Canadiens meet with Patrick Roy for vacant GM job.

The cat is now officially out of the bag and in spite of reports that Montreal Canadiens legend Patrick Roy was not being considered for the current vacant general manager's position in the Canadiens organization, it would seem that this is in fact the case.

On Saturday Montreal Canadiens insider Renaud Lavoie of TVA Sports confirmed that Roy, who denied earlier this week that he would be meeting with the Canadiens in regards to the vacant GM job, was in fact among the candidates being considered by the Habs and had met with them on Friday.

"This meeting had been planned for some time due to the fact that Geoff Molson had reached out to Jacques Tanguay (President of the Quebec Remparts) in order to ask him permission to speak with Patrick Roy," said Lavoie on Saturday as per TVA Sports(translated from French).

To Patrick Roy's credit it does not sound like the denial he issued earlier this week was a malicious one, but rather a decision that was prompted by the fact that he did not know what the Canadiens were willing to reveal publicly about the process. According to Roy the decision was made out of respect to the Canadiens.

"So why then did he deny the fact that he would be meeting with the Canadiens on Friday during a Thursday press conference? I spoke to him today and he told me that he was trying to protect the Canadiens during this process. He did not know if he was allowed to say that he was in fact a candidate but was later told by the Canadiens that there were no issues with him making mention of it," said Lavoie.

Lavoie goes on to list that a large number of candidates remain in the hunt, candidates that include some big names like Roberto Luongo, Daniel Brière, Mathieu Darche, Kent Hughes, Stéphane Quintal, and Marc Denis, so this by no means makes Roy a favorite. In fact Lavoie reports that meetings with all the candidates have seemingly gone very well, which likely means that team owner Geoff Molson and executive vice president of hockey operations Geoff Gorton have a lot of work ahead of them when it comes to narrowing the list down to their final candidates for the role.