Even if Tuesday night’s controversial goalie interference call had resulted in a victory, Claude Julien still wasn’t long for the Montreal Canadiens. They squandered a hot start and tumbled down the standings in the pressure cooker North Division. General manager Marc Bergevin had seen enough.
“It’s a hard thing to watch. Our team was chasing the puck. We’re not in sync. Sometimes you can blame injuries. But we had none! Zero,” said Bergevin.
Julien and associate coach Kirk Muller were fired on Wednesday. Julien ended his second tour of duty as Montreal head coach with a 113-113-35 record, qualifying for the postseason twice but failing to win a playoff round — although the Canadiens did eliminate Pittsburgh in the qualification round of last season’s expanded postseason.
As Dominique Ducharme takes over a 9-5-4 team on an interim basis, what’s the thinking for the Canadiens? And what’s next for Julien?
Why fire Claude Julien?
The Canadiens had a blazing start, in which they collected 16 out of a possible 20 points. Then they had to stop playing the Vancouver Canucks — against whom they earned nine of 10 points — and started playing the Ottawa Senators, the worst team in the NHL except when they’re playing Montreal, going 3-1-0 against the Habs since Feb. 4.
(This was reminiscent of Montreal’s 0-4 record against the moribund Detroit Red Wings last season.)
Their diminishing returns had Bergevin convinced that the players had tuned out Julien.
“I saw a team that was lost, a team with no direction,” he said on Wednesday, adding that he saw patterns that reminded him of the team’s eight-game winless streaks last season. He could no longer wait to make a change, and “wasn’t going to wait to pull the trigger.”
The slide underscored systemic problems under Julien during his time in Montreal.
The team’s offense was always under scrutiny, with a goals-per-game average of 3.01 over the past three seasons. While their average goals (3.39) ranks in the top 10 this season, the Habs have scored more than two goals in just two of their past eight games.
But Julien’s teams have always been solid at 5-on-5. They have strong possession numbers. They always have solid underlying numbers: Montreal is fourth in expected goals per game (2.56) this season at even strength, which matches with their standing in raw goals per game at 5-on-5 (61). Their expected goals differential at 5-on-5 was the best in the NHL, per Evolving Hockey, at plus-1.29 goals per 60 minutes.
What they don’t have is creativity. That’s been one of the major knocks on Julien in Montreal. The offensive game plan seemingly revolves around a defenseman taking a shot through traffic in front of the net. Rinse, repeat. It’s an old-school approach from an old-school coach. The Canadiens are reading sheet music in a division where teams like Edmonton and Toronto are playing offensive jazz.
One thing Ducharme said in his news conference on Wednesday was that “we’ll work at giving the puck carrier more options.” On the creativity front, that’s good news.
Bergevin invested heavily in this team in the offseason, adding offensive talents such as Tyler Toffoli and Josh Anderson to bolster its goal scoring, which has dried up recently. But the real problem is on special teams.
“The special teams need to be better. A lot better,” Bergevin said. “When we’re at our best, we don’t score on every power play, but we gain momentum from it.”
The Canadiens ranked 28th in power play percentage (15.6%) over the past three seasons; this season, they’re 20th (18.2%), but that’s a relic from their torrid start, having failed to score a power-play goal in their past six games.
Their penalty kill is 22nd this season (76.4%) and was ranked 19th in the NHL (79.4%) over the past three seasons.
“We were chasing our tail too much in our own zone,” Bergevin said.
That’s a problem when Montreal takes as many penalties as it does: 11:10 per game on average, second most in the NHL. That speaks to a lack of discipline, as the Canadiens have an NHL-worst minus-15 penalty differential. That speaks to a problem with the message from the bench reaching the players.
Yet here’s the number that needs the most attention on the penalty kill: .818, which is Carey Price‘s shorthanded save percentage this season, which is 30th among players who have played at least eight games. Price is ranked 55th in the NHL in goals saved above average at minus-2.1; his backup, Jake Allen, is eighth (6.3).
It’s said a coach is only as a good as his goaltender. Price has not been good. Julien is out of a job.
Why promote Dominique Ducharme?
There was a little surprise in the coaching community that Muller didn’t take over from Julien, considering the job he did in the bubble last season during Julien’s health crisis. But the power play’s collapse, of which Muller was in charge, in the last eight games were an anchor for him. He also isn’t bilingual, and was in the last year of his contract, as was Julien.
It is to Julien’s credit that he hired Ducharme for his staff in 2018. This was a younger, bilingual coach with a strong coaching background in Canadian junior hockey, both with the QMJHL’s Halifax Mooseheads and Team Canada in winning silver (2017) and gold (2018) at the IIHF World Junior Championship. Julien said his own experience as an assistant coach in the Olympics and the World Cup of Hockey encouraged him to add Ducharme to his staff as another voice, despite the fact that he had all the trappings of Julien’s successor one day.
“You know what? It’s not a bad thing to have another set of eyes,” Julien said in 2018.
All eyes are on the interim coach and new assistant coach Alex Burrows now. Ducharme is the head coach through the end of the season. It’s the first pro team he’s coached.
“It’s a new voice. I felt like this is what the team was looking for,” Bergevin said.
He helped Muller coach the power play, but he didn’t run the power play. Big difference. One assumes he’ll be tasked with cracking the code here. Again, there was an overreliance on point shots on the power play, just like at 5-on-5. There needs to be more creativity in that unit.
That said, it would behoove Ducharme to continue Montreal’s solid play at 5-on-5, using speed and being aggressive on the puck. That’s not the issue. “We had success with how we’re playing. We’ll be close to that,” Bergevin said.
There’s another aspect to Ducharme that’s going to sound familiar to those who followed Julien’s career path: his ability to coach young players. When Julien was fired in Boston after 55 games in 2016-17, his relationship with the Bruins’ youthful rank and file was criticized. Bruce Cassidy wasn’t just younger in age than Julien, he had worked with younger players in the American Hockey League before getting called up to replace Julien in Boston.
Ducharme is 13 years younger than Julien. Bergevin called him “a new type of coach” for the team.
“Dom was in the junior ranks a lot more recently than Claude. Players change. I feel like it might be a different voice for the players. It’s not to say Claude doesn’t have a good message. It’s just that the message sometimes has to come from a different voice,” the GM said.
What’s next for Claude Julien?
Obviously, our first hope is continued good health. Julien left the postseason bubble last summer after feeling chest pains, and he had a stent placed in a coronary artery at a Toronto hospital. He said he felt “100 percent” after the procedure, and coached without incident this season.
He’s coached consistently since the 2002-03 season, when he was hired for the first time by Montreal. His 10-year run with the Boston Bruins produced a Stanley Cup championship and two conference championships. He had a 667-445-152 record, with 10 ties.
He joins a robust collection of former NHL head coaches looking for work, one that includes former Vegas Golden Knights coach Gerard Gallant, former Minnesota Wild coach Bruce Boudreau and former NBC analyst Mike Babcock (currently coaching at the University of Saskatchewan). That’s on top of all the rising star assistants currently on NHL benches and in the American Hockey League.
Obviously, the first team that comes to mind is the Seattle Kraken, the NHL expansion franchise making its debut this October — a team that has yet to name a head coach. But Julien might be better suited as the “veteran quick fix” for a talented team of veteran players.
What’s next for the Canadiens?
There are many who believe this Canadiens team can be a championship contender if Price can find his groove — and again, he’s 35th in goals saved above average (21.3) since 2017-18, so the search continues — and if the special teams can turn around.
That might be true. It also might be true that the Canadiens are a supporting cast in search of a featured player. Remember when they went hard after John Tavares as a free agent? It’s that level of star they’re lacking, and it’s that level of star that elevates a franchise from contention to champion.
As it stands, Montreal is a capped-out team ($443,814 in current space) in a capped-out league. Bergevin obviously believes a coaching change can get more out of this roster. But what about a GM change?
Bergevin has been the general manager of the Canadiens since May 2012. His teams have qualified for the playoffs five times and haven’t advanced past the first round since 2015. Ducharme is his third coach after Julien and Michel Therrien, who was his first hire. If Ducharme isn’t the answer — and we’ll all get a good look the rest of this season — does Bergevin get a chance to hire a fourth coach?
He was praised to the heavens for a strong offseason, and he looked like a genius through the first 10 games of the season. He heavily invested in this roster. He can do it again next summer, when the Canadiens will have over $15 million in open space. He hasn’t been shy about taking big swings — trading P.K. Subban, Max Pacioretty, Mikhail Sergachev and Max Domi through the years; and signing Sebastian Aho to an offer tag that was matched by the Hurricanes — and has found success through the draft.
That said, this team has a payroll close to $68 million in salary. If the Canadiens can’t rally for a playoff spot, does Bergevin survive?
Perhaps like the head coach, the general manager is going to be only as good as his goaltender, too. The difference being that Julien didn’t give Price an eight-year deal with a $10.5 million cap hit and a full no-movement clause through 2025-26.