Disgusted and stunned that this would even be an issue. Sitting on the fence on this one Robert? Are you kidding me? You ice the best possible team, and who cares if the player is from Guyana, Kazakstan (Nik Antropov is – lol), or Burkina Faso?

Yappy Lappy signing was a good one at 900K. Well done Pete Gauthier!

I loathe Maxy Pad, but he is a useful little smile at the other team from the bench agitator. Has a little talent too. But his diving, whining, yapping ways are going to catch up to him sometime soon.

I fervently hope he gets all his teeth knocked out so he won’t be able to be Yappy Lappy so much anymore. Just jesting – kinda. Would like Boogard or Orr to do the job, but anyone will do. :) :)

Bien sur this will always be a major major issue with the mainstream French media in Montreal which is pathetique. Oh well. Ice your team and win hockey games without a care in the world where he is from.

Should not even be an issue to be discussed in this day and age, but the neanderthals insist on keeping it an issue. Outrageous and obscene.

Curious to know what Louis Leblanc’s current status speaking of French Canadian players with the Canadiens.

Can anyone out there enlighten me? Thanks.

I’m a bit ambivalent about all this. Philosophically, I agree that place of birth shouldn’t play a role in the selection of players. But when you look at the decline in Quebec-born players dressed by the Habs over the past 30 or so years, it’s hard not to feel a little uneasy.

I’m preparing a blog post on this topic, and here’s a summary of what I found. In terms of regular season man-games, the share of Quebec-born players on the Habs stood at an average of 49% during the ‘76 to ’79 dynasty block. That share gradually declined, down to a low point of 24% in the Cup loss season of ’88-’89. The Quebec contingent then grew dramatically over the next few years, peaking in ‘92-’93, when 51% of the man-games during the cup season were played by Quebec-born players. By the end of the 1990s, however, the Quebec contingent only accounted for 21% of regular season man-games.

I haven’t crunched the data for all of the 2000s yet, but in 2009-2010, a paltry 14% of all regular season man-games were played by Quebec-born players. That’s somewhat sad.

Habs Analytics

Aren’t we barking up the wrong tree here. Shouldn’t the question be “how can we improve development in Quebec so that more youngsters can break into the team?”

Look at it this way, investing more in developing younger talent, getting them experience and keeping them in Quebec would result in more high quality French Canadians playing for the Habs. The Habs win because they’re getting decent players and the fans win because they’re home town boys. Canada wins because more home grown players are playing for Canadian NHL teams.

Maybe creating a more joined up system in Quebec would help? In the South of France, the big Rugby clubs like Toulouse and Perpignan are always working with local feeder clubs and developmental camps to scout for tomorrows stars. The cultural tie between France and the sport is so great that its a huge plus for your family if you manage to get your son into one of the big club rugby camps for Biarritz or Toulouse. So you have a joined up system which links everyone from the tiny saturday league team in the Pyrenees all the way to the French national team.

If the Habs had that kind of system we’d see many more high quality local players breaking through I feel.

…there was an excellent article at All Habs that said basically what I suspected the issue was and something similar to what Peter Vine was getting at. The issue isn’t that the Habs aren’t drafting Quebecois players, it’s that almost nobody is, comparatively speaking. Quebeckers just aren’t making the NHL at the same rate they used to, and there are any number of reasons for that, but if the talent pool isn’t all that big, then for the Habs to limit themselves to French-Canadian Quebecois at the draft table would be absolutely insane, especially since they rarely draft high enough to pick up the real (almost-)guaranteed top-shelf Quebec talent. Development of Quebec-born hockey talent has to become a priority in Quebec from the bottom-up if they want to regain their prominence. But then, I suspect most of the people who are vocally angry about the Canadiens’ small Quebecois roster don’t actually care about hockey, so why would they care about this?

Or maybe Sam Pollock should just come back from the grave and convince the NHL to let them pick a few Quebecois players before the draft begins to “protect their culture”.