The Montreal Canadiens went through a busy offseason of changes on the ice and are in the midst of making several big changes off the ice as well.
Team owner Geoff Molson made the decision to fire general manager Marc Bergevin in late November. He also let go assistant general manager and the head of the team’s draft strategy Trevor Timmins.
While we expected the next decision to be the announcement of the team’s next general manager, the Canadiens have made a different hire. It is inevitable that a fan base as large as the one the Montreal Canadiens have will not universally love whoever is chosen to be the next general manager, but everybody seemed to enjoy today’s hire.
The Canadiens organization announced that Chantal Machabée was hired to be the team’s Vice President of Communications. Machabée will work directly with the Canadiens hockey operations and management team and her responsibilities will include handling and managing all of the team’s communications.
The Canadiens have been criticized recently for a lack of communication from the managerial team to the public. This was most obvious when they selected Logan Mailloux in the first round of the 2021 NHL Draft after he asked not to be drafted at all. The team had an opportunity to, at the very least, release a short statement saying that Mailloux and the Canadiens organization would work together to educate young male hockey players on respecting women.
That’s the very least they could have done, but they really didn’t do anything to explain their selection or what they would do together in the future.
Machabée has worked at RDS for over 30 years so she has an incredible amount of experience working in the media. She will now kind of work from the other side of the fence, as she will control the messages that are sent out from the team to the media to be distributed.
In a statement welcoming Machabée to the Canadiens organization, Molson mentioned the importance of maintaining communication with fans of the team and the media and that Machabée will contribute to this.
It was perhaps not the announcement of a hiring that we expected this week, but Machabée has an incredible amount of respect from members of the media who would have worked with and alongside her over the years.
After the Bergevin era of silence, it will be interesting to see how much communication there is between the team’s managerial staff and the fans in the coming years.