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Well. Gainey must be sweating right now for two reasons. First, he's never been so active on the free agent market and has to be trying to catch his breath right now. Second, he just took a huge risk by spending 107M$ on four players over five years.
So the five year plan is over and failed. Bob Gainey has decided to clean up and change the core of the team. New, younger and hopefully better players have been signed and the aging ones are left to try their luck at free agency. But some players who left town will be hard to replace...
The reign of Saku Koivu is over. Koivu will, for the first time in his career, play for a different team than Montreal this fall. He's been the target of lots of criticism in the recent years for dozens of reasons but I hope he can finish his career away from the spotlight.
He won't surpass Jean Beliveau as the longest running Montreal Canadiens captain but somehow I think management would not have allowed it...
Kovalev, who was one of the only two along with Komisarek who were offered contracts by Bob Gainey, said all year he wanted to end his career in Montreal. So what has kept him from accepting the offer is a mystery.
But he seemed to have missed his chance to resign now. Unless Bob pulls a rabbit and clears up enough cap space somehow, he likely won't be back next year. It's too bad, I liked the enigmatic Russian and with Komisarek gone he would have been the likely candidate for captain as well as adding more punching power and size to the offense.
Why Bob Gainey talks about how "important it is for this team to have this flavour" talking about home grown talent and french canadian players when asked the question during this years NHL entry draft...and then offer nothing to Alex Tanguay is a total mystery and almost hypocritical.
With the obvious departure of Mathieu Dandenault, Patrice Brisebois, and Francis Bouillon, there are very few french speaking players. And Tanguay is still young. He can provide offense and loves playing here. Why not?
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