Morning Bell for Thursday DECEMBER?!!? 1st, 2011

Today's honorary ringer: Brian Burke

- "I've made some terrible trades in my career". - Brian Burke

You have to respect how candid the Leafs GM is. Telling it like it is, not insulting knowledgeable hockey fans with stupid omertà-like silence or ambiguous and restrained speak. Calling a spade a spade because the whole world knows it's a spade. God love you Burkie and the personality you bring to the game. Monsieur Gomez, Monsieur Price,... it gives me hives.

Habs lose to the Ducks last night, go 0-43 on the PP and prompt duck management to fire their coach Randy Carlyle. What does that tell you Pierre Gauthier. What. Nothing? No? Really? Boudreau collects 2 days of welfare and makes it back behind an NHL bench. Now that's socially conscientious stuff.

I would have rather stayed up last night to watch a documentary on mayonnaise.

Boston goes 12-0-1 in November and capped off the month by beating the Leafs. The champs are playing like it now. We are playing like asparagus.

Egypt is waiting for election results. DC is in Cairo counting the ballots. He's taken Jacques Martin with him in the hopes of getting him mummified.

Perry Pearn What Were You Thinking!

Molson: You guys see how many empty seats in the stands last night?

Gauthier: It wasn't so bad.

Molson: It wasn't so bad? Are you fucking crazy? Do you know how many hotdogs I brought home in a doggy bag?

Gauthier: They give you those?

Molson: I paid for them, who else they gonna give em to? Until someone pays 12 bucks a pop for them they've got my name all over em.

Gauthier: This team needs a boost. I don't know what to do. Maybe I should call a press conference and say some weird shit again.

Molson: It's that freaking Perry Pearn man, HE'S KILLING ME!

Gauthier: Pearn, really? I don't think he's got that much of an impact.

Molson: Are you kidding? He's our special units guy.

Gauthier: Yeah, and our special units are real special. I'm very attached to them.

Molson: What the fuck are you talking about Pierre. Don't give me that weird press conference shit again.

Gauthier: Ok, I agree, we need to shake the boys up, getting rid of Perry will scare the pants out of them.

Molson: Good stuff, but there's more. I want someone from the training team to randomly turn off the lights  in the room at some point today while the guys are suiting up. Maybe one of the trainers even screams boo! Scare the shit of the boys and get their heads on right. That'll set them straight for the season.

Gauthier: What?

Molson: Then, I want you guys to carve a hole under the long dining room buffet table and have a guy pop out of the spaghetti serving bowl and scream Boo! and scare the shit out of the players. Fuck that'll show these guys to slack off.

Gauthier: This is your idea of motivating the team?

Molson: I used to take honey out of a bee's ass to make the honey ale when I was a kid, Pierre. I told you that before.

Gauthier: Geoff I'm really confused and my head's starting to hurt.

Molson: Fucking Perry Pearn. You know I caught that cheap bastard using a Samsung tablet? At the rate we pay him he couldn't even get a first generation iPad? You know he still uses BETA video to work on reviews with the players? I hear he even asked PK to play with sunglasses on the point to freak the other team out.

Gauthier: Who told you this?

Molson: Mathieu Darche, he tells me everything.

Gauthier: Last week Pearn was playing poker with the other assistant coaches and he goes all in with a Jack-10, off suit. Who the hell goes all in with that hand? I'm telling you he was killing this team.

Gauthier: That's not a bad hand...

Molson: You know what did it for me? He brought a bouillabaisse to a pot luck at our house last year. How the fuck are we supposed to eat that? Bring me a salad, a cake, a chicken for god's sake!

Gauthier: What's a bouillabaisse. Does it taste like coriander? I don't like coriander much. Never cared for the stuff really.

Molson: Hey Gauthier! WAKE UP! We've got serious issues here and you're talking to me about coriander?! Get down there and fire Pearn's ass.

Gauthier: Will. do.

Molson: But offer him another job within the organization. Tell him we want to keep him on as a cook. That bouillabaisse was fucking delicious.

Occupy This

Jack Todd called for heads today.

We thought about doing that too.

Call for heads, ask for a change. Rattle off a long list of failed draft picks, trades, line changes, timeouts. Demand a revolution. See everything in black. Perceive ineptitdude everywhere.

Had the team been 6-1 instead of 1-6, we would have interpreted everything Gainey and Gauthier have done as the stuff of Mensa. Drafting PK, drafting Price, having the inner fortitude to trade Halak, signing Cammalleri, reeling in a leader like Gill...and so on.

Brian Burke laughs at media criticism. He aptly says, if these people knew anything about hockey, they would be in hockey (that must hurt, Pierre McGuire).

So where does that leave the media? And the poor bloggers? Are they not to criticize because they don"t know what they're talking about? Are they reduced to silence because they're not in the room with the boys? Can we not draw any conclusions?

It's so easy to fall prey to the fire the coach banter. It's just as easy to indulge in overhyping when things are going right.

All in all, neither really belongs.

When evaluating the talent pool in the NHL's teams front offices the prevailing sentiment is that there are about 4 or 5 phenomenal general managers, while everyone else is fortunate to occupy the position. That isn't to say that these GM's are incompetent, it just means that their natural skill set isn't as polished as the privileged few who year in, year out, find the way to ice a very competitive hockey team, regardless of cap, injury or drafting issues.

Pierre Gauthier has made some incredibly questionable moves, some a neophyte would have hesitated on. I think Bob Gainey and Gauthier knew when they signed Gomez that he wasn't getting the star player from New Jersey. Gomez had already lost a step in his Ranger years but he wasn't playing in the intelligent Devil system that, incredibly, while focusing on stingy defence, still affords the star players the platform to bury the net. (We criticize the Devils for having killed hockey but while they were allegedly doing that, guys like Gionta, Elias, Gomez, Holik, Guerin and company were still putting up better individual numbers than most Habs have compiled in that time.)

One thing is for certain, when compiling the cons list for Gomez, Gauthier could easily point to a heavy contract but not to the possibility that the forward would suddenly become the newest 40-40 guy on the team. That is to say, scoring a goal every 40 games while barely reaching 40 points on the season.

Gomez and Cammalleri struggled offensively last year. They had the worst seasons in their respective careers. Is it the system Martin has implemented? Does that really make sense? That's not really his track record. Players like Martin Havlat, Marian Hossa and Daniel Alfredsson blossomed under his tutelage. Both Zdeno Chara and Wade Redden had strong offensive contributions. All Martin needed was a quality goaltender to make a dent in the playoffs.

We can point to Gauthier's caving to the Markov camp and aquiescing to their demand for a third year on the contract...

Are Martin and Gauthier really that bad? They may, they may not be. We don't know what the inner dynamics of the team are. As an organization, rest assured, their primary goal is to turn a profit, the largest one available. On a whole, the Canadiens are succeeding admirably at doing this. And this is where we may be very justified in pitching tents on de la Gauchetière.

The beef we have with Gauthier and Martin lies in their inability to relay anything of substance to the public. This disdain for the media and the right to convey any message of meaning or importance to the fans that line their pockets is nothing less than offensive. I don't need them to be Michael Winslow from Police Academy rattling off every sound and noise under the sun at a press conference. But give us something. The corporate greed that has seen ticket prices rocket since the lockout, the profit obsessed mentality that has seen the brass carve out the seating chart at the Bell Centre to squeeze every possible penny out of your pocket while the team has won so little in the playoffs - they speak to a sense of priority that isolates the sense of belonging a fan yearns for. The seating chart today looks like a board game on an acid trip. The team has begun to speak through silence. We don't care about you, because we are market proof and whatever we do, you have shown us that the number on the board game in game out reads 21 073.

It's a dangerous game to play and the lead now belongs to Geoff Molson. Some will say forget it, as long as they win I don't need them to be Brian Burke. I disagree. While I don't need the forthcoming candour of the Leafs colourful GM, I do expect some shades of charisma from at least one of your bridges to the public - the coach or the GM. Why? Because it's in harmony with the "feeding off" factor. The team feeds off the public, often times a deciding contributor on the ice. And the public feeds off the team and how it presents itself. Phil Esposito made a passionate plea for patience and understanding to the masses when Russia was showing Canada the ropes during the Summit Series in 1972. All of a sudden, the country empathize with the players. Win or lose, they would be a team Canada could be proud of.

The fact is, the team is tanking today and Gauthier is still giving us the bizarre distant descriptions of a "Monsieur Gomez" here and a "Monsieur Price" there. MONSIEUR?!! Are you serious?!! Have you guys completely lost touch with what this team represents to the public? They are not Monsieur. They are Guy, Patrick, Cammy. They are Carey, Larry, PK. They feel like family. They aren't a Canada Revenu agent.

Is it early to ask for firings? Maybe it is. Do we know on what grounds? The record isn't enough. Coaches have been let go with decent records on their performance sheets. Look at Marc Crawford last year, fired after a 95-point season. If emotion is required to will this team back to life, there may be cause for concern. If Muller was in fact the spark that made the room feel tighter, warmer, closer then the intangible that is communication becomes just as important as the ability to score on the power play, or make an important save, or dive for a key shot block.

Can that passion be relayed to the players? The fans do not see it and the code of omertà that has shrouded this organization for years may create a disconnect that may begin with 21 072 and counting...