Why Montreal GM Marc Bergevin Is A Boss, And Boston's Don Sweeney Is Lost

The Montreal Canadiens’ hiring of Claude Julien and cold-blooded assassination of Michel Therrien on Valentine’s Day did more than just inject life into a NHL franchise that was clearly fading. It revealed the stark contrast between Montreal’s Marc Bergevin, a general manager with a singular focus on a Stanley Cup; and Boston’s Don Sweeney, a general manager with a focus on hoping his fan base was as easily distracted by a Super Bowl parade as he has been from creating a tangible plan for his team during his two years in office.

Let’s start with the latter

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Sweeney took over the Boston Bruins general manager job from Peter Chiarelli in May 2015 during something that resembled an internal coup to outside observers. Team president Cam Neely helped install Sweeney, who had been an assistant GM, to run an aging team that was no longer a contender and desperately in need of a rebuild—or, at the very least, a smart makeover.

At the time, that seemed to be the plan. It should have been the plan. The Bruins went from Cup winner in 2011 to Cup finalist in 2013 to out of the playoffs altogether in 2015, and the time had come to refresh. Sweeney appeared headed that way, as he spent the summer acquiring draft picks and shipping away Milan Lucic … but overpaying for Matt Beleskey? And extending Adam McQuaid? And trading a draft pick for Zac Rinaldo? Is Sweeney the GM version of the Good Cop/Bad Cop from The Lego Movie?

Ever fill out multiple NCAA brackets? There’s one rule—you can’t hedge too much. You’re either committed to a plan or you’re not. Maybe you make a few tweaks to the brackets here and there, but you can’t have one Final Four on one bracket and a totally different Final Four on another. That’s how you finish in the middle of the pack and get nothing out of it.

That was the Bruins in 2015-16; they were competitive, far from an also-ran, but not postseason-bound for the second straight year. They had one foot in a rebuild and one foot in a five-year contract for Matt freaking Beleskey. And they finished 2016 almost exactly where they finished 2015, just outside the playoffs and nowhere near a top-five draft pick.

But hey, lesson learned, perhaps? Sweeney didn’t overpay to re-sign free agent Loui Eriksson … but he overpaid for free agent David Backes? Why, man?

And here they are again, on the fringe of the playoffs, a roster begging for a refresh. And for reasons that existed the past two years just as clearly as they did a week ago, Sweeney finally dropped the axe on Julien, then the Bruins’ coach, and let the news of it be known in the middle of Boston’s celebration of the New England Patriots’ championship.

Therein lies the difference between the two GMs—Sweeney has been indecisive in his nearly two years in Boston, playing the Donald Trump to Neely’s Steve Bannon, while Montreal’s Bergevin has been pointed in every move he has made, including the poaching of one of the NHL’s top coaches from a divisional rival.

Say what you want about the quality of Bergevin’s moves, but he clearly has a better understanding of his roster and where it sits in the NHL hierarchy. Last season’s horror show that was result of Carey Price’s season-long injury aside, the Canadiens are in it to win it now. And Bergevin knows it.

That’s why he shipped out Lars Eller to make room for Andrew Shaw (not a great move). That’s why he took a gamble on Alex Radulov (a great move). That’s why he jumped at the chance to swap PK Subban for Shea Weber (a bad move in the long term, but a negligible one in the very, very short term). And that’s why when the opportunity arose to part ways with Therrien and his archaic ways and replace him with a coach in the same echelon as Mike Babcock and Joel Quenneville, Bergevin did what Doug Armstrong failed to do in St. Louis with Ken Hitchcock.

He took out his friend with ruthless efficiency, and put the team first.

That’s also why Bergevin will add Kevin Shattenkirk or some other impactful player at the deadline. The time is now for the Canadiens and nothing about Bergevin’s actions since the offseason says he will hesitate to make another win-now move.

It won’t happen, but how funny would it be if the Canadiens added Zdeno Chara at the deadline? Don, hey, it’s Marc. No hard feelings about the Claude thing, right? It’s just business. You get it. You’re smart. Anyway, how do you feel about something along the lines of Chara for Alexei Emelin? Didn’t Emelin try to fight Chara once? Tough as nails. A real Boston guy. Much younger too. Throw in, I don’t know, Ryan Spooner and we’ll announce it at the same time some big Red Sox news breaks. Deal?

There’s no place in hockey that’s worse to find yourself than in the middle of the standings—nowhere good enough to win a Cup, nowhere bad enough to win a draft lottery. That’s where the Bruins were when Sweeney took over, and that’s where they will be whenever their 2016-17 season ends.

Even with Julien, the Canadiens aren’t guaranteed to get out of the first round. They’ve lost six of seven. Should they hang on to first place in the Atlantic Division, their reward likely will be a first-round matchup with the fourth-best team in the stacked Metropolitan, a.k.a. the fourth- or fifth-best team in the NHL. The league’s idiotic playoff format will almost definitely result in the second-best team in the Atlantic getting a cushier matchup than that division’s regular-season champion.

But Bergevin has a plan, and for better or worse, he’s sticking to it. He’s all-in. Unlike the Weber-Subban trade, swapping Therrien for Julien is an upgrade forever. In a salary-capped league, it’s almost impossible to find a competitive edge, and it’s even more difficult to do it in the middle of February without trading assets.

Bergevin saw a way to better his team now and didn’t wait two years to do it. It seems like the bare minimum to ask of a team’s GM, but when you look at Sweeney feeling around in the dark without a flashlight, it should provide a lot of comfort for Habs fans and make Bruins fans feel even worse than they did when Julien was fired a week ago.

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