Can the Montreal Canadiens use a similar system Vegas did to succeed?
By Elias Laradi
If you look at NHL history, expansion teams usually didn’t do well in their first couple of years. Ottawa only won a mere 18 games in their inaugural season while Atlanta and Columbus were basically bottom feeders for a very long time.
The factor being why the Vegas Golden Knights were so good is actually because teams didn’t know what kind of system they would use, and it was very hard to scout a team that had not played a game yet. We quickly found out their system was speed, being aggressive on both ends of the ice, and of course, Marc Andre Fleury, who played lights out.
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That is most likely why Vegas had one of the greatest seasons an expansion team could have, breaking every record imaginable. Even making it to the Stanley Cup final left everyone in the league speechless. NHL analyst kept saying, could this be the year an expansion team wins a championship in their first year. Leave it to Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals to spoil the Vegas party.
Now let’s look into how the Montreal Canadiens can try to use this system to make their team better.
Let me be the first to say how I feel about Marc Bergevin. I think his earlier work from the day he started until 2014 was decent. However, from 2014 onwards, I feel like he went on a downward spiral.
2017 was a critical year in the Bergevin era as he had fired the coach, and at the time, good friend Michel Therrien and replacing him in recycled fashion with Claude Julien, who had surprisingly been let go by the Boston Bruins. The team was in first place but still going through a rough patch, and Bergevin felt a change was needed to ride the ship in the playoffs.
It didn’t go as planned as the Montreal Canadiens lost to the New York Rangers in six games in a series where the team’s issues stood out.