Montreal Canadiens: How to Rebuild Organization in Three Easy Steps

Clean house in the front office

This might be the most important step in rebuilding the organization. Go from the top down and just clean house and find people who are capable of rebuilding a team. This means getting rid of general manager Marc Bergevin, his assistant Scott Mellanby and the man most responsible for the team’s drafting over the past decade or so, Trevor Timmins.

Since Bergevin arrived on the scene in 2012, Alex Galchenyuk is by far the highest scoring player drafted by the Canadiens. Second? That would be Artturi Lehkonen who has 62 career goals. Drafting goal scorers isn’t everything, but if you can’t draft any goal scorers you can’t build a good hockey team.

Drafting Michael McCarron, Nikita Scherbak and Noah Juulsen in the first round is a bad enough track record but taking Logan Mailloux, who is barely a first round talent, and after he asked not to be drafted at all was the worst of the team’s first round decisions. It should be their final one.

Get them out of here and bring in some people who have a history of success at the NHL Draft and with building a team. Of course, there is the caveat that the people in the position’s of authority should be from the Montreal area or at the very least speak French fluently. But let’s find a way around that.

Let’s name a French general manager but also a President of Hockey Operations who is not French, but is just the best person for the job.

That would be Jeff Gorton. He is the man responsible for much of the Boston Bruins success in the past ten years and is also the man who quickly rebuilt the New York Rangers. He isn’t French, but he wouldn’t be the general manager either.

Gorton was briefly the general manager in Boston, taking the reins for a few months while the team continued its search for a permanent GM. In his few months with the Bruins, Gorton ran one NHL Draft and the team selected Phil Kessel, Milan Lucic and Brad Marchand. That’s not bad. He also went out on July 1st and signed Marc Savard and Zdeno Chara, who was one of the best free agent signings of all time. Savard would have been as well if not for injuries.

Next in the chain of command should be general manager Martin Madden who is currently the Assistant General Manager in Anaheim. Perhaps he is quite comfortable there but he was just passed over by a less experienced candidate to fill in as interim general manager when Bob Murray got the boot for his booze fuelled tirades over the years.

Madden was the Director of Amateur Scouting for the Ducks from 2008 until he was promoted to his current role in 2020. He routinely found a couple of NHL regulars every year at the draft, supplying the Ducks with the talent that made them a Stanley Cup contender for much of the 2010’s.

The Ducks lost Chris Pronger and Scott Niedermayer in consecutive years just after Madden arrived and he helped retool quickly and ensure they were one of the best teams in the league from 2010-18. Again, they had to retool as Corey Perry and Ryan Getzlaf left their prime but the team once again has plenty of young talent on hand and are looking ahead of schedule on their rebuild already.

The Canadiens could really please the French media by also brining in Mathieu Darche, a Montreal native who played his college hockey at McGill. He is the Director of Hockey Operations for the Tampa Bay Lightning so he would have first hand knowledge of how a Stanley Cup championship organization is run in the front office. He could be the new Assistant General Manager.