November 13, 2022 | 3:00pm ET
By Anthony Di Marco, TheFourthPeriod.com
THE POST-BERGEVIN ERA: ONE YEAR LATER
Marc Bergevin
MONTREAL, QC — It took Marc Bergevin nine years. Nine years to finally construct a team that made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, ultimately bowing out in five games to the Tampa Bay Lightning. A culmination of a truly rollercoaster career at the helm of the Montreal Canadiens.
It isn’t every day that a General Manager reaches the Final and loses his job within a year. In Bergevin’s case, it happened within six months of each other.
On November 29, 2021, the Canadiens announced Bergevin had been relieved of his duties. As the changing of the guard became, Assistant GM Trevor Timmins and Sr. V.P. for Public Affairs and Communications Paul Wilson also were fired. Assistant GM Scott Mellanby elected to resign. Former Rangers GM Jeff Gorton was named Executive Vice President of Hockey Operations immediately and subsequently hired Kent Hughes as Bergevin’s successor.
When looking back at the Bergevin era, he truly offered a rollercoaster ride with respect to what he did for the franchise. He took over a team coming off a dreadful 2011-12 season in which former GM (and Bob Gainey disciple) Pierre Gauthier ran an aging Montreal roster into the cellar of the Eastern Conference.
Electing to go with a ‘reload on the fly’ approach, Bergevin quickly turned the Habs around, getting them back into the playoffs during his first season as GM in 2013. Names like Alex Galchenyuk, Brendan Gallagher, Max Pacioretty, Carey Price and P.K. Subban all blossomed under Bergevin in the early years, with two (Gallagher and Price) being organizational cornerstones until the end of his run as GM in 2021.
Qualifying for the playoffs in each of his first three seasons as GM, Bergevin faced his first true test of adversity in 2015-16 when the club fell off a cliff on the heels of a season-ending injury to Price, the reigning Hart and Vezina Trophy winner. After major dysfunctionality throughout the year, Bergevin made his biggest trade as GM, flipping Subban for Shea Weber in a blockbuster swap of elite defensemen.
After 2016, it seemed like Bergevin was always swimming upstream.
The Habs got back into the playoffs in 2017 following a coaching change, but it was short lived. The club quickly entered another retool on the fly in 2018, moving out Pacioretty and reloading on younger talent in the following years in Jesperi Kotkaniemi (now in Carolina) and Cole Caufield via the draft and trading for eventual captain Nick Suzuki.
The later years of Bergevin were certainly a mixed bag.
On one hand, the team made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons and returned to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 1993.
But on the other, you had a drastically flawed team with no true direction that greatly benefited from an altered playoff format and berths that were a direct result of a technicality because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In what could be described as “fool’s gold,” the Canadiens were not the Stanley Cup Final team that their record and playoff success suggested. In fact, in a “normal” NHL season, they would not have even qualified for the playoffs in 2020 or 2021. Canadiens Owner Geoff Molson saw the same thing and elected to pull the plug, even after just seeing his franchise go back to the Final for the first time in 28 years.
What’s important to remember, however, is that Bergevin left Gorton and Hughes a decent situation to work with.
On his way out, Bergevin extended Suzuki to an eight-year, $63 million contract that is looking like a great value deal in the early stages. He drafted Caufield who, while riding shotgun with Suzuki, has emerged as one of the best young goal-scorers in the NHL. Alexander Romanov was an impressive young defenseman drafted by Bergevin and was parlayed into Kirby Dach by the current regime; Dach has found early success in Montreal on the team’s top line.
Defencemen Kaiden Guhle and Jordan Harris were both high draft picks under the Bergevin regime and have already become staples in the club’s top-four. Josh Anderson was acquired and signed to a six-year contract, and he has become a mainstay in the top-six, previous playing alongside Suzuki and Caufield for much of his stint in Montreal prior to Dach’s emergence.
But with the good, there were definitely some blunders on the way out. The six-year contract extension handed out to Brendan Gallagher seemed to be one based more on reputation than future performance. The Jonathan Drouin fiasco proved to be one of the bigger blunders of Bergevin’s entire run as GM. The illogical signing of Mike Hoffman to a three-year contract came across as nothing more than a panic signing. The loss of Kotkaniemi via an Offer Sheet led to acquiring Christian Dvorak for a first-round selection, another move that reeked of desperation.
All in all, when looking back at the Bergevin era, it comes down to one term that describes it all: mixed feelings. He left behind several young pieces that have helped the current regime put together a plan for the future, but he made some head-scratching decisions the team is still paying for today and the current management corps is trying to clean up.
Gorton and Hughes have a long way to go before making this group a Stanley Cup contender, but they were able to take reigns and get this team on a path before it was too late. Had Bergevin been given just a little more runway, things could’ve gotten ugly, but at this point, it seems ownership made the right decision just in time to steer the ship.
Bergevin’s tenure was a mix of positive, negatives and downright polarizing moves, but with the right tinkering and movement from his successors, he may have gotten out just in time.
