What About Bob?
The Bob Gainey era officially ends in Montreal, not with a crash but with a whimper. A well-scripted press conference and bye bye Bob, welcome unimposing NHL veteran administrator with no significant successes to his name. History will record that Gainey retired from his post, but anyone who can read between the lines (as Gainey clearly did) knew that his time was up. Montreal had turned on him.
When Gainey was first hired 6 years ago it was the first time since Sam Pollock that the Habs had had a GM worthy of the name, someone who did not pander to the press or live in fear of their barbs, a man to be respected and looked up to by the players.
Over his tenure Bob brought respectability and calm to a position that had for too long been the domain of fools (or Houles as the case may be). But this is Montreal and this is what we demand: out with the old, in with the new. So now we get some second-rate mortician to take the reigns for a year or two before he also walks the plank into the pit of ineffectual Montreal GM’s.
And then the fools will return - led no-doubt by some Pierre McGuire-esque moron who caters to the changeable whims of 40,000 failed QMHL coaches turned demagogues who ply their trade in the newspapers and call-in shows of ‘la nation’ playing arm-chair GM for the brainless hordes who gather to their soap-boxes like flies to a bug-zapper.
Maybe, 20-years hence, when we run our next ‘future Patrick Roy’ out of town and begin our 7th rebuilding, someone intelligent will look back at yesterday’s press conference as a watershed moment when this city rose up and chose mediocrity. And maybe history will remember Bob as Mua'dib, a tragic hero who saw the future - the fanatics taking the helm of the team and steering it to Armageddon - but ultimately could do nothing to stop it.
Have a good retirement Bob.