I liked your Bowman article, I agree with most of it and one of the biggest blunders and few blunders by Pollack was not selecting Bowman as his successor (in my eyes even bigger then not drafting Bossy).

However, I'm not so sure that Bowman would have ripped apart the habs had he succeeded Pollack.

I think Bowman would have stuck with Gainey, Robinson and Lafleur.  he probably would have gotten a much better goalie then the stiffs they had after Dryden retired.  I am positive though that Bowman would have done a much better job then Grundman or Savard in running the habs and that will forever be a blunder that I will never forgive Sam Pollack for.

I think that the Langway, Englom, Jarvis trade ranked just below the Roy fiasco by Houle.   That trade instantly gave Washington some semblance of respectability by providing them with two all-star defencemen and a shut down centre.  How you can trade two fairly young studs on D is beyond me. 

Then of course there was the Wickeniser draft over Savard.  Lafleur probably would have gone on to score 50 goals for another 3-4 years if they drafted Savard.

I think the only decent trade Grundman made was this pickup of Larouche - even though I always thought Larouche was a bum - Larouche reminds me a lot of Richer - loads of talent  but lazy and inconsistent.

If i remember correctly, when Bowman was with the Sabres he tried to pick up Lafleur for Perrault, but Savard didn't want to risk trading Lafleur from a PR perspective.  Which in my eyes was complete stuipidity - sounds much better to alllow the greatest player of the habs dynasty to retire for no return.  I wasn't much of a Perrault fan and would have liked to see the habs pick up somoene else, but some return would have been nice.  Although, in all honesty, if the habs had traded away Lafleur back when I was 13 or 14 years old, I may have stopped cheering for the habs.  As it is, I ended up being a life long habs fan, despite growing up in Western Canada during the heyday of the Oilers/Flames.  However, as a rationale adult - I can see that trading Lafleur was the only sensible thing to do.  heck, even  a year after he had been retired, I had started lamenting that why the heck didn't they trade Lafleur then let him retire without any return!!!

I also seem to remember that the habs (I think it was Savard and not Grundman), had tried to put a package together that was to have included Robinson in an attempt to get the rights to draft #66.  If i remember correctly, Lafleur was also supposed to be part of that offer, but its been a while, so I can't remember for sure.

I will forever hold Grundman responsible for letting the habs fall from being argubly the greatest team of all time, to just another team (just as I'll forever hold the unholy trinity of the bumbling idiots of Corey, Houle and Tremblay for letting the habs sink to the level of the Ballard leafs),  but I also was not a fan of Savard - despite the habs winning two cups during his watch.  However, after the Corey-Houle-Tremblay years, Savard almost seems like a genius. 

I think Habs fan will forever wonder what could have been, had the habs let Bowman take over from Grundman.

In any event, if the Habs could somehow get Bowman back, I think that it would not only help them have the right guy to lead them back to respectibility, it might even help them attract free agents going forward.