Starting now, the players who still don the bleu, blanc et rouge won't be looking into the eyes of a man they've lost confidence in; it will be the steely gaze of Bob Gainey.
There are a number of things that you can never find fault with when it comes to Montreal Canadiens general Manager Bob Gainey.
Intelligence is one. His having an innate sense for when something goes wrong and his natural instinct to do something about it are two others.
I admire and respect his integrity and rarely in my professional life have I come across anyone who is more about team and putting what's right for a team above all else than Bob Gainey.
The above, however, are only a part of the reason I can sit here and write that Monday he did the right thing in firing Guy Carbonneau as head coach.
The biggest reason to back him is that he not only recognizes that the mess Montreal is in is a goodly part his doing, but that he's willing to put himself on the line to do something about.
Gainey didn't send a nephew out to tell the world that he was "too old" to go back behind the bench. He didn't say that what ails his team is directly related to his now fired coach: the coach whose contract he extended by some three years just this past October.
He simply recognized that his team had a problem and that Carbonneau's relationship to that team was a part of the problem and that had to be corrected.
It didn't matter that he was on the hook for the money or that Carbonneau was (and I am certain will still be) his very good friend.
The only thing that mattered was that with 16 games left in the season his team wasn't going in the right direction and so he acted accordingly. He fired his friend and put himself in his place.
That requires another trait Gainey has in abundance - courage - and it's hard to imagine the Canadiens won't be better for that.
They will still have the problem of shaky goaltending and a lack of size up the middle, problems that are largely of Gainey the GM's making. They will still have the problem of not having a game-controlling defenceman on the point, also a problem of his off-season decision making in each of the past two years.
They might, for a time, continue to have the problem of being too loose in their own end and being betrayed by some special teams that appear to be phantom relatives of the squads that carried the club to first place in the Eastern Conference standings last spring.
He knows all of those things fall on him. But what he won't have to deal with in what is now a desperate attempt to hold onto a playoff berth is a team that will be playing like it simply doesn't care.
We saw a lot of that in recent weeks and that, in essence, has been this team's problem pretty much since the all-star break. That time in franchise history, starting today, is over.
Starting now, the players who still don the bleu, blanc et rouge won't be looking into the eyes of a man they've lost confidence in; they will be staring into the steely gaze of a man who holds their hockey future in the palm of his signing hand.
They will be answering to a man who, when he demands performance, holds the hammer in which to back up those demands.
They will, in the end, be made to be more responsible to their boss, themselves and their teammates because they have no other choice. When Bob Gainey comes behind the bench he leaves no room for excuses.
Maybe it was because he tried too hard or because he was so demanding on himself (as a player as well as a coach) that Carbonneau couldn't quite come to grips with things the way Gainey can. The deposed coach never could quite understand players who regularly took nights off, got themselves involved in allegations of purse-snatching episodes or public displays of indecency. Surely he couldn't even begin to understand how some of them could allegedly get themselves entangled with the city's criminal element. Most importantly -- judging from the way he viewed the game and the role of Les Habs in it -- he could never comprehend what, in his mind, was the most distressing sin of all: Montreal players not trying - with every fiber of their being - to succeed in every moment of every game, home and away.
That was Carbonneau's failing. He was too good and too caring a hockey player to ever comprehend how someone, anyone, could not play that same way he always did.
Gainey does.
He understands the balancing act a coach must both create and endure. He gets that some people need special treatment and others, a kick in the backside.
He knows that his team has weaknesses and that they must not only be disguised, they also have to be overcome. That's a tough job even for the most caring of men and no one could ever say Guy Carbonneau didn't care.
But in the end, Gainey stepped behind the bench because he was certain his team could do better and, given the little time that remained, it was up to him to make sure that happened.
Bob Gainey had both the courage and good hockey sense to know he was that one.
Not an easy call to make, but then you have to admire him for that as well.
