The Habs Francophone Questions.

[kinot-1]

Because the question of having Francophone GMs, coaches, and players on the Habs, has come up in different threads, I felt that this might be a thread where any and all discussions on the topic could be talked about.

Ya know,,, back in the day when there were only 6 teams, NHL teams were hobbled by their (IMO) budgets, and therefore could not afford to send their scouts to Europe, or Russia, or anywhere else (or felt they were "lesser" leagues). Teams (from Chicago eastward) generally just sent 1-2 scouts to check out the Canadian Junior Hockey Leagues and that was about it. They didn't check out the college leagues, European hockey leagues, Russian leagues (although, Russia probably would not have let their players go), or any other leagues. Therefore, the Habs, of course, were bound to pick the best players in the QMJL (priority), the OHL, or the WHL.

Now, however, teams now have a plethora of scouts everywhere, to find a hidden gem. Other teams could not care less where their players grew up or the language they speak, they are picking/finding the best people available to help their teams.

Those who believe that the French speaking player should have a better shot of making the Habs, because of his first language, is living in the past, skill should be the priority, among other things not related to language.

The Habs however, have tried to stick with this outdated philosophy at the detriment to winning. They have been appeasing certain sectors of the media and fans, instead of focusing on the ultimate prize. Fans don't care how their team got there, who is on the team, who is the coach,,, just that the team won the cup or in the hunt. IMO, "some" Francophone players are given too much time to develop and too much ice-time, while players of other languages are not given the same treatment. MT, since he was hired, has had his favorites and his whipping boys, and we all know who these players are/were.

If you want the best team available, you have to choose the best people, from management on down, regardless of other factors. The only language spoken in the dressing room is English, regardless of which team you play for.

"If" Quebec City gets a team and follows this same language first philosophy, they will be doomed to the same fate as the Habs.

[FirstStar]

Quebec city will try to land as many francophone players.

The rangers are well known for offering american born players outrageous contracts.

The regular fan doesn't care, just look at the whole subban thing.

If the regular fan cared that their players were white and French, they would've packed PK's bags for them.

Just look at the fan favorites in the last 10 years, Kovy, Gally, Chuck, Price, Marky, Halak, etc...

It's the media, with political pushing that stir the pot, that is in my opinion.

[Habs=stanleycup]

Because the question of having Francophone GMs, coaches, and players on the Habs, has come up in different threads, I felt that this might be a thread where any and all discussions on the topic could be talked about.

"If" Quebec City gets a team and follows this same language first philosophy, they will be doomed to the same fate as the Habs.

I say let Quebec have their team again, also let them have all the Francophone politics along with it and leave us alone.

We`re not playing to enhance political correctness at the expense of skill & common sense, we`re playing to WIN Stanley Cups.

[BigTed3]

The Alouettes named Jacques Chapdelaine interim head coach, making him the 1st francophone head coach in team history (albeit a relatively short team history compared to the Habs). I think it's fantastic that we have a Quebec-born person who is of the caliber to be named coach, and I think he was a good candidate for the job. But it's easier to put faith in that being the case when you know the Als don't have a policy that forces them to make that decision. When we were winning championships in the past couple of decades, no one questioned the fact the Als have had anglophone coaches only. No one said Don Matthews didn't deserve to be here on account of language, no one told Marc Trestmann to go back to the United States, no one said Jim Popp is a lousy coach because his French is second-rate. When the Expos had Felipe Alou, and anglophone from another country, as manager, he was largely celebrated for what he brought to the team and the city.

Point being, these other examples reinforce that the notion a French coach is needed is complete garbage. Find a good coach, find a guy who can win and treat fans and players with respect and people will be happy. Good for the Als for finding a coach who also happens to be Francophone and good for the Als for doing so without their history showing they compromised the on-field product to make that happen. Shame on the Habs for not putting the on-ice product first the same way.

[Habberwacky]

Trying to ignore the history of our nation and the sport that has evolved along with it is not likely to work although moving the Habs to say Las Vegas and giving Quebec City a  team might be a solution This dynamic has been around since our French province was subjugated to English driven policies. As a business man who sells products in the Province I will continue to believe Mr. Molson knows what is best for his business. There are plenty of other less annoying teams for me to root for if this is a big issue for me, I notice most of the international teams try to include players from their country who speak their language and I am not likely to try and judge that philosophy, although I did have an Irish friend play on Austria's National team. Most coaches and managers today will tell you the systems  used by the majority of NHL teams are effective not because of the language behind them but by how the players execute them. It is all about the players ability to execute and the coaches ability to motivate. If the elocution is in English or French the players need to comply. 

[habs_93]

30 minutes ago, Habberwacky said:

Most coaches and managers today will tell you the systems  used by the majority of NHL teams are effective not because of the language behind them but by how the players execute them.

This is quite the missing of the point.

If the best possible personnel are from Quebec, then that's one thing. But they're not. So insisting on hiring people who come from a provincial system which (to be polite) has a few problems is insisting on being substandard.

[Habs=stanleycup]

12 minutes ago, habs_93 said:

This is quite the missing of the point.

If the best possible personnel are from Quebec, then that's one thing. But they're not. So insisting on hiring people who come from a provincial system which (to be polite) has a few problems is insisting on being substandard.

Agreed. That is what is flawed regarding this policy or system.

[Habberwacky]

On 02/10/2016 at 0:08 PM, habs_93 said:

This is quite the missing of the point.

If the best possible personnel are from Quebec, then that's one thing. But they're not. So insisting on hiring people who come from a provincial system which (to be polite) has a few problems is insisting on being substandard.

This post from  2011 appears to say the best coaches do come from Quebec and this argument has been around forever. http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/06/are-quebec-born-nhl-coaches-more-likely-to-win-the-cup-.html  A little chart at the bottom of the first blog is interesting. I don't think things have changed that much as evidenceed by Ottawa's hiring of Boucher. Not sure what the point is. Quebec does fine with its hockey coaches French or English and so does Team Canada.

[habs_93]

12 hours ago, Habberwacky said:

This post from  2011 appears to say the best coaches do come from Quebec and this argument has been around forever. http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/06/are-quebec-born-nhl-coaches-more-likely-to-win-the-cup-.html  A little chart at the bottom of the first blog is interesting.

For a variety of reasons, this constitutes no evidence.

Records prior to the 30-team league and salary cap/lockout CBA are interesting, but substantially less relevant now. You simply cannot compare the league in 1976 and 2016. Playing styles have evolved significantly, the conditioning and average skill of players is almost beyond comparison, equipment has changed, the development of coaching and scouting/front office work has exploded. That's not even mentioning more teams, a salary cap, the growth of international hockey, a longer season, a different playoff format, relative strength of divisions and conferences, schedule design, etc, etc. So with all due respect to Claude Ruel, his career is interesting, but irrelevant.

We're also, then, getting into sample size and noise. A lot of that noise directly biases the data in ways which make them easily abused, by people both actively dishonest and simply misinformed. Coaches are not fired nearly as often as they should be, because sports people are humans and most humans are servants to opportunity cost. So very, very bad coaches (hi John, Michel, and Bob!) will keep jobs months and years longer than is supported by reality. During these intervals, stuff happens and their teams get lucky. Sometimes, very lucky indeed. And because sports people are humans (still) and most humans are susceptible to confirmation bias, magical thinking, and compassion, these awful coaches often have lengthy careers. Which gives them a reputation (He's been around for years! He's a team guy! He turned <team> around! He won a Cup!), and thus a chance to keep being bad and taking jobs from "risky" new blood. So, there simply aren't enough seasons with enough coaches to make any supportable inference about it. This might very well keep qualified Quebecois talent out of the NHL, actually. This is an aside, but if we "have" to have a coach from the Quebec system, why can't we have a revolutionary young thinker, a student of the game, some up and coming QMJHL innovator? Sure, it might fail, but fortune favours the brave.

12 hours ago, Habberwacky said:

I don't think things have changed that much as evidenceed by Ottawa's hiring of Boucher. Not sure what the point is. Quebec does fine with its hockey coaches French or English and so does Team Canada.

So, because an organization as historically cheap and dysfunctional as Ottawa hired a guy from Quebec, everything's dandy with Hockey Quebec? That dog, as it's said, won't hunt.

Referring back to that lovely spreadsheet, the last 10 Quebec-born or Francophone coaches to make their debut in the NHL are (descending chronologically) Guy Boucher, Guy Carbonneau, Denis Savard, Claude Julien, Michel Therrien, Kevin Lowe, Alain Vigneault, Jacques Laperriere (pictured, left), Mario Tremblay, and Steve Kasper. That's not an impressive list, I'm sure you'll concede, even with "Claude Julien's Cup", which logic would dictate was more the responsibility of Thomas, Bergeron, and Chara.

Rampant anti-Quebec sentiment? No, fewer coaches and fewer worthy coaches, because the province is not keeping up with developments in modern hockey. Let's look at the draft performance of the QMJHL between 2004 and 2012. How many quality players has the QMJHL produced? I regret having to rely on such a silly (if objective... barely) measure as All-Star participation and individual awards (Hart, Vezina, Calder, Ross, Norris, Conn Smythe, Lindsay, Selke, and Richard), but even the cynics such as me could begrudgingly admit it's a relatively acceptable analogue. So, we'll use that. Players will only be counted once. The QMJHL is not first (the OHL, with 21). It's not second (the WHL, with 8). It's not third (Sweden, with 7). It is, in fact, tied for fourth with Russia, with 6 players. Right behind it with 4 each are the US National Team Development Program and US High Schools. Empirically, NHL talent is not coming out of Quebec at a great rate these days. If we want to find coaches who know how to coach (and coach against) elite NHL-level talent, maybe the organization should be concentrating on high schools and Sweden. Sarcasm aside, Hockey Quebec is a mess.

Maybe one doesn't want to accept that. Fine. Let's dismiss all of it, regardless of merit, and go with something else. One simple, easy, indisputable fact that you cannot deny without denying basic reality: Quebec is smaller than Canada, Canada is smaller than North America, and North America is smaller than the World. If you restrict your staff search to people who come from one province of one country, you cannot help but reduce your pool of qualified talent. This is not a way to win things, other than the approval of provincial malcontents.

If the team wants to insist it has a cultural imperative to emphasize Francophone interests, that's it's right. However, it should respect us enough to complete the sentence: emphasizing it over success. Unless Geoff Molson wants to assemble a consortium of people to pump tens of millions of dollars into Hockey Quebec and turn it into a world-class organization developing world-class talent up and down the line—and wait the 10-25 years it'll take before these people start rising to the top—such a strategy necessarily means the team will be shooting itself in the foot.

And I submit that fans who are more interested in things as vulgar and simple as winning hockey games have just as much a right to call this their team and demand their interests be considered.

[BigTed3]

19 hours ago, Habberwacky said:

This post from  2011 appears to say the best coaches do come from Quebec and this argument has been around forever. http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/06/are-quebec-born-nhl-coaches-more-likely-to-win-the-cup-.html  A little chart at the bottom of the first blog is interesting. I don't think things have changed that much as evidenceed by Ottawa's hiring of Boucher. Not sure what the point is. Quebec does fine with its hockey coaches French or English and so does Team Canada.

I didn't open the actual chart, but historically, more coaches and players came from Quebec when the league was smaller and its growth occurred mainly in Quebec and Ontario. The Habs had a large contingent of talented French-Canadian players in those days, and French coaches also had an advantage coming from an area of North America where hockey was more developed. Nowadays, there are definitely a number of good French-Canadian coaches as well, but that doesn't mean that talent is exclusive to Quebec nor does it mean that all Quebec-born coaches are good. Julien and Vigneault are very good coaches, but Therrien, Hartley, and Roy were three of the weakest coaches in the league last year.

The problem I have is not with whether we hire a French or English coach, it's our exclusion of all English candidates before we make a short-list of potential candidates. We're excluding over 90% of the pool of candidates based on a criterion that has no bearing on the person's ability to succeed at the job (and by success I mean the ability to lead a team to a Cup, which is really all that should matter in the game in measuring a coach's worth to his team). If the Habs were to find a legitimate French-speaking coach, by all means, go ahead. But we have Therrien. Our system has been awful, our player deployment has been awful, our powerplay has been awful, and we rely almost solely on goaltending to remain in the playoff hunt. There is no substantial benefit to employing Therrien, and yet we do, with the insistence that Price will overcome the rest of the team's deficiencies and in large part because no on in Habs management knows if there's a better French-speaking coach available.

I strongly believe the insistence on having a French coach is hindering our on-ice product. The data seems to suggest our coaching is sub-standard, and most if not all the other teams with that poor a performance replaced their coach. Why didn't we?

 

[Habberwacky]

Not sure who gets to say what is legitimate. As I said this argument has been going on since the french and englsih have lived here. I don't think it has anything to do with hockey

[Habs=stanleycup]

7 minutes ago, Habberwacky said:

Not sure who gets to say what is legitimate. As I said this argument has been going on since the french and englsih have lived here. I don't think it has anything to do with hockey

When skill gets a back seat at the expense of politics, that is what makes it counterproductive IMO.

[Habs=stanleycup]

As in some workplaces, this is the scenario:

Employee A has more skill than Employee B. But Employee B is bilingual.

Employee B gets promoted because he is bilingual instead of Employee A, who is more skilled.

Im pretty sure it works the same way in some parts of the NHL.

 

[kinot-1]

1 hour ago, Habs=stanleycup said:

As in some workplaces, this is the scenario:

Employee A has more skill than Employee B. But Employee B is bilingual.

Employee B gets promoted because he is bilingual instead of Employee A, who is more skilled.

Im pretty sure it works the same way in some parts of the NHL.

 

It certainly works in the Canadian Armed Forces, and many federal jobs. 

 

[Manatee-X]

7 hours ago, kinot-1 said:

It certainly works in the Canadian Armed Forces, and many federal jobs. 

 

Although in fairness, in a lot of those jobs it is an actual advantage to be bilingual.  Hockey coach, not so much.