TRADE IS OPEN AND SHUT
Arizona got the better player: Todd
I haven’t seen a whole lot of the Arizona Coyotes the past couple of seasons — perhaps because they were rancid.
Most of what I recall of Max Domi dates back to the world juniors, when he was pretty good — and so flashy that he made P.K. Subban look like a shrinking violet. Let’s just say that if cockiness was talent, Max Domi would have been Connor McDavid.
He isn’t.
Perhaps a couple of tough years in the desert have taught the young man how to be humble. We’ll see. He has some grit, but the younger Domi is more than just a gritty winger. Or should be. He has to be better than he showed in Arizona the past two seasons. He has skills and you know he’s going to show up, which you didn’t know with Alex Galchenyuk from one game to the next.
What Domi doesn’t have is what Galchenyuk has: premium, Grade A National Hockey League talent. Galchenyuk was a No. 3 overall draft choice and deservedly so — personal issues aside.
Galchenyuk could be maddening, wandering around in the defensive zone like a guy who has blundered into the wrong party and is trying to find someone he knows. Like another departed first-rounder, Nathan Beaulieu, it sometimes seemed that he lacked the requisite grey matter to grasp the game at the NHL level.
Still, he was good enough to score 30 goals in one season while playing centre for an awful team much of that time. Good enough to thread a wrist shot through three defenders from 20 feet out, while delicately balanced on one skate.
Now that talent is gone to Arizona.
It’s becoming a June tradition: GM Marc Bergevin makes a big trade. Fans rage on social media. Geoff Molson shrugs. And the Canadiens get worse.
P.K. Subban.
Mikhail Sergachev. Galchenyuk.
The old axiom on deals says the team that gets the best player wins the trade. By that standard, you can argue over the first two deals: Subban for Shea Weber and Sergachev for Jonathan Drouin.
This one is open and shut: the Coyotes won. Baggage aside, Galchenyuk is the better player with significantly higher potential.
Is it possible that the younger Domi might be a better fit? Possibly. Is it conceivable that going to a hockey market might spark his game? Maybe.
We might expect more of the same next June if Bergevin is still around, except that he’s running out of young stars to trade. He’s running out of stars, period.
More and more, this resembles the stretch when Serge Savard and Réjean Houle emptied the Canadiens’ cupboard one trade at a time. Taken individually, the deals sometimes didn’t look that bad: It was only when you stepped back to view the overall picture that it was clear a good team had been flipped for a bad one.
If the Canadiens had one need going into this off-season apart from a top-flight centreman, it was high-octane offence. So the first move Bergevin makes is to trade away part of what little elite offensive talent he has in return for a nine-goal winger.
There’s something else going on here and it’s a failing of this club going back at least as far as the Chris Chelios trade: the Canadiens don’t deal well with players who don’t quite fit the mould.
Not every player is Brendan Gallagher, who comes to the office every day, gives it everything he has without complaint and shrugs off every hit and bad call. Some, like Subban and Galchenyuk, are high maintenance, albeit in very different ways.
The danger is that if you give up on every player who tests your patience, from Chelios and Patrick Roy to Subban and Galchenyuk, you end up with a cupboard full of players who simply aren’t good enough.
The one good thing about this trade? Don Cherry, who worships the ground Tie Domi walks on, will now have to cheer for his son in a Canadiens uniform.
That might be worth the price of admission.
The rest?
Not so much.