It's hard to understand the utter disconnection that exists between the management of the team and the political reality of the day.
Let us for the moment put the politics of language aside and consider that the Montreal Canadiens are a business, more importantly an entertainment business.
If I were to run an independent movie theatre in south shore Brossard (a town with many Chinese residents), I'd certainly consider bringing Chinese movies and having a staff (or some significant portion thereof) that could talk to an important part of the client base in their own language.
Same goes for a bookstore in Chicoutimi, where I'd likely concentrate on French books.
It isn't rocket science.
The most basic rules in commerce is recognizing what customers want and successfully delivering it. Companies spend billions on market research trying to figure out exactly what that is and relentlessly pursue this mission as if on a quest for the Holy Grail.
Whether or not it was the right hockey decision, let's be honest, only an idiot would hire an English unilingual head coach in today's Quebec.
Enter Geoff Molson.
When Geoff Molson bought the team and made the decision to dump the eminantly experienced Pierre Boivin as president, he took on the ultimate responsibility of top banana, a job he is clearly not up to.
It doesn't surprise me, children born of the silver spoon seldom achieve much on their own and Quebec's rich kids are no different.
There are notable exceptions, one that comes to mind is Pierre-Karl Péladeau, who after a rocky start at the helm of Quebecor has since found his rhythm and become a force to be reckoned with, a rough sort who actually has blossomed into a bigger and nastier SOB than his father.
Take that last description of PKP as a compliment.
Nobody can deny that his success in turning around the faltering dynasty that his father left him is based largely on the force of his personality, where his willingness to play rough is coupled with a keen single-mindedness and an amazing ability to manipulate.
But make no mistake, PKP is the exception.
Most children of billionaires and hundred-millionaires are not cut from the same cloth.
Most are coupon-clippers, who recognize their limitations and keep out of the public eye, content to occupy themselves with trivial pursuits while leading the life of genteel aristocrats. Most are uncomfortable dealing with the great unwashed and live in constant fear of being outed as unworthy and unsuccessful.
How do I know?
Well for many years I was the president of an important charitable foundation and as such trolled for dollars among the gazillionaire class.
Of course, most of the board of directors of foundations where I solicited donations were stuffed with a lot of these children of the rich and over the years, I grew to actually feel sorry for many of them who were bullied, belittled and marginalized by their parents and as adults grew into badly-adjusted and complexed human beings.
Many of them were in their forties and fifties, never really having done anything worth a lick in their entire lives and who resented their parents and their own wealth, but trapped by their own lack of skills.
I'm not going to mention names of those rich kids who choose wisely not to get involved in public life. They deserve their privacy.
I'm also going on record now as saying, that Geoff Molson was not one that I knew or dealt with, but alas he shows the classic signs of a rich boy underachiever.
From his less than stellar academic record, to a bunch of gimme jobs at Molson, he hasn't exactly set the world afire.
Here he is, looking like a clown, in a really bad television commercial.
This is the owner of the Canadiens?
Here's a video of him sucking up to Michel Arsenault the controversial and sometimes nasty leader of the Quebec Labour Union, the FTQ Link
Now when underachievers get their hands on the throttle of real power, the results can be disastrous as is underscored by Montreal's Bronfman family.
Like all billionaire dynastic families, succession remains problematic and hotly contested. The reigns of power of the business empire of the late Samuel Bronfman had been successfully transferred to Edgar Bronfman, who in turn, when the time came to retire, made the disastrous decision to hand his son, Edgar Bronfman Jr. the top job.
Suffice to say that the Bronfmans remain a rich family with a small fortune.
Problem is that when Edgar Jr. took over the company, they had a large fortune!
One bad decision after another saw the Bronfman fortune fritter away and today the family fortune is just a pale reminder of what it once was.
Reading the history of the collapse of the family fortune is a sad reminder that a storied family name does not a businessman make. Read Fortune's Fool
They say that most commercial airline crashes are the result of more than one error, a confluence of unlikely circumstances coupled with poor decisions. In reaction to a deteriorating and unsafe flying situation, a pilot makes a tragic miscalculation that the co-pilot does not pick up on.
It sounds like a good description of what happened to the Canadiens and their decision to hire Randy Cunneyworth.
Bad judgement times two.
Clearly both Geoff and the hapless Pierre Gauthier underestimated the public's reaction to a unilingual coach.
The decision remains stunningly stupid, because you, I and the panhandler on the street could have told them both, that hiring a unilingual Anglo wasn't the brightest idea.
You might ask how a francophone like Gauthier could be so disconnected from reality that he did not see the impending public relations disaster that was to result in his decision to hire Cunneyworth.
But Gauthier is a francophone in name only, his long career in the NHL has always been conducted in English and when he got the job with the Habs, he decided to remain in the USA by setting up his family in Burlington, Vermont, where his kids attend an alternate school. Gauthier and his anglophone family lead an alternate lifestyle and eschew the big city life in Montreal.
Unfortunately his time away and his choice to live in the USA has insulated him from the realities of Quebec, especially the explosive language issue. At any rate, how on Earth as a General Manager can he convince a free agent to move to Montreal, if he himself won't live there?
He is to say the least, the worst fit possible for Molson, who needs a francophone well-rooted in Quebec culture and an ex-member of the hockey world, either as a coach or player.
Molson's biggest failure is his inability to see Gauthier's firing of Jacques Martin for what it is, a panicked decision made in haste without a clear and cogent plan, an attempt to transfer blame for the on-ice fiasco from himself to Martin.
Jacques Martin may not have been the greatest coach, but the Canadiens problems could clearly be laid at the doorstep of Gauthier, who since taking over from Bob Gainey has made one bad personnel decision after another.
But more importantly, the person that Molson replaced, Pierre Boivin, would never have allowed what happened to happen.
Here' what he told a reporter;
And there it is, as honest an assessment as can be made.
"Although he believes that his team is disadvantaged by its desire to hire someone who speaks French to address the fans and media during the regular season, the businessman also believes that the Canadiens have a role to play in this regard and it is his duty to hire a local coach.
"It's almost an obligation that the next coach will be able to speak to supporters and media in their language, but we are but one team among 30 who is concerned with this and it limits us in our selection process, "
"I think our team deserves to finally have a coach of experience, we have to stop looking in junior or the AHL. We'll cross our fingers for there to be some French experience available, "he added. Link{Fr}
Boivin brought the right balance of business and hockey to the job. I've always admired how professional and cool he remained in a very tough job. His personal life, so full of tragedy, perhaps steeled himself from making rash decisions.
For Geoff Molson, his immediate and panicked reaction was to throw Randy Cunneyworth under the bus, promising fans that he'd be gone at the end of the year.
For Cunneyworth, it's an unfair betrayal, the same fate that befell the unfortunate Don Lever last season, sacrificed over language.
A little better planning could have avoided all this.
Canadiens are going nowhere this year and if they had to wait until the off season for a suitable candidate for coach to present itself, then that's what they should have done.
Hockey fans in Quebec are emotional but not stupid. Everybody knows that it was Gauthier that should have been fired before Martin.
Everybody it seems, except Geoff Molson.
