ADDING FUEL TO CH FIRE
Therrien plays blame game
Early in December, I wrote a column about Michel Therrien being the Rodney Dangerfield of NHL coaches, not getting the proper respect for what he had accomplished with the Canadiens.
At the time, the Canadiens had a 19-4-3 record, ranked second in the NHL in offence, third in defence, fourth on the power play and second in penalty killing. Since being hired by general manager Marc Bergevin before the start of the 2012-13 season, Therrien had a 144-68-26 record.
How times have changed. Now Therrien and the Canadiens have become a joke — including John Scott, who scored his first goal with the AHL’s St. John’s IceCaps Wednesday night as a punchline — but their fans aren’t laughing. One fan put it this way in a comment on the hockeyinsideout. com website after Wednesday night’s 3-2 loss to the Avalanche in Colorado: “Habs are the new Leafs”.
My earlier column on Therrien was written a week after Carey Price went down with a lowerbody injury that the coach said at the time would keep the superstar goalie “out for a week.” Price had missed three weeks earlier in the season with the same injury. This time Price has been out for 12 weeks and counting — and is probably done for the season — and the Canadiens are still hiding the exact nature of the injury. Are they protecting the goalie or the medical staff? A joke. Since I wrote that column on Therrien, the Canadiens have gone 8-23-1 and you can’t put all the blame on Price’s injury. Not when the Canadiens have scored more than two goals in only eight of the last 32 games. As Therrien likes to say, you need to score three goals to win in today’s NHL — no matter who is in goal.
Every NHL coach has a shelf life and Therrien’s expired Wednesday night when he threw his best player — P.K. Subban — under the bus after the loss in Colorado.
With just over two minutes left in the game, Subban lost the puck inside the Colorado blue line when he was poke-checked by Mikhail Grigorenko, lost an edge and fell to the ice. A three-onthree went the other way, with no real apparent danger until captain Max Pacioretty gave up on his backcheck and left his man — and Jarome Iginla was suddenly all alone in front of the net to score the winner.
But instead of criticizing his captain after the game, Therrien blamed the loss on Subban and his “individualistic” play.
“An individual mistake cost the game late in the game,” Therrien told reporters in Colorado.
“There’s a lot of positive about that game,” the coach added. “The work ethic … we play as a team. Unfortunately, at the end of the game when we don’t play as a team we could be in trouble and this is what happened.”
Here’s a question for Therrien: How bad do you think your team would be if you didn’t have P.K. Subban?
The defenceman leads the Canadiens in scoring with 5-39-44 totals and is plus-6 while averaging a team-high 25:59 of ice time. He has been on the ice for 56.5 per cent of the goals the Canadiens have scored this season.
When Bergevin gave Therrien a strong vote of confidence last month, saying he would not fire the coach this season “no matter what,” the GM added: “When you play not to make mistakes, you make mistakes. When you play not to lose, you lose. And that’s my message to our players.”
Bergevin added: “As a former player, I’ve been through it. You just try and say you don’t want to be the guy to make that mistake. It plays in your head and that’s what, as a team, we have to get out of it. We need to do this to start winning hockey games.”
Whether you like Subban or not — his flamboyant style definitely rubs some fans, and surely some teammates, the wrong way — he is a “winner.” The Canadiens need more winners — and that’s what Subban was trying to do Wednesday night: win the hockey game.
But the coach wants the most talented player on his team to simply put the puck in deep, play for overtime and the loser point, and hope someone else might be able to create offence. How’s that working so far, coach?
Pacioretty, the team’s leading goal-scorer with 20, has one goal in his last 12 games and is minus-14 during that span. Pacioretty didn’t speak with the media after the game, but Lars Eller — who has 10 goals in 58 games — did and mentioned Subban’s mistake.
“I think we played concentrated for 58 minutes, and one mistake and we paid for it,” Eller said.
“We can’t give up,” added Eller, who has two goals in his last 12 games. “I think we showed today that we are not a team that gives up. But you know, it’s just disappointing again that a mistake like that ... cost us the game when we worked hard for 58 minutes. It’s a disappointing outcome.”
Said Subban: “If I do that play all over again and I don’t lose an edge, I probably take it down the wall and create something. But in this case, I lost an edge and the puck turns over. It doesn’t really matter. You got to get the puck in deep.
“If I had to do it over again, I probably would try not to have lost an edge,” the defenceman added. “I think I put myself in positions a lot where I have control (of the puck) in one hand and I use my body to shield it in that position. (Grigorenko) didn’t push me, he didn’t really do anything. I just crossed over and lost an edge and the puck was there for him. Maybe my next play would have been to rim it deep right away, but I didn’t anticipate losing an edge in that situation.”
Subban must be scratching his head. His GM sends a message that he won’t fire his coach and wants the players to play to win and not worry about mistakes. Then when the team’s best player makes a mistake, the coach throws him under the bus.
What a joke.