Montreal GM knows he already lost P.K. Subban trade (Trending Topics)

Not sure if you heard the great news, but the Nashville Predators made it through to the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs in stunning fashion, while the Montreal Canadiens got bounced in the first round by a fairly underwhelming New York Rangers team.

Haha, they traded P.K. Subban straight up for Shea Weber, who’s older and worse than him but has Certain Qualities which actually make him better, such as Leadership and Hardtoplayagainstness. So ironic, then, that it was in fact the Montreal Canadiens who got the easier draw but lost in the first round. Crazy.

No one could have seen this coming.

And while, sure, it’s very funny that Marc Bergevin owned himself into oblivion with this trade for any number of problems that anyone could have seen on the day the trade was made … like, what’s the point of bringing it up? I am, of course, not averse to a large amount of grave-dancing when things go the way you predict, but this one Bergevin saw coming even as he had a brave face about how this was the right trade for the Habs in the immediate future.

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Point being: Giggling about it, while fun and cathartic, is kinda maybe not as fun or cathartic as it should be because Bergevin already knows full well he [expletived] up and it will cost him his job at some point in the near future.

Believe me, there’s no disguising the fact that Subban is great, and should be the biggest star in the league. No one has, or indeed had, deluded themselves otherwise. He had three points in Game 1 against St. Louis and looked untouchable doing it. Montreal knew the kind of player it was losing on the ice when it traded him, as well as the player it was losing in the room. Bergevin thought, wrongly, that Weber could be better married to the system Michel Therrien wanted his team to play.

In making the trade, Montreal got rid of its only real puck-moving defenseman (leaving aside the fact that he is, in point of fact, a world-class puck-mover) and decided it would settle into a, shall we say, more methodical approach.

The Canadiens, of course, knew that by trading for a defenseman who was older, slower, and more expensive, they were banking on Weber’s ability to mesh into a doomed-to-fail system as something that would give them an immediate edge so they could compete in a weak division for the next year or three.

That’s it.

Now, was it smart for Bergevin to choose a coach with a long track record of failure over a relatively young, elite player? Of course not. Even the Buffalo organization, inept as it may be, recognized that would be a mistake.

But it’s a mistake Bergevin made as he attempted to wring just a little more competitive juice out of a roster that wasn’t really ever going to be able to truly compete for a Cup unless Carey Price got on a roll starting around April 15. Obviously we all understood right away that this was a bad idea, but at what point do you suppose the realization set in among members of the Canadiens front office that this last grand experiment had blown up in their faces?

Obviously, the jumping-off point for that discussion is the date on which Michel Therrien was fired. Did Bergevin know at that point that his cause was doomed? If you pay a hefty premium for a guy to better fit into a coach’s system, and then fire that coach, well you’re gonna have a lot of buyer’s remorse.

Now, to be fair, the Habs were able to make a major upgrade in terms of coaching quality. But a Claude Julien system is heavily reliant on three things: defensively responsible centers, elite goalies, and defensemen who can get the puck up the ice.

Montreal, to one extent or another, has the first two. Without Subban, it doesn’t remotely come close to having the third.

So the next point at which Bergevin probably realized this season was a lost cause was the trade deadline. The team’s acquisitions at that point screamed, “I have no idea how to handle this.” Obviously the team had some pretty clear needs, and Bergevin did nothing to address them, likely in large part because there was no way he could.

Where do you get a puck-moving defenseman or No. 1 center with what Montreal had to offer? Hell, even if Montreal had the raft of picks, prospects, and NHLers that, say, Toronto or Buffalo do, who’s giving up a player like that? The Brandon Davidson acquisition was the closest thing to the kind of help they needed, and while he’s a useful depth defender, they needed something more substantial.

When the season finally came to an end — prematurely in Bergevin’s book, I’m sure — the amount of harping he did on the need for a No. 1 center was not disingenuous. The Canadiens, like a lot of teams in the league, absolutely need someone like that. The protestations (some might say he doth did too much of that) about how he wouldn’t trade Carey Price for one is a smart play, because at that point you’re just taking your thumb out of one hole in the dike to plug another one.

The Canadiens need three things to be truly competitive. They have about one and a half of them, depending upon your feelings about Alex Galchenyuk’s ceiling. Trading the one surefire whole thing they have to upgrade the half thing would be foolish, of course. But where do you get that third thing, the puck-mover? You don’t, basically. Had one, gave it away.

And so while he’s not going to be fired in the next few months, the clock is now officially ticking on Bergevin. He will have wasted Subban’s prime (partly through an inability to win while he was there, and certainly by trading him away before it ended), Price’s prime and Max Pacioretty’s prime, because he never built a complete team and never had good enough coaching. That’s on him, for sure. In hockey, it should be a capital offense.

The thing is that Bergevin knew the risk. By taking on a longer, more expensive contract for an older player, he acknowledged, “Okay, this window is closing, so we might as well push all in.” It was a fatal miscalculation as to what was going to make the team competitive. Trade Subban for a center, sure, that might work. But trade Subban for a worse defenseman whose skillset doesn’t translate to the modern NHL, to please a coach whose skillset also doesn’t translate to the modern NHL? That was always going to end in catastrophe.

He didn’t know it then, but do you think Bergevin doesn’t know it now? Like every Predators win, every Subban goal, every pretty puck rush isn’t a knife in his gut? This absolutely can’t be a guy who thinks he’s done a good job, or who has a viable, realistic plan to get himself or his team out of this fix.

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These are mistakes that lead to GMs getting fired, and now he’s just watching the clock.

Then it’s up to his replacement to figure out what to do with an over-30 goalie, a nearly-30 winger, and a way-over-30 defenseman. At least Bergevin made it so Price and Pacioretty have contracts that expire in the next two seasons. That makes them very movable for an inevitable rebuild.

So honestly, the best ‘owns’ online aren’t really going to do the kind of damage you want. Bergevin’s already thought of all the good ones, and now he’s stuck with them until he doesn’t have this job any more.

The good news is that it won’t be more than a year or two before all that’s over.

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Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.

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