The Canadiens fired Laval Rocket head coach Sylvain Lefebvre on Tuesday after six years at the helm of the team’s AHL affiliate.

Several factors led to his dismissal, not only stemming from this season, but over the course of his tenure as head coach. Here are four of them.

Penalty Kill

The Rocket finished with the second-worst penalty killing in the league at 77.5 percent and allowed 74 power play goals, the most in the AHL.

Much like the Canadiens, they went through long stretches in which they allowed a power play goal every game, and while they did improve their discipline relative to previous years, their lack of success was not only demoralizing for the players and the coaches, but it also led to the Rocket finishing dead last in the AHL standings.

Here’s an example of their penalty kill “strategy” which I like to call the drunken accordion.

They slowly chase the opposing forwards around as if they were playing Timbits hockey during an NHL intermission, giving them plenty of time to analyze the play and make decisions.

Every single passing lane remains available, and there’s little to no coverage for specific players. It’s not quite a zone defence, it’s not quite man-to-man coverage, it’s just a disaster.

Defensive liability

It wasn’t just the penalty kill which led to goals against, seeing as the Rocket allowed 186 5-on-5 goals against this season, roughly 50 too many to qualify for the playoffs.

And while Lefebvre did lose some of his defensive depth this season, including Zach Redmond and Jakub Jerabek, players like Noah Juulsen and Brett Lernout only received call-ups to the Canadiens once the playoffs were out of reach. He still had access to a relatively strong blue line, including Matt Taormina, Éric Gélinas, and Tom Parisi, who was the most underrated player on the team this year.

The gap control was non-existent, meaning opponents could enter the zone at will. The zone coverage was atrocious, leading to many high-danger chances against. The forwards didn’t support their defencemen very well, which led to extended offensive zone shifts for opposing teams. Those issues should sound familiar to most Canadiens fans.

The lack of success from a defensive standpoint is nothing new for Lefebvre’s teams. Last season they finished with a respectable 150 5-on-5 goals against, although that was mostly due to goaltender Charlie Lindgren standing on his head for most of the year. In 2015-16 the St. John’s IceCaps finished dead last in the league by allowing 183 5-on-5 goals. The previous year his team finished bottom-10 in the league, allowing 161 goals.

Roster Decisions

During the previous seasons, we’ve seen a slew of questionable roster decisions coming from Montreal’s AHL affiliate. Whether it was benching Nikita Scherbak during games, forcing him to play down the middle despite little to no experience there, and then placing him on the fourth line to play with John Scott after he struggled to play centre last season, or benching Jakub Jerabek in favour of lesser players, there have been several instances in which Lefebvre has seemingly played favourites, preferring to play good cop with gritty players and bad cop with skilled players.

This was much more evident while Michel Therrien was coaching the Canadiens, and less of a recurring issue once Claude Julien took over, but the lack of development at the AHL level, particularly for skilled players, can’t be ignored.

There’s only so much you can do with the talent you’re given, but when you end up doing nothing year after year, it’s easy to identify the common denominator.

Simon Bourque, a 21-year-old highly-touted offensive defenceman, was often a healthy scratch, and when he did play, he received a very limited amount of shifts. On the other hand Gélinas, 26, was given lots of minutes throughout the year, despite his defensive issues which led to endless chances against while he was on the ice . One is a Canadiens prospect, the other is a journeyman with an AHL contract.

If the Rocket’s main goal is to develop players, the onus should be placed on giving them more opportunities to learn and make mistakes, especially if they aren’t in playoff contention, which was the case this year. And pretty much every year.

Failure to Launch

With just 10 home wins this year the Rocket were by far the worst team in the league, hardly ideal for their first year in Laval. They were desperately hoping to start off on the right foot, but instead they continued their long tradition of failing to meet very reasonable expectations.

One of the main reasons they won a lot fewer home games this season was due to their lack of home-ice advantage, and by that, I mean opponents no longer had to play against Lefebvre’s teams immediately following a long flight. When the team was in Newfoundland, more often than not they would win the first game of a back-to-back series, and once the opposing team had time to rest and adapt, they would lose the second one. Lefebvre no longer had that advantage in Laval.

And yes, the team finally managed to graduate a fair amount of players to the NHL, something we hadn’t seen for half a decade during Lefebvre’s reign as coach, but that situation was more due to a lack of depth at the NHL level and injuries rather than players forcing their way onto the roster.

It’s also worth noting that the Rocket had the AHL’s leading scorer in Chris Terry, one of the best defencemen in Taormina, and a goaltender that has seen some success in the NHL in Lindgren. The Rocket used over 50 players this year, which was an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one. The Utica Comets used almost 60 players, and still managed to qualify for the playoffs.

Simply put, the Canadiens’ AHL affiliate has had a losing culture for too many years. That kind of toxic environment can weigh heavily on young players and is quite detrimental to their development.

After failing to receive an answer from Lefebvre, I asked Rocket general manager Larry Carriere what they were going to do to instill a winning culture with the team, and his answer was somewhat confusing.

“You definitely want a winning culture,” he said. “That’s the philosophy we have. We’ve learned a lot. You put together a team that you think can go deep and then the call-ups and injuries happened. Things happen, but you stay the course. You hope you have enough depth in (ECHL) Brampton to make up for it. You try to adjust as you go. You don’t like the results, but it reveals a lot of character that the team has and the coach has.”

They don’t have a winning culture.

They didn’t have enough, if any, depth in Brampton.

The coaches did not adjust whatsoever.

Losing doesn’t reveal character, but rather a lack of organizational foresight and planning.

If the team hopes to make a successful run any time in the near future, they’ll have to stop looking to intangibles like character, and start focusing on talent.

They also need to use their AHL team to groom potential coaches for the NHL. Lefebvre certainly wasn’t a viable option.

A new coach is a start, but the organizational issues go deeper than that.

(Top photo credit: Laval Rocket Hockey)