HF Habs: Anyone else completely losing interest in the Team?

[Runner77]

You have a statistically better chance to win the lottery than the Habs do to win a cup with Bergevin.

The Habs have combined the two concepts by offering their own lottery. Talk about bringing their losing experience closer to home.

 

[Runner77]

I think there's a persuasive argument to be made that Bergevin will never win a cup. Never is worse than 1 in 40M.

Technically, he won one as part of the management group in Chicago. Given how the NHL is run, he's going to be able to parlay that into another 20 years' worth of management contracts somewhere.

 

[PaulD]

I'm not sure we're understanding each other. I would love to see NHL teams start hiring European coaches and managers. The NHL has done itself a disservice by ignoring that talent in Europe. However, Montreal has not only ignored coaches & managers from Europe, they've also ignored coaches & managers from most of THIS continent.

Dont forget the one now where to qualify you to have coached the Canadiens before. ha!

Anyone know the policy on how many times you can get fired and rehired ?

Martin up next or is it Carbs? Will Therrien be coach in 2024?

 

[ECWHSWI]

Dont forget the one now where to qualify you to have coached the Canadiens before. ha!

Anyone know the policy on how many times you can get fired and rehired ?

Martin up next or is it Carbs? Will Therrien be coach in 2024?

Hitchcock, Yeo, Vigneault, Boudreau, Therrien, Julien, Keenan back in the days... looks like the NHL is eco-friendly.

 

[PaulD]

Hitchcock, Yeo, Vigneault, Boudreau, Therrien, Julien, Keenan back in the days... looks like the NHL is eco-friendly.

Keenan, Vigneault, Yeo, those guys coach the same team twice?

 

[ECWHSWI]

Keenan, Vigneault, Yeo, those guys coach the same team twice?

are you saying the NHL isnt in the recycling business when it comes to coaches ?

come on now...

 

[Price is Wright]

The habs are very good are protecting themselves. There's a possibility MT wasn't fired sooner because there was no French speaking coach like CJ available. Babcock was available...no dice though. Why?

Again, it doesn't take rocket scientist to know it reduces options.

You're acting really naïve and insulting others because you refuse to grasp something simple. It doesn't matter if there was no better candidate last time or time before. It's like saying goes, a broken clock is right twice a day.

Expect better. I'm all for francophone coaches but man, it's a stupid policy. For coaches, GMs, etc...

Habs will never get a real president because the president needs to speak French. We'll see if I'm wrong.​

Therrien wasn't getting fired because Bergevin always thought he was doing a great job. See Lefebvre. He was forced to fire him because the team was downward spiralling again and rumours say Price led a mutiny. People also forget that he fired Therrien prior to Julien getting fired. That's why he reached out to Florida for Gerard Gallant (who doesn't speak French).

Personally I think everyone in the organization should learn how to speak french, mostly because I think everyone in Canada should be bilingual. But I also think it's something you can learn on the job, like many of the players do. Every candidate is available to the team because every candidate can learn French when they get here. I don't know why it isn't just looked at that way.

 

[Laurentide]

I followed almost every game the Expos played, attended several and from my estimation, as much as winning is important, what caused attendance to collapse were ownership decisions that had to do with running the team in a manner that did not secure the presence of their players long term. There has been baseball in Montreal since the 1860s, organized teams since the 1870s, there has always been baseball in Montreal in some form. I think if it's run properly it will thrive and as a 2nd major league sport, it would pick up from where the Habs drop off.

As for the tradition of winning, you can't put all fans in the same basket. There is a lot to be said for fan identification with certain player, it surpasses the team itself a lot of times. Every franchise has ebbs and flows but they're not all related to a team's record, but I'd argue it has to do with whether management wants to win and what they're doing about it. You can't win when you dispatch your best assets, when you're unwilling to pay up when they are due for a raise or a long-term deal. Most of the Expos' years were permeated with budgetary concerns, selling the team, selling off their best players, a constant flux of incoming unproven players replacing a star asset like a Gary Carter who drew crowds in and off the field.

Hell, they couldn't even secure the continuance of their English broadcasters which as a lot of Montrealers reminisce, were a staple and a direct connection to the team. You can't simply jettison a Dave Van Horne and not have a fallout. Nor can you bring in a snake oil salesman like Loria and his midget clone shyster and expect fans to buy in and trust the product. Same can be said of that incredibly shortsighted ownership consortium that took over from Bronfman. They did not have the wherewithal to play with the owners of all other major league teams. They were a bottom line operation, they dismantled the team for cash. I'll never forget how Claude Brochu ran the team like scrooge -- in his first spring training as head of the ownership group, he ordered players not to flip baseballs to fans in the stands and if they did, they'd have to pay for them. Just think about that for a second and add to that a myriad of other similarly petty examples that belittled the paying and ask yourself how much "winning" was the issue that brought the Expos to their knees.

You may be able to make a better argument with the Alouettes, the CFL is an acquired taste, caters to a more limited demographic that most perceived as an inferior product and which has been watered down over the years. To me that's just a minor sport that can't really be used as an example of anything, virtually no one will care if they folded tomorrow. Just as people cared somewhat when they went bankrupt. Maybe you can argue that for a minor sport, winning will become like an event that some fans may like to associate themselves with, but that's just the fairweather variety, bandwagon jumpers that you find in any city. The Alouettes don't reflect general fan mentality in my view and I used to follow them closely. I gave up on them once they went bankrupt and never again cared, even after they rostered good teams and won. I just didn't consider them to be relevant, not a mainstream sport, too much roster turnover, playing in a small league set up with limited appeal.

While Montreal is event-driven in terms of major happenings around town, like Formula 1 and the Jazz Fest, the same type of mentality doesn't necessarily apply to the way the city follows its sports. The distinction that I've seen and lived, is that fans will gravitate more easily toward sports that are mainstream and that puts Montreal on the map in terms of North American major leagues. And that means the Habs and Expos. If the Expos are owned by stable ownership and they are run like a team with long-term prospects, whose existence is not threatened from one week to the next as they were during the end of the Bronfman years, then then winning won't be the be-all and end-all. Any team that is properly managed will live through cycles of failure and success but what ultimately determines whether fans are on board, is how they are being managed, not whether they are winning -- when you have so many teams in a league, it is rather obvious and most fans accept this -- that winning it all is not assured and may not happen.

Just give the fans their star players and ensure that they get to stick around and manage the team effectively, without the specter of ownership abandonment and fans will be there, so winning is not everything. Not when it comes to a major league sport like MLB.

The Expos of the post-Bronfman era were plagued by ownership that varied from incompetent to borderline criminal but nobody would have cared if it didn't impact the team negatively on the field. Horrible owners sometimes win championships and when they do the fans give them a pass. So winning is the defining factor in whether or not someone decides to spend their money on a product or not.

However, in the case of the Expos, their budgetary, administrative and ownership issues pretty much ensured that winning was impossible. Bronfman was a bit of a cheapskate which is why he decided to sell in the first place. He gladly participated in the owner collusion scandal during the 80's and once the gig was up he cashed in his chips rather than pay what the going rate for players was going to be. Anyone looking to buy the team from him should have been able to see what Bronfman saw: that costs were going up exponentially. But for whatever reason these facts were either lost on Brochu and his partners or ignored. But you had to know it would end badly since all together they probably didn't even have as much money as Bronfman. So how were they going to field a competitive team with even less money at their disposal than the guy they bought it from? Brochu may have acted like Scrooge but most of the money that was being spent wasn't his. He was merely the front man for a group of small fry minority owners who either couldn't or wouldn't spend what was required to be competitive. Then of course came Loria and Mini-Me who purposely ran the franchise off a cliff, took their payoff and left the entire mess in Bud Selig's hands.

Given all that, it's a miracle that even 5000 people bothered to buy tickets to Expos games. But no matter the reasons behind it, the not winning and the absence of any hope of winning sealed their fate in the eyes of the fans.

The Als used to fill the Big O in the late 70's but by the early 80's went belly up and came back briefly as the Concordes. Within 5 years they went from crowds of over 50K to less than 5K. Again the common thread was that they stopped being an elite team. Even today's version of the Als, even when they were perennial Grey Cup favourites, their appeal was largely confined to the 20K who showed up to games. If they won the Cup then people would show up en masse for the victory parade just like they show up en masse for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. But like a lot of non-hockey sports in Quebec, support for football is a mile wide and about an inch deep. It doesn't take much to go from sell-out crowds to a half-empty stadium. All it takes is a few too many games in the loss column.

I believe (and hope) that a major league baseball team can return to Montreal and thrive there. But it will have to be run like a Swiss watch and whoever owns it will have to be willing to spend money when the situation calls for it. If the team is in the playoff hunt at the deadline the owner(s) must be willing to help get them over the hump even if it means spending a pile of money to do it. I keep thinking of that one season during the time that the club was owned by MLB and they refused to allow the team to add anyone which could have helped them make the playoffs. Making the post-season that year could have saved the franchise but MLB wasn't interested in spending a dime more than it had to. Whatever faint hope the remaining fans had was extinguished forever at that point. Aside from the Mark Langston deal, I can't think of a single instance during the history of the Expos where they went "all in" trying to win the pennant.

 

[PaulD]

are you saying the NHL isnt in the recycling business when it comes to coaches ?

come on now...

No it was a legit question. My post clearly took a funny shot at the Montreal hiring the same coach to coach THEIR team again.

You listed a bunch of names.

Legit question...I was asking if all those coaches were hired by the SAME TEAM twice? Not the same league.

I was not being sarcastic.

 

[ECWHSWI]

No it was a legit question. My post clearly took a funny shot at the Montreal hiring the same coach to coach THEIR team again.

You listed a bunch of names.

Legit question...I was asking if all those coaches were hired by the SAME TEAM twice? Not the same league.

I was not being sarcastic.

outside of Hitchkock and maybe (?) Keenan, maybe a few were re-hired... but it doesnt change the fact NHL coaches are recycled a lot.

 

[Laurentide]

Therrien wasn't getting fired because Bergevin always thought he was doing a great job. See Lefebvre. He was forced to fire him because the team was downward spiralling again and rumours say Price led a mutiny. People also forget that he fired Therrien prior to Julien getting fired. That's why he reached out to Florida for Gerard Gallant (who doesn't speak French).

Personally I think everyone in the organization should learn how to speak french, mostly because I think everyone in Canada should be bilingual. But I also think it's something you can learn on the job, like many of the players do. Every candidate is available to the team because every candidate can learn French when they get here. I don't know why it isn't just looked at that way.

I agree. A commitment to learn enough of the language to speak passably is all that should be required, like how guys such as Robinson and Gainey learned to speak French once they donned the CH. But the impetus for this language requirement comes from the Francophone media and those guys do not want an anglo who can speak some butchered version of French. They demand a pur laine guy, preferably one who needs the media to shill for him to get the job. It's about power and influence and the Francophone media wants to hang on to it. They know just how loudly to blow into the dog whistle in order to get the masses enraged. They proved that with the phony Cunneyworth outrage, as if they actually believed that he would ever be more than an interim hire.

 

[PaulD]

Coaches hired by the same team twice that I can recall.

Julien
Therrien
Hitchcock (won cup first time)
Nielson

 

[PaulD]

outside of Hitchkock and maybe (?) Keenan, maybe a few were re-hired... but it doesnt change the fact NHL coaches are recycled a lot.

I did not say there were not.

I joked that on top of french speaking coaches the habs have no problem hiring a coach they already fired. Never said anything about "the league" You brought that up.

Thats cool. Separate discussion. BTW...What team did Keenan coach twice? Yeo ?

Far as I can recall Dallas did it once. Ballard did it in the same week. ha! Montreal twice.

 

[habsgirl5000]

Coaches hired by the same team twice that I can recall.

Julien
Therrien
Hitchcock (won cup first time)
Nielson

in the entire history of the NHL, has a coach EVER won the cup during his SECOND tenure with the same team?

i think the answer is no.....and we aint gonna change history with CJ

 

[PaulD]

in the entire history of the NHL, has a coach EVER won the cup during his SECOND tenure with the same team?

i think the answer is no.....and we aint gonna change history with CJ

And Pitt aint gonna hire Therrien in a million years. lol

 

[PaulD]

If Alzner , Plelks, and Benn are at camp next sept, ......hundreds of beer leaguers could be semi legit walk ons.

 

[Lshap]

I followed almost every game the Expos played, attended several and from my estimation, as much as winning is important, what caused attendance to collapse were ownership decisions that had to do with running the team in a manner that did not secure the presence of their players long term. There has been baseball in Montreal since the 1860s, organized teams since the 1870s, there has always been baseball in Montreal in some form. I think if it's run properly it will thrive and as a 2nd major league sport, it would pick up from where the Habs drop off.

As for the tradition of winning, you can't put all fans in the same basket. There is a lot to be said for fan identification with certain player, it surpasses the team itself a lot of times. Every franchise has ebbs and flows but they're not all related to a team's record, but I'd argue it has to do with whether management wants to win and what they're doing about it. You can't win when you dispatch your best assets, when you're unwilling to pay up when they are due for a raise or a long-term deal. Most of the Expos' years were permeated with budgetary concerns, selling the team, selling off their best players, a constant flux of incoming unproven players replacing a star asset like a Gary Carter who drew crowds in and off the field.

Hell, they couldn't even secure the continuance of their English broadcasters which as a lot of Montrealers reminisce, were a staple and a direct connection to the team. You can't simply jettison a Dave Van Horne and not have a fallout. Nor can you bring in a snake oil salesman like Loria and his midget clone shyster and expect fans to buy in and trust the product. Same can be said of that incredibly shortsighted ownership consortium that took over from Bronfman. They did not have the wherewithal to play with the owners of all other major league teams. They were a bottom line operation, they dismantled the team for cash. I'll never forget how Claude Brochu ran the team like scrooge -- in his first spring training as head of the ownership group, he ordered players not to flip baseballs to fans in the stands and if they did, they'd have to pay for them. Just think about that for a second and add to that a myriad of other similarly petty examples that belittled the paying and ask yourself how much "winning" was the issue that brought the Expos to their knees.

You may be able to make a better argument with the Alouettes, the CFL is an acquired taste, caters to a more limited demographic that most perceived as an inferior product and which has been watered down over the years. To me that's just a minor sport that can't really be used as an example of anything, virtually no one will care if they folded tomorrow. Just as people cared somewhat when they went bankrupt. Maybe you can argue that for a minor sport, winning will become like an event that some fans may like to associate themselves with, but that's just the fairweather variety, bandwagon jumpers that you find in any city. The Alouettes don't reflect general fan mentality in my view and I used to follow them closely. I gave up on them once they went bankrupt and never again cared, even after they rostered good teams and won. I just didn't consider them to be relevant, not a mainstream sport, too much roster turnover, playing in a small league set up with limited appeal.

While Montreal is event-driven in terms of major happenings around town, like Formula 1 and the Jazz Fest, the same type of mentality doesn't necessarily apply to the way the city follows its sports. The distinction that I've seen and lived, is that fans will gravitate more easily toward sports that are mainstream and that puts Montreal on the map in terms of North American major leagues. And that means the Habs and Expos. If the Expos are owned by stable ownership and they are run like a team with long-term prospects, whose existence is not threatened from one week to the next as they were during the end of the Bronfman years, then then winning won't be the be-all and end-all. Any team that is properly managed will live through cycles of failure and success but what ultimately determines whether fans are on board, is how they are being managed, not whether they are winning -- when you have so many teams in a league, it is rather obvious and most fans accept this -- that winning it all is not assured and may not happen.

Just give the fans their star players and ensure that they get to stick around and manage the team effectively, without the specter of ownership abandonment and fans will be there, so winning is not everything. Not when it comes to a major league sport like MLB.

Good points and well said. As you said, the MLB plays on a very different stage than the CFL and requires a huge expenditure of money and patience. I can't see any ownership group willing to take the plunge with the Expos.2, but it would be nice.

The Habs have combined the two concepts by offering their own lottery. Talk about bringing their losing experience closer to home.

You're on fire, man!

 

[Lshap]

Dont forget the one now where to qualify you to have coached the Canadiens before. ha!

Anyone know the policy on how many times you can get fired and rehired ?

Martin up next or is it Carbs? Will Therrien be coach in 2024?

Jacques Martin was very underrated here and scapegoated by Gauthier. I said so at the time and his reputation has been redeemed since. Smart, effective coach.

outside of Hitchkock and maybe (?) Keenan, maybe a few were re-hired... but it doesnt change the fact NHL coaches are recycled a lot.

Agreed. Randy Carlyle is back with Anaheim, another example of the eco-friendly coach-recycling system in the NHL.

 

[peate]

No Habs game all week and no one cares. Arizona plays Vegas tonight, no help for the tank.

 

[groovejuice]

Technically, he won one as part of the management group in Chicago. Given how the NHL is run, he's going to be able to parlay that into another 20 years' worth of management contracts somewhere.

I'll concede that Bergevin could get dubious credit for proximity to excellence. Technicalities are only close in horseshoes and Dunning-Kruger though.

 

[Lshap]

No Habs game all week and no one cares. Arizona plays Vegas tonight, no help for the tank.

The next time hockey counts will be the draft lottery.

 

[Runner77]

The Expos of the post-Bronfman era were plagued by ownership that varied from incompetent to borderline criminal but nobody would have cared if it didn't impact the team negatively on the field. Horrible owners sometimes win championships and when they do the fans give them a pass. So winning is the defining factor in whether or not someone decides to spend their money on a product or not.

However, in the case of the Expos, their budgetary, administrative and ownership issues pretty much ensured that winning was impossible. Bronfman was a bit of a cheapskate which is why he decided to sell in the first place. He gladly participated in the owner collusion scandal during the 80's and once the gig was up he cashed in his chips rather than pay what the going rate for players was going to be. Anyone looking to buy the team from him should have been able to see what Bronfman saw: that costs were going up exponentially. But for whatever reason these facts were either lost on Brochu and his partners or ignored. But you had to know it would end badly since all together they probably didn't even have as much money as Bronfman. So how were they going to field a competitive team with even less money at their disposal than the guy they bought it from? Brochu may have acted like Scrooge but most of the money that was being spent wasn't his. He was merely the front man for a group of small fry minority owners who either couldn't or wouldn't spend what was required to be competitive. Then of course came Loria and Mini-Me who purposely ran the franchise off a cliff, took their payoff and left the entire mess in Bud Selig's hands.

Given all that, it's a miracle that even 5000 people bothered to buy tickets to Expos games. But no matter the reasons behind it, the not winning and the absence of any hope of winning sealed their fate in the eyes of the fans.

The Als used to fill the Big O in the late 70's but by the early 80's went belly up and came back briefly as the Concordes. Within 5 years they went from crowds of over 50K to less than 5K. Again the common thread was that they stopped being an elite team. Even today's version of the Als, even when they were perennial Grey Cup favourites, their appeal was largely confined to the 20K who showed up to games. If they won the Cup then people would show up en masse for the victory parade just like they show up en masse for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. But like a lot of non-hockey sports in Quebec, support for football is a mile wide and about an inch deep. It doesn't take much to go from sell-out crowds to a half-empty stadium. All it takes is a few too many games in the loss column.

I believe (and hope) that a major league baseball team can return to Montreal and thrive there. But it will have to be run like a Swiss watch and whoever owns it will have to be willing to spend money when the situation calls for it. If the team is in the playoff hunt at the deadline the owner(s) must be willing to help get them over the hump even if it means spending a pile of money to do it. I keep thinking of that one season during the time that the club was owned by MLB and they refused to allow the team to add anyone which could have helped them make the playoffs. Making the post-season that year could have saved the franchise but MLB wasn't interested in spending a dime more than it had to. Whatever faint hope the remaining fans had was extinguished forever at that point. Aside from the Mark Langston deal, I can't think of a single instance during the history of the Expos where they went "all in" trying to win the pennant.

I respect your contention however, it doesn't apply across the board. Winning has its importance but the longevity of a team, how it operates within the context of a 30-team league is far more important as it's not reasonable to expect a team to win consistently or to win the big prize with the odds being so low. It's far to easy to drum up the Habs winning in decades past operating in a 6-team league and during several years where the rules favored their acquisition of the best players, not to mention decades where they were favored by having the best and most shrewd management types. This doesn't create any precedent for fans expecting to win and only attending if they win. It's in the past, the team and league don't operate that way anymore, it can't be used as fans expecting to win only. It's just a confluence of events and circumstances that favored Montreal fans in the past century -- they no longer apply.

I can't agree with your contention about "horrible owners" and how they spend their money. If you're a horrible owner, you're usually ripping off the fans by sapping into the product, you're cashing in on revenues and that will usually translate into a lesser product on the field. Fans are not dumb, they'll catch on readily and will abandon ship when the owners themselves don't have confidence in the product they're putting out.

Again, I'm not going to give any credence to arguments based on the Als for reasons I've already expounded upon. The Als are not representative of how fans will conduct themselves with the more established major league sports that define a city's image across North America. Hence, whatever trendlines you choose to extrapolate from the CFL need to be put in their proper context. The CFL has no star power, no identification process of the magnitude that a star player of a major league team will have. A 9 team league that can't even field teams to fill a full balanced slate, and worse who jerrymandered the configuration of its "regions" to include a team in the wrong geographically based divisions, is nothing more than a small time chump diversion. The CFL in the 70s and 80s was commonly mocked as standing for Cheap Foreign Labor. A league of rejects. It shouldn't be a precedent in a conversation about the Habs and what their fans are after or what in general, fans are like in Quebec.

As for the Expos and their prospects, we're no longer in 2004, there is far greater revenue sharing now. Heck, you have a team like the Milwaukee Brewers is a backwater when compared to Montreal and that is thriving. The gloom and doom scenarios that you are envisaging were more appropriate at a time when the team was run by penny pinchers and where the league was more favorable to owners who spent their own money. Claude Brochu and the consortium pocketed a lot of the revenue sharing money from their day, they didn't reinvest it in the players. Jean Coutu was part of the consortium at the time and his vision for the team was to run it like his pharmacies -- it was a bottomline operation, where it had to produce an immediate profit and he would always be advocating new ways of generating revenue that involved cutting into the product, being overly frugal on player retention and ultimately killing the product. Would you expect fans to be on board with this type of vision and management?

Before you say Bronfman was a bit of cheapskate, just remember what happened when Jean Drapeau had to put together a group of financiers to put the $1 Million franchise fee in 1968. Ten of the city's richest individuals were solicited by Drapeau to pony up their share to make good on the money. So Drapeau calls a meeting for all 10 to decide who pays in what proportion. The day of the meeting came and only Charles Bronfman showed up. And he put up the totality of the franchise fee on his own. So there's no way I'm going to remotely crap on Bronfman, if it wasn't for him, there would have been no major league baseball in Montreal, despite the facts that he had reticences near the end of his ownership of the team and did not embark upon the inflationary trends of the day that required more money than he wanted to pay to keep star players on the team long-term.

Baseball has been the most capitalist of major sports. It was a toy for the uber rich. Unfortunately for Montreal in the time that Bronfman was trying to sell the team, Montreal lost a hoarde of the very rich to Toronto. Bronfman to his credit, did not move to Toronto, but continued to invest locally. He was also concerned with ensuring that the team would continue in the city and only passed it on to Brochu and his consortium because he thought Brochu would keep the team in the community. Bronfman could have secured a far higher return if he was out to sell to the highest bidder, someone who would, like Loria, have bought into the team solely as a means of acceding to the select group of owners that have an MLB franchise -- a very exclusive club, but a very ultra rich club, one who mostly used their MLB teams as a promotional device, for tax breaks or merely as a toy fetish (and not to mention how no MLB team in the last 40 years was sold for less than its cost of acquisition). Clearly, Claude Brochu's consortium was out of his element.

And I am fully aware that Brochu was small potatoes individually, as head of the consortium and the consortium itself was of the small-minded variety. He was handpicked by Bronfman on account of Brochu being a Seagram's guy over many years. The city just didn't have the type of capitalist to be able to play with the rest of the owners in MLB. This has zero to do with winning or not winning. You can't run a franchise and expect fan support when it's wobbling from the time the consortium took over and who predictably ran it to the ground and put it on life support. You can't judge fans for not attending the mausoleum-worthy product they created. Fans have attended Expos games during many seasons where they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of contending -- and that tells you that winning is not the be-all and end-all -- it's nice to contend, it fun to have hope and dreams and when a team is well managed, where revenues from baseball are reinvested on the field, where a fan can identify with a player and be able to count on that player being around for most of his career, when a player is being brought up, is a bred organizational player -- there is an anticipation and association with the player that becomes in itself, an act of winning.

If you still have season tickets of the Expos that you claim you want to sell, let's not confuse the value of memorabilia with a real thing that mattered for all the right reasons and that was allowed to die by those who had no business owning it in the first place. The fact of fans not choosing to attend was a backlash against what the owners at the relevant times, stood for and chose to act upon. It shows you that fans are smart and they were right in not supporting the team -- it was doomed to fail on account of shortsighted ownership that was ill equipped and incompetently managed the team. It in now way should be used as an example about how fans will only support a team if it is winning -- nothing could be more further from the truth.

 

[MasterDecoy]

No.

I'm sure everyone enjoys watching a lottery worthy roster on the ice and shit show up top.

 

[Runner77]

Good points and well said. As you said, the MLB plays on a very different stage than the CFL and requires a huge expenditure of money and patience. I can't see any ownership group willing to take the plunge with the Expos.2, but it would be nice.
(...)

You're on fire, man!

Thanks so much, Grand Poobah. Always flattering to receive recognition from a big chief.

I'll fight tooth and nail for what I know happened with the Expos, I've lived and died every moment, many times over. No one is going to convince me that Montreal fans only want winning. It's a generality that is far too easy to make when you have a team like the Habs who won Stanley Cups hand over fist in what is the most favorable and skewed of set-ups ever seen in the history of pro sports. Ain't gonna happen anymore in a 31 league set-up, where talent is spread out, where the Habs no longer only have to beat out 5 teams to win a Cup, where they don't have the sharpest management talent leading them, etc. Habs haven't won a Cup since 1993 and yet since then, there has been a growing waiting list for season tickets. I remember being on one in the 90s and receiving a letter from the Habs confirming where I ranked.

And since 1993, we've seen our share of inept management types and coaches and not to mention players, but none of it stopped fans from continuing to be rabid. Habs owners always invested, they built a state-of-the art building in the middle of downtown when no one else had cranes working in the downtown core and paid up for it without govt assistance. Fans did not have to look over their shoulder and fear that the team could leave the city or that money would ever be an object, or that players could not be retained. The fact of this kind of consistency and predictability in the existence of a major league product, is what keeps fans coming back. Winning is not an absolute necessity. The fact of trying to win is a function of a well-managed team allocating its resources to the product in a timely manner -- it is all the fans are looking for as no one in any sport can guarantee the outcome of games, otherwise it wouldn't be a sport. So winning is not the be-all and end-all. The average Montreal pro team fan deserves far more credit than he/she has been given.

 

[Tyson]

You know you don’t really care anymore when you enjoy watching other teams. I have enjoyed the Leafs and Jets. Both teams have decent management, are committed to winning. They are top notch organizations. Habs will take 5-7 years to turn this ship around especially with the current Managnent team staying at the helm.