♫We're talkin' hockey, traps and odd-man rushins, talkin hockey, cheap shots and concussions♫

[captainsblog]

The local radio station carrying the Sabres games put together this audio montage of the highlights and (more recently) lowlights of the half-season just ended. It all pirouettes nicely around the moment at about the 1:33 mark of the sound clip, where a Bruin goon ran Buffalo's all-World goalie and concussed him in the process, the team failed to come to his defense, and nothing's really been the same since.

Yet another coach in the league (Columbus, this time) got the ooot-and-aboot today, making at least four to be shown the door so far. But not ours; they just plug along with the same moldy mold of player, and system, and hope to sneak in to the playoffs just in time to be out-hit, out-defensed and out-scored.

Sucks to be us.

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Yet at least we all, more-or-less, can understand each other. In Montreal, the big kerfuffle right now isn't over the firing of the old coach, or about the record of his interim replacement, but all seems focused on the fact that the interim, former Amerks coach Randy Cunneyworth, does not speak French.

I heard the story the first time on NPR's Only a Game at ass'o'clock Saturday:

Dave Stubbs of the Montreal Gazette joined Bill to discuss the controversy.

“Since their birth in 1909, this team has been much more than a hockey club, certainly to the French-Canadian population in the province of Quebec,” Stubbs said. “The Montreal Canadiens have been almost a cultural institution.”

This perhaps makes Montreal a unique market in North American sports. One would be hard-pressed to find another sports franchise that would be thrust into turmoil over a head coach’s native language.

“The customer is always right,” said Stubbs, “and if the fans say this is something that is very important to them, then great. My feeling is that it might not be as important to the fans as it is to some people in the media who believe that they are sort of standard bearers in the defense of the French language.”

However, Stubbs believes Cunneyworth’s future as the head coach in Montreal next season will be dictated more by whether or not he can lead his team to victories.

By the end of that day, featuring a Les Habitants home game in the Bell Centre, the brouhaha had gotten even nastier:

Mouvement Quebec francais president Mario Beaulieu released a statement to accompany Saturday evening’s demonstration. Via the Montreal Gazette: “The Montreal Canadiens management does not respect the status of French as Quebec’s official language,” Beaulieu said. “The music played in the Bell Centre is English. All announcements made in the arena are bilingual. There are only two or three francophone players left on the team. And now they have named a head coach who doesn’t speak a word of French. Not even ‘Bonjour’.”

That last line's un fibbe: Cunneyworth's learning the language intensely, and is working as much of it into game-day news conferences as he can. Yet this crowd doesn't seem to want just bilingualism as their goal; even announcing things in both languages in the building is offensive. And the music bit seems a bit much, too; there isn't much actual English in "We Will Rock You" or "Rock and Roll Part 2," anyway.

All seems pretty much adieu about nothing to me.