Bergs good us to Finals though. That's huge. Great spring, plus good Bubble. HuGo likely never get us there.
HuGo was left good core. Suzuki, Caufield, Romano, Guhle, Roy. Probably first overall pick. Caufield best player we had since Mats Naslund. Both equal to me.
HuGo left probably more. Toffoli and those other trade deadline pieces were all Bergs acquisitions, which he gave up nil to acquire. Bergs never inherited valuable trade deadline chips like that.
Berg also got the team to dead last in the NHL and bottom3 and bottom10 too many times. One fluke run to the cup finals (where the Habs got easily dealt with and handedly punished by the Lightning) doesn’t undo the greater context.
If reaching the cup finals is huge, then so is cratering the team three times.
Bergevin doesn’t get credit for leaving a top pick, he didn’t plan to tank and he didn’t sell any assets — he gave Petry, Gallagher, and Armia extensions while signing Savard and Hoffman to compete again this year.
I wouldn’t call Caufield the Habs’ best player since Naslund — that’s a strange claim for what is still a rookie. He isn’t a better player than Habs prime Markov, Koivu, Pacioretty, Kovalev, or obviously Subban or Price. Then there is Turgeon and Damphousse and others I’m too young to be able to accurately cite.
Between the names you’ve listed only three of the five have played any NHL minutes and only Suzuki and Caufield are especially notable players worth crediting Bergevin with. Recall that he gave Sergachev away for what amounted to be nothing.
As for Toffoli, there was no desire or intention from Bergevin to sell him. Bergevin signed Toffoli and Chiarot and others to fill in gaps left by his organization’s truly dreadful player development. In 2012 the Habs could’ve sold Markov, Gionta, Desharnais, Emelin, Gorges, Bourque, Eller, and Plekanec too — Bergevin
chose to hold onto nearly all of them and/or lose them for free.
I’m going to drop the issue but I don’t understand how anyone can claim HuGo don’t have an incredibly difficult project ahead of them.
1) From a cap commitment standpoint it cannot get any worse. It’ll be very hard to clear cap space.
2) From a core player standpoint the Habs have one (maybe two) actual core players despite so many contract commitments. So not just shedding cap but also replacing all these core roles in a highly competitive market is its own massive challenge.
3) The two above arguments deal with player turnover. What does HuGo do with the immovable contract commitments? What does HuGo do with Price’s and Gallagher’s contracts and their NTC/NMCs?
It’s just not comparable, the cap is flat or nearly flat for at least another year too. It’s just a really tough scene and if the Habs overachieve it mustn’t be forgotten.
