The Canadian | The clock and Martin St-Louis

It’s an inevitable observation in the competitive world of professional sports: when a team keeps losing, it’s almost always the coach who suffers.

Martin St-Louis arrived behind the Canadiens bench on February 9, 2022. Since that day, he has a record of 83-113-29 as the Canadiens’ driver, spanning 225 games. Currently, the Canadian occupies 31^e place in the general rankings of the National Hockey League.

With such lagging results, most coaches would no doubt be faced with the sound of the clock and time running out, due to results that are long overdue. For comparison, the management of the Boston Bruins recently concluded that Jim Montgomery was no longer the man for the job behind the bench, despite a record of 120-41-23 at the helm of the club.

St-Louis led the Canadiens to a 14-19-4 record to conclude the 2021-2022 season, and then its teams have never done better than 28^e place in the general classification of the circuit.

In an announced and already planned context of reconstruction, will the Canadian management be able to continue to play the card of patience with its coach, even if the defeats continue to accumulate and the team does not progress?

If this is the case, St-Louis can consider itself lucky, because its predecessors behind the Montreal bench have often been paid for much less than that. Backtracking.

Dominique Ducharme

He was the one in charge until the club management decided to give the wheel to Martin St-Louis. Ducharme will not have been behind this bench for long; a brief stint of 83 games spread over two seasons, with a record of 23-46-14. He led the team to the 2021 Finals following an astonishing playoff run, but the retirements of Carey Price and Shea Weber, combined with the hasty decisions of general manager Marc Bergevin, ultimately sunk the club and , therefore, hasten his departure. It was also rumored that Ducharme’s relationship with some of the club’s veterans was not in good shape.

Claude Julien

After managing the Canadian for the first time in the early 2000s, Julien returned to the scene in February 2017, at the head of a club that aspired to great things or, at least, that was what management believed then. But the Canadian’s repeated failures in the playoffs – two quick exits in the first round –, in addition to two seasons which ended outside the playoff picture, ended up getting the better of Julien. The coach was fired the day after a defeat against the Ottawa Senators, a sixth loss in eight games. At that point, the Canadian had a record of 9-5-4 and found himself in 4^e rank of what was then called the Northern Division.

Michel Therrien

Michel Therrien also had a first tour behind the Montreal bench in the early 2000s, before being called back to town for the start of the 2012-2013 season. Like Claude Julien a little later, Therrien was unable to survive a long decline for his club, which had lost six of its previous seven games at the time of the dismissal, including three defeats by shutout. Interesting detail, all the same: at the time of this decision, in the middle of Valentine’s Day 2017, the Canadian from Therrien was still at the top of the Atlantic division, with a six-point lead over the Ottawa Senators. However, general manager Marc Bergevin could not resist the idea of ​​a return of Claude Julien, who had just been fired the previous week by the Boston Bruins.

Jacques Martin

Here’s another coach who had to pay the price despite a very respectable record at the helm of the Canadiens, in this case a record of 96-75-25, including the magical spring of 2010 and a berth in the Eastern final . But unlike the Canadian of now, the CH of then was in results mode, and for Martin, everything collapsed on December 17, 2011, because of a team that did not perform at all up to expectations. When indicating the exit to Martin, the Canadian found himself at 11^e rank in the Eastern Conference with 33 points in 32 games and a record of 13-12-7.