Indeed it’s sad when a good warrior and captain such as Saku Koivu is finished as a Montreal Canadien and will carry on elsewhere. We all loved and appreciated what he did for the team and city as a great player and a man who gave his time and money to hospitals and sick kids and other organizations.

But I have to take a hard-nosed approach here. Except when I was a kid and idolized the Rocket and Harvey and Beliveau and the rest, I’ve always gone for the bottom line, which is winning. I got used to hockey being strictly a business a long time ago, and realized that seldom will you see anyone remain with one club for an entire career. Players come and go, and that’s fine. The main thing is the team. A winning team. And if the team wins, you’ll love the new players.

You can criticize Bob Gainey all you want for landing small, skilled players, and for not re-signing others. But you would’ve been even more upset if Gainey had sat still and changed very little. Did you like the team last year? I didn’t. They barely made the playoffs, and were quickly and embarrassingly shoved aside by the Boston Bruins. Montreal was not a team to scare anyone, and changes, even unpopular ones, were crucial.

Do you know exactly what has transpired behind the scenes? Was there a divided dressing room, as we heard from time to time? Did Koivu actually want out of Montreal, possibly to join his brother in Minnesota? And I know you’ll wince on this one, but Koivu, in the last year or two, became quite mediocre on the ice, and good man or not, he wasn’t helping the team a great deal.

It’s all about winning. It’s the team as a whole. If the Canadiens can win the Stanley Cup with twenty guys like Sean Avery or Jarkko Ruutu for example,  then I’m happy. This club was going nowhere fast, once again. And going nowhere every year gets old. Aren’t you tired of that?

I want a great team back, so if Koivu or Alex Kovalev or anyone else isn’t re-signed and is an unpopular decision, then so be it. It’s time for a big change. Time to try something different.

2008-2009                                                                       2009-2010

Steve Begin                                                                        Brian Gionta

Matt D’Agostini                                                                 ?

Chris Higgins                                                                      Scott Gomez

Saku Koivu                                                                          ?

Andrei Kostitsyn                                                               Andrei Kostitsyn

Sergei Kostitsyn                                                                 Sergei Kostitsyn

Tom Kostopoulos                                                               ?

Alex Kovalev                                                                        ?

Robert Lang                                                                           Mike Cammalleri

Maxim Lapierre                                                                    Maxim Lapierre

Georges Laraque                                                                   Georges Laraque

Guillaume Latendresse                                                       Guillaume Latendresse

Tomas Plekanec                                                                      Tomas Plekanec

Alex Tanguay                                                                           ?

Francis Bouillon                                                                      Hal Gill

Patrice Brisebois                                                                      ?

Mathieu Dandenault                                                                ?

Josh Gorges                                                                                 Josh Gorges

Roman Hamrlik                                                                          Roman Hamrlik

Mike Komisarek                                                                          Jaroslav Spacek

Andrei Markov                                                                            Andrei Markov

Ryan O’Byrne                                                                                Ryan O’Byrne

Jaroslav Halak                                                                              Jaroslav Halak

Carey Price                                                                                     Carey Price

I’m tired of small Canadiens teams. I want some big guys.

Hoping it all works out.

So many teams were interested in signing him. How come? He was one of the Canadiens’ worst defencemen last season. He has no idea what to do with the puck. He doesn’t score goals. He got pummelled by Milan Lucic. He made no impact whatsoever with Montreal. All he is is big and strong. It doesn’t make him dangerous, or a power-play guy, or a puck-handler. He doesn’t seem to be even a good fighter, and he was a liability in front of poor Carey Price and Jaroslav Halak, both of whom attempted almost nightly to bail him out after he gave the puck away.

Now he’s a Leaf. Ain’t it sweet? At least Hal Gill knows how to make the safe pass out of his zone, something Komisarek never figured out.

Everybody’s raving about Komisarek and how he’ll be big part of the re-building of the Leafs. I think it’s a joke. He’s tremendously overrated. He’s called an all-star, but we know how he became an all-star - when fans did their thing with the voting procedure.

Montreal had terrible problems on defence last year. Well, I’m here to say much of the reason was Komisarek, with his bad passes and brain-dead penalty-taking.

Toronto can have him. It’ll be funny when he passes up the middle, right on the stick of Scott Gomez or Mike Cammalleri or any other Hab, and we win the game because of it.

Through it all, through his bungling and costing the team in so many ways, he still felt he deserved a big raise. And somehow he’s managed to convince all the experts that he’s some kind of big-time star. That’s his biggest accomplishment so far. Fooling the experts.

Hey Leaf fans, don’t get too excited by this signing.

He’s only 5′9, 185 lbs, which means we’re going to hear all year from people like Don Cherry that the Habs aren’t going anywhere because they’re too small. It’s a good thing we got giant Hal Gill to balance things out a little.

Doesn’t it boggle the mind the kind of dollars being thrown around? Cammalleri will be putting 6 million a year for five years in his wallet. Hopefully he’ll score at least 39 again this year.

Size we needed. Power play specialist we needed. These two could contribute greatly to the team. So I’m fine with these decisions.

Mike Komisarek, I’m not fine with. If and when he picks another team, I’ve got lots to say.

Frankly, I don’t know what to think about this. Yes, Higgins underachieved with the Canadiens, never blossoming into the player the organization thought he would become. Same for Gomez in New York. He never became the star on Broadway they thought he’d be, like he was when he was in New Jersey. There, he was an up-and-coming young gun, a two-time Stanley Cups winner over in the swamp.

The problem also remains that Gomez stands to make a silly 8 million this season, which means the bank is perilously close to being broke in Habtown as far as nabbing other players from out there goes. 

It also seems sad that the Habs gave up on McDonagh, who was expected to amount to something in Montreal. Maybe he wasn’t developing the way they thought, or maybe Gainey just really likes Gomez and decided to pay a hefty price.

If this is all the movement Gainey makes, there’s going to be a lot of disappointed Habs fans who understand as much as the brass that the Canadiens aren’t about to set the world on fire with the existing team as is.

Maybe this will all work out. Gomez will shine as a Canadien, and Gainey will end up looking like Sam Pollock. It’s going to be a wait-and-see.

This is what I know about Gomez. I saw him play in Powell River against the home town Kings when he was with the BCHL South Surrey Eagles. He was a huge star in this league, and fans came out to see him. But in Powell River, there were a group of about ten people in the stands who rode him unmercifully, and Gomez got so upset, he started waving his stick and answering back to the hecklers.

When the game began, Gomex was great. He was a beautiful, if somewhat unorthodox skater, and he was great carrying the puck from his end to deep into Powell River’s. But, at about the five minute mark, and maybe because the hecklers had done their job, Gomez was involved in some nasty business on the ice and was promptly thrown out.

So I saw him for five minutes. But I liked the five minutes worth.

Gainey says Canadien fans should be a patient bunch. Doesn’t he realize who he’s talking to here?

You want patience? We haven’t won the cup since 1993. That’s about a hundred years ago.

We’re not Toronto Maple Leafs fans, Bob. They haven’t seen their team win the cup since 1967, and they don’t even seem to mind. They just keep buying tickets, for whatever reason. But we’re different. We want a cup every year. Every single year. We need it. It’s our right. And it’s been sixteen really shitty years.

And you want us to be patient?

The news seems grim. Gainey admits now that the pursuit of a big centreman is on hold, mainly because Tampa Bay seems to have no intention of letting go of Vincent Lecavalier, who pretty well happens to be the big centreman Gainey alludes to. And Bob says the pursuit of any big centreman could drag on for months.

But I also have news for Gainey, whom I admire and respect. The Habs need more than just a big centreman. Is Montreal ready to break the bank to get a big centreman and forget that they also need at least one dynamic defenceman, a second-line power forward, and maybe even a veteran goalie to come in and teach Carey Price how to become an NHL star?

Gainey wants to re-sign Alex Kovalev, Mike Komisarek, and probably Saku Koivu, Mathieu Schneider, and Alex Tanguay, and look to bring back others such as Chris Higgins, Tomas Plekanec, and Guillaume Latendresse.

This is all great news, this attempt at bringing back most of last year’s team. But you saw the way Pittsburgh and Detroit looked in the Stanley Cup finals, along with Washington, Boston and others in the playoff this year. All had much more to offer in their lineup than the Canadiens did. That’s why, even though a  big centreman like Lecavalier would be a beautiful thing, there’s also a few other holes that need to be filled.

Maybe Gainey’s right; we have to be patient. But doesn’t he realize who he’s talking to?

Or maybe they just had this really cool mischievous side of them

For example, when Frank Selke was the assistant manager to Conn Smythe when the Leafs won the Cup in 1945, he was engraved in shortform as “”ass man.”"

Some of the names are misspelled, and one has been covered with X’s. The Montreal Maroon’s Harry “Punch” Broadbent’s name is upside down.

The engraver had trouble with Jacques Plante’s name too. It was misspelled three times as Jac Plante, Jacq Plante, and Jaques Plante. Alex Delvecchio is Alex Belvecchio. And Bob Gainey is Bob Gainy.

Turk Broda , the great Leafs’ goalie of the 1040’s, whose birth name is Walter, won the Cup in 1942 and got his name on twice for this, one as Turk, and one as Walter. Another who has his name on twice is Pete Palangio in 1938 with Chicago. His name appears correctly, and also as Palagio.

When the Leafs won in 1963, the engraver carved out TORONTO MAPLE LEAES. In 1972, the Boston Bruins became the BQSTQN BRUINS. And the New York Islanders in 1981 were the NEW YORK ILANDERS.

In 1984, Peter Pocklington , owner of the Cup-winning Edmonton Oilers, approved the list of players and officials after the Oilers had won their first cup. His father Bazil is on it, even though he had nothing to do with the club.  That’s the one that has a bunch of X’s on top of it.

Mistakes are now fixed, mainly because Colorado winger Adam Deadmarsh appeared as “Adam Deadmarch”, and the player was so upset he made noise about it and they fixed it. But, like Hockey Hall of Fame curator Phil Pritchard says, “If it can be corrected, it will be corrected. But if it’s Bobby Orr with three b’s, then there’s not a lot that can be done.”