CANADIENS’ BABY BOOM
With a pedigree steeped in history, Blake Geoffrion already feels he’s part of the Canadiens family,
B lake
Geoffrion has come north from his native Tennessee with some sound advice from his father.
“He told me not to worry about you guys,” Geoffrion said with a laugh Wednesday in the Canadiens’ Bell Centre dressing room, waving at a media crowd unlike any he’d seen before.
On Thursday, Geoffrion will make his home-ice Habs debut, following in the strides of his great-grandfather, Howie Morenz, his grandfather, Bernie Geoffrion, and his father, Danny. He will skate beneath Howie and Bernie’s banners that hang from the rafters, and against the Minnesota Wild he’ll absorb as much of the experience as his focus will allow.
There was no sign Wednesday that the pressure was bearing down on a fourthgeneration Canadien. And he was taking to heart a few words of wisdom from de- fenceman P.K. Subban, 22, an old sage who suggested the 24-year-old newcomer simply use the emotion he’ll feel on the ice to his advantage.
“When (Danny) played here, he said he felt the pressure,” Geoffrion said. “He was nervous. It’s a lot different for me. I was kind of disguised way down in Tennessee. You guys didn’t even know I existed for a while.
“My father grew up here, he got to see Pappy all the time,” he added of his grandfather, the legendary Boomer. “When Dad was playing here, my Pappy was the coach.”
It’s been a whirlwind two weeks for Geoffrion, acquired from the Nashville Predators on Feb. 17 for Habs defenceman Hal Gill. He reported to the Hamilton Bulldogs, played for them at the Bell Centre last Friday, was called up to the Canadiens on Monday, made his Habs debut Tuesday in Tampa Bay and on Thursday sees action on home ice with his parents in the crowd.
Grandmother Marlene Geoffrion, Boomer’s widow – “my Nana,” Blake calls her – won’t be in the house. But she, too, is part of this magic.
On Wednesday, walking to the Bell Centre from the hotel where he’s installed, Geoffrion pulled on his No. 57 jersey – honouring Boomer’s No. 5 and Morenz’s No. 7 – and joined his new team on risers at centre ice for the club’s official portrait, something “pretty special.”
“It’s an honour to wear the Geoffrion name on the back and to be a part of this family and the tradition here in Montreal,” Geoffrion said. “Pressure comes along with that, but I’m my own player. I’ll just play as hard as I can.”
The young man is embracing all that goes with his family’s legendary name. It was something for which he got a taste in 2006 when he was in town for the emotional ceremony to retire the sweater of Boomer, who’d died the morning of the bannerraising.
“I remember hearing all these stories growing up about my Pappy,” he recalled. “I knew he was a superstar but I didn’t know what it meant until I got here, people coming up to us, offering condolences on our loss, telling us he was a great man. I couldn’t believe these people recognized his grandsons.”
But it’s going wrong for Wilson, and for Burke, as surely as it has gone wrong for all the others for 45 years. Only louder, and with more acrimony.
Their predecessors were not bad people. They meant well. A few came with something resembling credentials, many did not. The latter were mostly cronies or ill-chosen functionaries of the eccentric Harold Ballard or, under subsequent owners, simply ill-chosen.
Some were famous players, like George Armstrong, Dick Duff and Red Kelly and, on the management side, Ken Dryden, or sons of famous players, like John Ferguson Jr.
There have been Gm-coach combinations, in that time, that everyone knew going in were just never going to work, but they happened anyway – mainly under Ballard’s loopy stewardship.
The 10 seasons encompassing 1982 through 1991, for example, when the Maple Leaf GMS were Gerry Mcnamara, Gord Stellick and Floyd Smith – a period in which Mike Nykoluk, Dan Maloney, John Brophy, George Armstrong, Doug Carpenter and Tom Watt coached the club – were basically a lost decade. Those coaches’ cumulative winning percentage was .390.
The specific nadir was the final four-plus seasons of the Mcnamara administration, when Maloney and Brophy went 109-211-33 for a .355 batting average.
Pat Burns and Cliff Fletcher, Pat Quinn and Ken Dryden were the exceptions, but even they were never quite exceptional enough.
It was against this back drop of nearly unrelieved mediocrity that Wilson and then Burke, in that order, walked onstage in 2008: Wilson from a perennial contender in San Jose and, before that, a 1998 Stanley Cup final appearance with Washington and even before that, a memorable 1996 World Cup of Hockey championship with Team USA; Burke with a 2007 Cup ring in Anaheim and a curriculum vitae that included successful (if ultimately thankless)
The Leafs had virtually no talent on the ice or in the system.
stints with the NHL and the Vancouver Canucks.
Burke and Wilson were old friends and had played college hockey together. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been a productive partnership.
Well, maybe one reason. The Leafs had virtually no talent on the ice or in the system, and were essentially starting over, 41 years into the Stanley Cup drought.
Burke’s harshest critics will tell you now, with the benefit of hindsight – and some of them, to be fair, always thought so – that he was more bluster than actual brilliance, that he made a career out of moving up in the 1999 draft to get both Henrik and Daniel Sedin, that he inherited Bryan Murray’s founda- tion to win the Stanley Cup in his second year as Ducks GM, and that his desire to take the Toronto job was fired by his endless love of the spotlight.
His supporters, on the other hand – count me, stubbornly, in this group – credit him (and his longtime lieutenant and eventual successor in Vancouver, Dave Nonis) with laying the groundwork for the Canucks team that is on pace to win a second consecutive Presidents’ Trophy, point to his acquisitions of Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger in successive seasons as the keys to the Ducks’ 2007 Cup, and believe he knew before he sought out the Toronto post that he would be taking on the most infuriating enigma in hockey. And relished the challenge.
Wilson’s detractors say he never got the job done with a talented San Jose team, so why would anyone expect him to succeed with this motley bunch?
Did Burke and Wilson really think they would have time to turn it around in Toronto? Maybe they did.
But four seasons in, after changing everything and nothing, it looks as though only one of them will survive to see how the five-year plan turns out. And while the death-watch persists, the GM and coach can think of nothing better than to blame the media, and the pressure, and the trade deadline. It is, frankly, unworthy of them.
Once upon a time, in the most dispiriting Maple Leafs era of all, a rare illuminating moment was John Brophy’s Profanity Hall of Fame rant following a loss in Minnesota in which the white-haired veteran of the minor leagues hung the F-bomb a record 72 times, using it as noun, verb, adjective and adverb.
He was so mad at his gutless team, he actually sent an assistant coach out to find the Toronto scribes and call them back in for a second tirade.
Wilson knows all the words, but don’t expect to hear them. As he slowly walks the plank, he knows that aiming them at the players any longer is only telling half the story. Of the other half, he dare not speak.