Montreal Canadiens: Gerard Gallant to Coach Canada at World Championships

The Montreal Canadiens fired head coach Claude Julien this season and haven’t seen much improvement under their interim coach.

Dominique Ducharme took over the Habs bench after being promoted but the Habs have continued their “win one, lose one” ways and remain stuck in the middle of the Canadian Division.

One of their recent coaches, an assistant, but one who deserved consideration to take over as head coach, is going to be coaching Canada at the World championships.

Gerard Gallant was an assistant to Michel Therrien for two years. The Canadiens were quite successful in that time, winning their division in the 2013 season and then finishing with 100 points in 2013-14 before taking a run all the way to the Eastern Conference Final. They fell to the New York Rangers in six games, battling without Carey Price who was injured in Game 1 of the series.

Gallant then moved on to become head coach of the Florida Panthers and then guided the expansion Vegas Golden Knights to the Stanley Cup Final in the inaugural season. He was fired by Vegas in 2019-20 after a 24-19-0 start to the season, which brought the expansion teams all-time record to 118-75-20.

That is a much better record than any expansion team could have possibly imagined in year three, but apparently it wasn’t enough for the Golden Knights.

Gallant has been unemployed since, but was just named the head coach of Canada’s team at the upcoming World Championships.

The tournament will be held from May 21 – June 6 in Riga, Latvia. While the roster won’t be picked for another week or two, it will be interesting to see who Gallant targets. We could see a couple of former Canadiens like P.K. Subban join his former Habs coach in Latvia.

Current Canadiens players hopefully won’t be eligible due to the NHL Playoffs, but an early exit could see young players like Nick Suzuki hop over to Riga to join Gallant in the World Championships.

Who knows, with the Habs mid-season coaching change not having a huge impact on the standings, maybe this is a nice audition for Gallant to get another look behind the bench of the Montreal Canadiens in the near future.