactive, highly conservative, and highly dysfunctional in all facets.
If Patrick Roy + Jeff Gorton can work together, they would probably firstly define their organization’s values (eg “whatever it takes”) and have Patrick Roy pursue the club’s objectives with gusto — to me that means the club would hire skills and talent coaches, it would invest in the AHL and ECHL clubs, it would invest in scouting and talent acquisition, it would instill a culture of excellence that only people like Yzerman and Patrick Roy can really embody. How can a player look Patrick Roy in the face and tell him there wasn’t anything more he could’ve done? Impossible.
Many years ago Geoff Molson said No Stone Left Unturned and proceeded not to do a damn thing; the only name on this awful list of candidates who remotely approaches that mentality is Patrick Roy. The born winner.
That said, he is also underqualified for the GM position. He has no experience managing a professional hockey team and his personality will cast a long shadow.
But I fear what will happen if this hockey club if it turns its back on yet another living legend after what Molson and Bergevin did to Larry Robinson. Patrick Roy is a guy who’d bleed for success and who has bled for the success of the Habs, so I cannot imagine rejecting him in favour of a nobody like Mathieu Darche or Daniel Brière.
Second, the other three bozos
Émilie Castonguay
If anyone in hockey media is seriously supporting Castonguay’s candidacy know that they’re virtue signaling their social equality bona fides (at best) and actively want the worst for the Habs otherwise.
She is not qualified.
She has one notable client, Alexis Lafrenière who is still on his entry level contract, and otherwise she has very little exposure to the NHL world. She attained a finance bachelor’s degree that she earned while playing hockey for Niagara University which is notable for being the number 2 ranked “Best Value Schools Regional Universities North”. Following a short internship with the Canadiens organization, she earned a law degree from University of Montréal and has since become a player agent.
Very little experience as a player agent, no professional hockey experience, and no front-office experience outside of a brief internship. Give me a break.
Danièle Sauvageau
A former police officer, she’s the head coach of the Canadian Women’s National Team. She was then assistant coach of a QMJHL team that folded (the Montréal Rockets), following that the GM of the University of Montréal college women’s hockey team, and then in 2021 as the GM of “the Montréal team in the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association” — which is, I have no idea.
Honestly, I like her — she seems ambitious and as adequately qualified as a woman could be in the highly male-dominated hockey world. She could be a fine Assistant GM in support of the goals of the new GM and Jeff Gorton but then again what does Assistant GM even mean? The buck stops with the GM (and Jeff Gorton), everyone else is more or less part of that person’s regime and direction.
Kent Hughes
Unlike Castonguay, Kent Hughes has a significant portfolio of NHLers he represents and a long history of getting big deals for his clients — he got Vincent Lecavalier’s monster deal and Josh Anderson’s too. I can’t find much on him or his credentials however. I’m not convinced he’s going to want to jump from Player Agent to GM and if he does, to me it’s a big question mark: why would he?.
I’m also wary of two non-NHLers leading the Habs. I know we should move past the Old Boy’s Club but the club exists and we don’t need the Habs to run against the grain — let us learn to walk and then run first without soiling our trousers before we start innovating. The problem of Bergevin wasn’t that he was a former NHLer, it was that he was a bozo. With Gorton and Hughes, I’d be concerned the Habs lack someone who has pro-experience and can relate to relevant stakeholders from that angle.
Finally, our conclusion
There are no good candidates, there are no shoo-ins.
A new GM is a new regime with a new court. If we want a clean break from the past, we need to avoid the QC Hockey Mafia types (Denis and Darche) and avoid the likes of those who are clearly underqualified (Brière, Quintal, Castonguay). It’s a tough gig, no need to make it tougher.
I hope Gorton has an open mind and can see all the angles here. I hope he makes the right decisions and gets the Habs back on the road to respectability.
As for my picks?
I don’t like any of the options before me but if I had to choose from these: I’d go with Patrick Roy as GM for his otherworldly strength of character and Sauvageau as AGM for her experience in hockey in Québec. Both would fit neatly with what Jeff Gorton seems to be lacking and if the Habs are to be made into a successful Québecois hockey club the Habs need to embrace success and not shy away from it or lower standards or make excuses — Roy and Sauvageau both fit the bill.
Thank you for reading, if you liked this article please share with your friends and fellow Habs fans. I look forward to being flamed on Reddit by never-say-die BargainBin Bergevin fans.
Denis is also VP hockey operations for a Q (chicoutimi I think) team