Appreciate this post - I won't pretend to know all the ins-ands-outs of the Montreal media, so I'll definitely defer to you. It's interesting that it's worse with Bergevin.
Is it with good reason though? Or is it all over the top? It's been a really poor 12 months for that organization and he's at the top
I personally think it's long overdue. Bergevin made a good first impression because he had some charisma and looked a lot more genuine than Gauthier who looked borderline creepy before him. It was a breath of fresh air, and even among fans he was one of the top candidate for the GM job at the time, so it was sort of an unanimous call. He seemed confident and he was coming out of Chicago, so people just figured he knew what he was doing.
But the more the pressure has built on, the less he could keep up the façade. The first time I recall he was at odds with a large portion of the fan base was the first contractual dispute with Subban where he forced him into a bridge deal which eventually came back to bite him in the ass - to no one's surprise.
But what really made him fall out of favor with the fan base is his over-commitment to Therrien, and by repercussion the fact the organization as a whole decided to favor a guy like Desharnais on the organizational depth chart instead of developing guys like Galchenyuk and Eller. That was the first big crack in the foundation. The Subban trade is what made a lot of people completely jump ship. That's when a lot of people realized he had no idea what he was doing. Not long before that you had the Shaw trade in spite of the fact he claimed multiple times he wanted to build this team through the draft, and the contract that followed shortly after was even worst than the trade in and of itself. And as people started calling him out, you quickly say the charisma and the confidence fade, and we were left with some kind of insecure narcissist that never really managed to own his mistakes. How ironic that this team's motto used to be "no excuses" when Therrien first came on board. The fact they started to pull excuses one after the other to explain whatever would ill the team at a given time ended up being such a comedy source that they had to get rid of the motto altogether. No joke, that actually happened.
The end result being, you have a guy here that took a team that had a 25 years old Carey Price, 23 years old Subban, Pacioretty and Eller, 20 years old Gallagher, 19 years old Beaulieu, a 3rd overall pick, and a decent amount of solid players in their prime like Plekanec, Markov, Cole, Gionta. The mission at that point was a fairly simple one. Find/develop a #1 center and surround your three young studs so that 5 years down the line you have a team that can hope to compete for a cup. Bergevin however never really had anything close to a long term plan and we find ourselves in the situation we're in today. We should be peaking right now and instead we're looking at a second lottery pick in 3 years. Our then young core is now in its 30s and won't hold up forever and after saying all these years he wanted us to build through the draft, we're currently sitting with one of the absolute worst prospect pool in the entire league.
So yeah, I do think it's with good reason. He managed to spoil the best young core this team had to work with in years, and he can thank Price for keeping up the appearances that this was a solid team for even a couple years, because even when we were winning division titles, everyone knew the team as a whole didn't play at that level. Bergevin didn't, though.
