Montreal Canadiens: Should Marc Bergevin’s Job be Safe in the Playoffs?
By Joshua Rosa
Drafting and Development
Trading is only one part of the job when it comes to managing a hockey club. Drafting and developing players within the organisation is just as important. Every hockey club has a vast array of people that put so much time and effort into the scouting and developing of players.
Rob Ramage is the Director of Player Development for the Canadiens. Eric Crawford is the head of Pro Scouting. And a whole team of scouts that go across the country to find the best talent to draft. But Bergevin has control over them and can have the last say when it comes to who to draft.
The first and second rounds of the draft are the ones that have the highest chances of becoming an NHL player. So let’s take a peek at the first two rounds of the drafts that Bergevin has been in charge of.
2012 1st Round: Alex Galchenyuk. 2nd Round: Sebastian Collberg, Dalton Thrower.
2013 1st Round: Michael McCarron. 2nd Round: Jacob De La Rose, Zachary Fucale, Artturi Lehkonen.
2014 1st Round: Nikita Scherbak.
2015 1st Round: Noah Juulsen.
2016 1st Round: Mikhail Sergachev.
2017 1st Round: Ryan Poehling. 2nd Round: Josh Brook. Joni Ikonen.
2018 1st Round: Jesperi Kotkaniemi. 2nd Round: Alexander Romanov. Jesse Ylonen. Jacob Olofsson.
2019 1st Round: Cole Caufield. 2nd Round: Jayden Struble.
2020 1st Round: Kaiden Guhle. 2nd Round: Luke Tuch. Jan Mysak.
Those are not great. It has definitely gotten better with the drafting of Caufield and Kotkaniemi who are NHL players, but there are a lot of whiffs. Sergachev is probably the best player on the list currently, and he no longer plays with Montreal. In fact, five of the nine first-round picks no longer play for Montreal at all.
Above is a graph of the percentage of players that have played at least one game with each team and were drafted by said team according to the Hockey Database. It is not surprising that Vegas is at the bottom, as they have had only four years to draft players, but only one spot above them is Montreal with 30% of the players that have played for Montreal having been drafted by the team.
That is a grand total of ten players. Those players are Brendan Gallagher, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Carey Price, Arturri Lehkonen, Alexander Romanov, Cole Caufield, Victor Mete, Cayden Primeau, Jake Evans and Otto Leskinen. There are some future stars here, especially Primeau, Romanov, Caufield, and Kotkaniemi; but many of the Habs’ best players are not on this list and the two that are either are in their prime or exiting it.
Obviously, there are a bunch of other factors that go into it. The more injuries that occur, the more times you have to dip into the farm system, which is mostly made from draft picks. And Montreal had been pretty lucky with injuries earlier in the season. But it also means that the core producers for Montreal are generally not drafted by them.
And that is ultimately the problem. Recently, Montreal has been drafting well, but it goes against some of the better players on the team. Price and Weber are exiting or exited their primes, and guys like Gallagher, Anderson, Petry, and Toffoli will be exiting their primes as the kids are coming up.
The timing is off and might be the downfall to the great re-set. Sure you have great talent coming up and some good talent on the team right now, but those do not coincide. The good players now are holding the Canadiens’ heads above water and denying the better draft picks needed to help the up-and-comers in the future.
But tanking is not in Bergevin’s vocabulary, or for that matter the Montreal Canadiens’. It is hard to imagine a Toronto-style rebuild going down in Montreal. It is on Geoff Molson, who seems to put the dollar above the long-term success of the team, and it’s on the media and fanbase that probably wouldn’t let that happen.
Speaking of which…