ROCKET FIRE LEFEBVRE
Habs’ AHL team finished last
Sylvain Lefebvre is a good man, as anyone who has gotten to know him will attest.
But sometimes in life — and sports — good guys finish last and that’s what happened this season to Lefebvre and the Laval Rocket, who had the worst record in the AHL (24-42-10) with him behind the bench.
On Tuesday, Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin announced Lefebvre had been fired after six seasons coaching the NHL club’s top farm team and missing the playoffs five times while being eliminated in the first round once. Larry Carrière will remain as GM of the Rocket and the future of assistant coaches Donald Dufresne, Nick Carrière and Marco Marciano will be determined once a new head coach is hired.
Dominique Ducharme, who was coach and GM of the QMJHL’s Drummondville Voltigeurs this season, is considered a leading candidate for the Rocket job since the Canadiens will surely want a bilingual head coach in Laval. The Voltigeurs finished this season with a 28-346 record and lost in the first round of the playoffs, but Ducharme led the Halifax Mooseheads to the QMJHL’s Presidents Cup championship and the Memorial Cup title in 2013 with a team that included current Canadiens centre Jonathan Drouin. Ducharme, a 45-year-old Joliette native, also coached Team Canada at the last two world junior championships, winning silver in 2017 and gold this year.
Lefebvre, a 50-year-old Richmond, Que., native, had no head-coaching experience when Bergevin hired him in 2012 to lead the AHL’s Hamilton Bulldogs after he had spent two years as an assistant with the AHL’s Lake Erie Monsters, followed by three years as an assistant with the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche.
At the Rocket’s post-mortem on Sunday in Laval, Lefebvre was uncertain what the future would hold for him and thanked the Canadiens for giving him a chance to be a head coach.
“I love what I do … I’m happy to be here,” Lefebvre said. “I’d love to come back.”
Bergevin decided Lefebvre won’t be back — and it was the right call.
Pro hockey is a results-driven business and the results simply weren’t there for Lefebvre, who had an overall 188-210-58 record during his six seasons coaching the Canadiens’ AHL farm teams in Hamilton, St. John’s and Laval. Player development (and/or scouting) has also been a concern with the Canadiens and it was time for a change at the AHL level. The decision could not have been easy for Bergevin, who is close with Lefebvre.
“I would like to sincerely thank Sylvain for his loyalty, his hard work and his contribution to the Montreal Canadiens’ organization over the past six seasons with Hamilton, St. John’s and Laval,” Bergevin said in a statement released by the Canadiens. “Challenges are extremely demanding as a head coach in the AHL, and Sylvain and his group had to overcome several difficult situations over the years. The decision to remove Sylvain from his coaching duties was a difficult one because I have a lot of respect for him and I consider him to be an excellent coach. I took the time to discuss the situation with Larry Carrière, and concluded that our development team needed a new direction in the head coaching position.”
All the blame for the Rocket finishing last this season can’t be placed on Lefebvre. A long list of injuries to the Canadiens meant 12 players were called up from Laval and the Rocket ended up using 51 players over the course of the AHL season.
“We’ve learned a lot this year in the organization,” Carrière said on Sunday. “I learned that we had a lot of depth and the depth players were so good that they stayed in Montreal. I learned that you can never have enough depth and that’s why we try to load up with players at all different levels and even at the East Coast level (with the Brampton Beast, who finished with a 28-34-10 record).
“You put together a team at the beginning of the year that you think can really go deep in the playoffs and it had the potential to do that,” Carrière added about the Rocket. “And then with the different call-ups and injuries that happened, things happened.”
Mike McCarron, the Canadiens’ first-round pick at the 2013 NHL Draft, was asked for his thoughts on Lefebvre on Sunday at the Rocket’s post-mortem.
“He’s been my coach for parts of three years now and he’s helped me tremendously,” McCarron said. “He knows the defensive game really well. That’s a hard step as a centreman coming into pro hockey is learning the defensive game and he’s helped me quite a bit.”
There were players on both the Canadiens and Rocket who talked at the end of their seasons about everyone not buying into the system they were being asked to play, which is basically the same in Montreal and Laval.
A coaching change at the AHL level is a start, but that alone won’t be enough to turn both the Rocket and Canadiens around after dreadful seasons.