Montreal Canadiens Prospect Samuel Houde Proving To Be Steal Of 2018 Draft

The Montreal Canadiens have done extremely well at the NHL Draft in the past few years. One such prospect, Samuel Houde was taken in the 5th round but looks like a future impact player.

The Montreal Canadiens have quickly built up one of the best groups of prospects in the National Hockey League. They are led by first round picks like Ryan Poehling, Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, but you can’t build the best prospect pipeline with only first round picks.

The draft now runs seven rounds deep and the Habs have found great prospects in each round over the past few years. Sure, Poehling, Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Caufield may be the best young players in the organization, but Cayden Primeau is one of the best goaltending prospects in hockey and he was a seventh round pick.

Between the first and seventh rounds, they’ve also added Mattias Norlinder, Jayden Struble, Jesse Ylonen, Alexander Romanov and Jordan Harris who all look like great prospects at the moment. Another young player in the pipeline, Samuel Houde, doesn’t get the same accolades as some of the others players, but he is proving to be a huge steal.

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Houde was taken in the fifth round of the 2018 NHL Draft. He had scored 16 goals and 32 points in 54 games for the Chicoutimi Sagueneens of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League before the Habs took him in the draft. He was generally known as a solid defensive player who could add some offence from time to time.

Last season, he didn’t show much more offence than he did as a 17 year old. He played ten more games, but he scored 16 goals once again and only jumped to 43 points. Once again, he was a solid defensive presence for the Sagueneens, but you expect a bigger jump offensively from a legitimate NHL prospect.

That jump has come this season. Houde is absolutely on fire for Chicoutimi this season and has the town thinking their team can win a championship. Houde is showing a remarkable consistency offensively this season and is leading the deep and talented Sagueneens in scoring.

In 15 games he has scored ten goals and 23 points. Sometimes when a player has huge offensive numbers, especially in Junior, it’s because they had a huge game or two where they scored five or six points and it greatly inflates their numbers.

Not Houde. He has only scored more than two points on one occasion, when he put up three against the Victoriaville Tigres. He has seven games where he scored two points, six games where he had a single point and just one game where he was shutout. That’s right, Houde has points in 14 out of his 15 games played this season. He is just as likely to have a three point game as he is to be scoreless. That’s pretty incredible.

The Chicoutimi Sagueneens are 10-3-2 to begin the season an Houde is leading them in points. They are currently the fifth ranked team in the weekly CHL Top Ten rankings and have a real good chance of going on a deep postseason run.

Much like Nick Suzuki, Cole Fonstad and Joel Teasdale last season, Houde has a chance to help lead his team all the way to the Memorial Cup next May. It has been an impressive season for a guy taken in the fifth round of the NHL Draft in 2018. Whether Chicoutimi makes a long run or not, Houde is going to look great with the Laval Rocket next season.