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category: sports

01 Jun 2009

Montreal Canadiens name Jacques Martin as new Head Coach

by: jackhammer

Wow, this is unexpected… Of all the people mentioned as potential candidates for the Habs’ new coach I don’t think I heard Jacques Martin’s name once? In any case, he is an accomplished coach with actual NHL coaching experience, so its encouraging. Read more from TSN.ca:

The Montreal Canadiens will hold a news conference this afternoon at 2pm et when the club will introduce Jacques Martin as their new head coach.

Montreal will be Martin’s third NHL stop as head coach after working for the Ottawa Senators and holding the head coach and general manager positions for the Florida Panthers.

Martin won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s top coach in 1998-99 after guiding the Ottawa Senators to a 44-23-15 record in the regular season. The Senators were swept in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs by the Buffalo Sabres. He has a career record of 517-406-119.

The Canadiens were in the market for a new coach after the club fired Guy Carbonneau in March. General Manager Bob Gainey took over as interim head coach and guided the team to an eighth-place finish and a first-round exit at the hands of the Boston Bruins.

The 2008-09 season marked the Canadiens’ 100th anniversary and while they started well, it has to be considered a disappointment for the franchise. The team won seven of their first nine games in October. With the great beginning came talk of capturing a Stanley Cup to cap the Centennial season, but off-ice scandals, rumblings of in-fighting, goaltending issues and the coaching change all took a major toll on the team.

Montreal is facing a summer of questions, with several of the clubs bigger names - captain Saku Koivu, Alex Kovalev and Mike Komisarek - among 10 regulars heading toward unrestricted free agency on July 1.

Last week, a Russian newspaper even reported the team offered Kovalev a new deal that would include being named captain and were prepared to let Koivu walk away.

With so many players potentially moving on, the duo of Martin and Gainey will have much to do when re-working the roster before the start of the 2009-10 season.