Montreal Canadiens: Worst Move of the Bob Gainey Era
By Suki Gill
By the spring of 2009, it had been six years on the job for Bob Gainey. The general manager of the Montreal Canadiens had just watched his team go from being at the top of the Eastern Conference standings at the all-star break to completely imploding their way to an eighth-place finish and a first-round sweep at the hands of the Boston Bruins.
For the second time in his tenure as GM, Gainey was forced to come down from the press box and go behind the bench on an interim basis to replace a head coach he had fired mid-season. The ordinarily stoic Gainey had seen enough, and the smell of imminent changes was noticeably in the air going into the offseason.
The team was ripe for an overhaul with several unrestricted free agents without contracts and Gainey with seemingly no intention to retain any of them. There was no bigger name among the unsigned than Saku Koivu, the long-tenured captain of the club who had been the face of the franchise for more than a decade. The list also included key contributors Alex Kovalev, Mike Komisarek and Alex Tanguay.
As July quickly approached, there was still no indication as to what Gainey had planned. What would transpire in the coming days would be nothing short of spectacular.
The first big bombshell finally dropped on June 30th, the eve of free agency. In a blockbuster deal that sent shockwaves across the 514 and beyond, Gainey acquired Scott Gomez and Tom Pyatt from the New York Rangers in exchange for Chris Higgins, Ryan McDonagh and Doug Janik. There were other spare parts involved, but those were the particulars.
It was a trade that was met with swift and immediate judgment as a comically bad deal for the Canadiens, and rightfully so, as it is irrefutably one of the worst moves of all time, let alone of the Bob Gainey era.
Gainey’s reasoning behind the Gomez acquisition was rooted in the Canadiens’ inability to reel big-name free agents. The thought was that getting Gomez would facilitate signing some of the players the Habs coveted on the open market. While the logic may have been sound, the cost was unforgivable.
With the exception of one elite season in the distant past, Gomez was a mediocre player who carried an albatross of a contract. Surely, giving up Higgins alone would have been enough to get the deal done. To have to include a blue-chipper like McDonagh was criminal.
Gainey would complete the makeover of his team in the days that followed. The vault was opened up, and big money contracts were handed out to the likes of Mike Cammalleri, Brian Gionta, Travis Moen, Hal Gill and Jaroslav Spacek. In one fell swoop, Gainey had reinvented his entire hockey club.
The new core would enjoy some immediate albeit short-lived success. There was an improbable run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2010, followed by a narrow Game 7 overtime loss in the first round of 2011. However, ultimately, this band of Canadiens fared no better than its Koivu-Kovalev-led predecessors.
While every other player mentioned in this article has retired, McDonagh continues to be a top-notch minute-munching defenseman who is showing no signs of slowing down.
Canadiens fans are left to wonder what could have been had the most patient of general managers not lost his patience and realized that trading McDonagh was simply a bridge too far to cross.
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