Montreal Canadiens Missed Opportunity With Ryan Dzingel
The Montreal Canadiens cleared lots of cap space for this offseason, but as the free agents dwindle, they remain static. Should they have signed Ryan Dzingel?
The Montreal Canadiens have been storing cap space like a squirrel stores food for the past two seasons. Heading into this offseason, they opened up even more by trading away Andrew Shaw and Nicolas Deslauriers just before free agency began.
With Shaw gone, the Habs should have been in the market for a scoring winger. However, with most of the free agents off the board on July 1st, the Habs landed backup goaltender Keith Kinkaid. Since then, they added minor league scorers in Riley Barber and Phil Varone as well as defensive defenseman Ben Chiarot.
Their need for another scoring forward, especially one that can help on the power play remains. Gustav Nyquist signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets, Joe Pavelski landed in Dallas, Marcus Johansson signed with the Buffalo Sabres, but none came to Montreal.
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After ten days of free agency, the only real option that remained was Ryan Dzingel. He is coming off a career-year where he scored 26 goals and 56 points with the Ottawa Senators and Columbus Blue Jackets. He didn’t have the best playoff, but his back-to-back seasons of 22 or more goals would have helped the Habs.
Dzingel is a versatile forward who plays a gritty style, hits, scores, can kill penalties, will help out a power play and can play on basically any line. In other words, he would have been an exceptional replacement for Shaw.
I didn’t mind the Habs passing on Nyquist because he got a four-year contract with a cap hit of $5.5 million. That’s a pretty big contract when they Habs have so many young players to re-sign in the next two years. Not getting into a bidding war for Johansson was okay as well, due to his concussion history which was one of the reasons they moved Shaw in the first place.
The perfect replacement would have Dzingel. He just signed a two-year contract with the Carolina Hurricanes with a cap hit of $3.375 million. This would have been an easy contract for the Habs to digest. In fact, they could have easily upped it to a two-year deal with a $3.75 million cap hit and fit it into their cap structure.
The Canadiens have lots of cap space heading into next season. After that, they have to re-sign Max Domi and Victor Mete, but have lots of money coming off the books in Dale Weise, Matthew Peca, Nate Thompson, Nick Cousins and Keith Kinkaid. They could easily fit in a two-year deal at less than $4 million per season.
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Why haven’t they upgraded the roster when given the chance to do so? Hopefully general manager Marc Bergevin has something bigger planned because there were lots of opportunities to make the Habs better and he has passed on the chance.