Montreal Canadiens: Five Best Habs Trades Since 2000

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The Montreal Canadiens, like all teams, have made some great trades that make you wonder what the other team was thinking and have also been guilty of some poor swaps. Take a look at their top five trades since 2000.

The Montreal Canadiens, like much of the rest of the world, are on pause at the moment. Their season came to a screeching halt after 71 games and we still don’t know when, or if, we will see the 2019-20 version of the Habs again.

The team was not exactly dominating on the ice this season. They were ten points out of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, and a perfect 11 game finish to their season likely would not have been enough to get them into the playoffs.

As we await an announcement of when the NHL calendar will start up again, and what it is going to look like when it does, we have been looking back at some of the best and worst decisions the Habs have made this century. We started by looking at the five best draft picks since the 2000 NHL Draft and the five worst decisions on the draft floor since then.

Today, we are taking a look at their five best trades since 2000. We could look back further, but when you start trying to compare players from the Habs glory years of the 50’s and 70’s to more recent players, it puts the greatest players of the past 20 years in an impossible scenario. We all know Andrei Markov was a great defenceman, but when you compare to Habs all-time greats, Markov’s exceptional play gets dwarfed by the giant numbers of Stanley Cups won by the likes of Larry Robinson, Doug Harvey, Guy Lapointe and Serge Savard.

It can be fun to do those all-time rankings, and heck, we even took a recent look at where Markov ranks among Habs defencemen, but it is impossible to compare something that happened in 1945, before the draft or trade deadline day even existed, to a deal made at the last second before the trade deadline in 2016.

So, to make things a little more clear, we have been doing these top fives, but only dating back to the year 2000. It keeps things a little more modern and most of these decisions sent ripple effects that are still impacting the roster today.

So, without further adieu, let’s take a look at the Montreal Canadiens five best trades since 2000.

CALGARY, AB – DECEMBER 19: Nick Suzuki #14 of the Montreal Canadiens (Photo by Derek Leung/Getty Images) /

#5: Tie between Shea Weber for P.K. Subban and Max Domi for Alex Galchenyuk

I couldn’t choose which one of these trades was a better one for the Habs. I, like many Habs fans out there, hated both of them when Marc Bergevin pulled the trigger. Now, I can’t figure out which of them was one of the five best trades we have seen the Habs pull off in the past two decades.

So, I put them in here together as a tie. They are remarkably similar deals in a lot of ways. A couple of old school one-for-one deals. Two of the Habs building blocks from the day Bergevin arrived in Montreal were shipped out for players that seemed to have more question marks than the people who were leaving town.

Since the trade, Weber has proven to be an excellent two-way defender well into his thirties and Domi put together a career year in his first season with the Habs. Weber has battled a few injuries since showing up in Montreal and Domi had a down season this year, scoring 44 points in 71 games after having 72 in 82 a year ago.

However, the two players who left town, looked terrible this season. Subban was dealt to the New Jersey Devils a year ago after becoming too much cap hit to handle in Nashville. The 2013 Norris Trophy winner had 18 points in 68 games and Galchenyuk scored just eight goals and 24 points in 59 games. Clearly, Bergevin got rid of both of them just before their value completely plummeted.

#4: Tomas Tatar, Nick Suzuki and a 2nd Round Pick for Max Pacioretty

This was another trade pulled off by Bergevin, and it included a core piece he inherited leaving town. However, he once again got full value on the return. While Pacioretty had fit in well in Vegas, and would have set a career high in points, the handful of players the Habs for in exchange for moving out their captain in 2018 have been fantastic.

Tomas Tatar was only put in this deal because the Golden Knights wanted to get rid of him. He set a career high with 58 points in his first year in Montreal and was even better this year, scoring 61 points in 68 games before the league pressed pause. He has basically kept pace with Pacioretty, while costing the Habs a little more than half of Pacioretty’s $7 million cap hit.

Nick Suzuki has quickly turned into a budding star for the Habs. He dominated the OHL last season after being acquired by the Habs and got better and better as his rookie NHL season went along this year. The 20 year old had 41 points in 71 games, and showed glimpses of being a trusted two-way centre for the next decade or so in Montreal.

Evaluating draft picks acquired in trades is always tricky. Was it a steal of a trade if the pick turns out great? Does it make it a terrible trade if you get a first round pick in a deal and he doesn’t pan out years later?

Either way, the Habs getting a second round pick with Tatar and Suzuki made this great value. Flipping that pick for a third and fifth on the draft floor and taking Mattias Norlinder and Jacob Leguerrier with those picks has the potential to make this trade look even better for the Habs in the long term.

MONTREAL- JANUARY 8: Alexei Kovalev #27 of the Montreal Canadiens (Photo by Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images) /

#3: Alex Kovalev for Josef Balej and a 2nd Round Pick.

The Habs were in a playoff race in the 2003-04 season when the trade deadline was approaching. They were getting some solid scoring from the round duo of Mike Ribeiro and Michael Ryder as well as Saku Koivu and Richard Zednik, but they needed another asset in the top six.

The New York Rangers had grown tired of paying big bucks to their players and not making any noise in the postseason. They quickly fell out of the playoff race with the Habs and then had one of the most fascinating midseason fire-sales in NHL history. They had added Jaromir Jagr in the middle of the year, but not long after traded away most of their roster.

One of those trades sent Alex Kovalev to the Habs for prospect Josef Balej and a second round pick they would use to select Bruce Graham. Balej and Graham combined to play 18 career NHL games and Kovalev would become a rockstar in Montreal.

Kovalev would play the rest of that 2003-04 season with the Habs and then four more full seasons after the 2004-05 season was wiped out due to the lockout. In total, he played 314 games with the Canadiens and scored 103 goals and 264 points. He added an impressive 17 goals and 31 points in 33 playoff games with the Habs.

#2: Josh Gorges and a First Round Pick for Craig Rivet and a Fifth Round Pick

The 2006-07 season was a difficult year to be general manager of the Habs. Bob Gainey had the unenviable task of trying to stay in a tight postseason race in the Eastern Conference, while his top three defencemen were all playing in the final year of their contract before they would be eligible to become unrestricted free agents.

The salary cap was barely over $40 million that season, so keeping all three of Andrei Markov, Sheldon Souray and Craig Rivet would be impossible. Trading two or three of them would guarantee the Habs would miss the playoffs that year.

Souray was a force offensively that year, scoring 26 goals and finishing second on the team with 64 points. Markov was blossoming into a terrific two-way player that was taking on huge minutes and playing all situations. Rivet was a steady, veteran presence who played a great defensive style.

Gainey elected to trade Rivet at the trade deadline to the San Jose Sharks. In return, the Habs added a young, unproved Josh Gorges on defence and a first round pick. That. is a difficult package to pass up, which is why Gainey pulled the trigger, even with the Habs in the middle of a playoff race that would ultimately see them fall two points short.

Of course, Gorges quickly became one of the Habs best defensive defencemen, playing huge minutes against opponent’s best players and being a mainstay on the penalty kill during his seven full seasons in Montreal.

The real asset in the trade was the first round pick the Habs received. The Sharks were really good in 2007, so it was going to be late in the first round, but that was still great value for a veteran, defensive guy like Rivet. Selecting Max Pacioretty with that pick just made this trade even better for the Habs.

Instead of having Rivet for the rest of that season and maybe getting into the first round of the playoffs, the Habs got seven years of top-four defensive production from Gorges and a decade of goal scoring from Pacioretty.

DETROIT, MICHIGAN – JANUARY 07: Phillip Danault #24 of the Montreal Canadiens. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images) /

#1: Phillip Danault and a Second Round Pick for Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann

The Canadiens were a mess in 2015-16. Carey Price had won every award in the world the season previous, but he was injured early the following year and the team fell off a cliff. While losing every other game isn’t ideal, sometimes teams can move out a few veterans for younger pieces that can help in the future. That’s always the hope at least, though it rarely works out as hoped for the team selling veterans.

However, Bergevin made it work in 2016. It was his fourth season as general manager of the Habs after leaving the Chicago Blackhawks to take the job in Montreal. So, he clearly knew the Hawks organization well and had a pretty good idea who their prospects were in the pipeline.

The problem with the Habs losing in 2015-16, aside from all the losing of course, was that they didn’t have a lot of veterans on expiring deals to trade at the deadline. The only two players they had that were clearly on their way out the door were Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann.

Weise had often been used on the top line with Pacioretty but was far from a typical first line NHL player. He had 14 goals and 26 points in 56 games with the Habs that season as the deadline for trades drew close. The hard-nosed winger had been acquired from the Vancouver Canucks almost exactly two years earlier for Raphael Diaz.

Fleischmann was signed to a one-year contract with the Habs that year after accepting a professional tryout in training camp. He started the season really well, scoring 15 points in his first 22 games with the Habs while playing on the third line with Lars Eller. Then, he had five points in his next 35 games.

Bergevin traded both Weise and Fleischmann in a package to the Blackhawks for Phillip Danault and a second round pick. The pair of new Blackhawks combined for 34 games in Chicago that season and scored four goals and six points.

Bergevin made that pick more valuable by waiting a few years to take it. The trade was made in February 2016, but the pick wasn’t made until 2018. So, instead of the pick being a really late second round selection because the Hawks were awesome in 2016, it was a very early pick in 2018 because the Hawks dynasty had finally fallen back to earth at that point. This became a huge difference because the Habs drafted Alexander Romanov with that pick.

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What makes this trade the best we have seen from the Habs in the last 20 years is the fact they gave up two veterans who were guaranteed to be leaving Montreal later that season anyway. in return they got Danault, who has turned into a terrific two-way centre and an early second round pick which eventually became Romanov.

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