Montreal Canadiens Missed Out on Perfect Tomas Tatar Replacement For Next Year

Montreal Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin is quite busy these days. After all, the team he built has been playing in the Stanley Cup Final. Also, it had to do so without its head coach, Dominique Ducharme for Game 1 and 2 due to a positive Covid-19 test.

So, you can excuse Bergevin if he is not thinking too much about next season right now. With his team literally less than a handful of wins away from winning the Stanley Cup, how could a GM be focused on next year’s run?

However, this may have led him to miss out on a perfect fit for the 2021-22 version of the Canadiens.

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Tomas Tatar has played great hockey for three seasons with the Habs, almost exclusively on a line with Phillip Danault and Brendan Gallagher. The trio is known for dominating possession, shutting down the best players in the world, and, not scoring at an elite pace but scoring plenty. Combining their offence with their exceptional defence makes them one of the best lines in the past three seasons at outscoring its opposition.

That’s the name of the game, isn’t it? Scoring more than the other team? Well, Tatar, Danault and Gallagher have done that as well as anyone lately.

The thing is, Tatar has been passed over on the depth chart in this playoff run. He is also an unrestricted free agent at season’s end which makes it very unlikely he returns to Montreal next season.

Jake Evans and Artturi Lehkonen have taken turns filling in on a line with Danault and Gallagher in Tatar’s absence. Though both Evans and Lehkonen have filled in admirably, and scored some huge goals, they lack the offence that Tatar brought to make this line as good as it was in the regular season.

So, it would be wise to look for a Tatar replacement for next season.

Who could that be? Well, it would be difficult to find a player more suited for the role than Viktor Arvidsson. The former Nashville Predators winger is a right shooting winger who can play the left side or right side. He didn’t have his best season this year, and isn’t as polished defensively as Lehkonen or Tatar, but he has experience playing against tough competition and would make the line more dangerous offensively than ever before.

Unfortunately for the Canadiens, he was dealt to the Los Angeles Kings late last week. With the Habs losing Tatar, and Jonathan Drouin’s future up in the air, they desperately need to add a left winger for next season. The depth chart on that side right now has Tyler Toffoli, Lehkonen, Paul Byron and Corey Perry.

With Perry possibly leaving, and little offence coming from Lehkonen and Byron, adding a top six left winger will be priority in the offseason.

That’s why it seemed odd when Viktor Arvidsson was traded for second and third round draft picks. The Canadiens have been hoarding picks for years and could move a second and a third in the upcoming draft and still have a pick in every round and a couple extra picks in the fourth round.

Arvidsson has been one of the best scorers on the Predators since becoming a full time NHL player five years ago. The 28 year old didn’t have his best season this year, dipping to ten goals and 25 points in 50 games, but a quick look at his stats will show that he is a strong candidate to bounce back.

His best season was in 2017-18 when he scored 29 goals and 61 points in 78 games. He also added five goals and nine points in 13 postseason contests that year.

The Swedish winger saw his shooting percentage drop to just 6.6% this season, which is down more than 5% from any of his four previous seasons. That’s not a sign of things to come, it’s simply an unlucky year for a guy who was still getting pucks on net, but they just weren’t finding their way in.

You can expect a big bounce back from Arvidsson next year, and his $4.3 million cap hit is actually half a million less than what Tatar earned during his time in Montreal. You can try to replace Tatar in free agency with a player like Brandon Saad or Taylor Hall, but good luck getting them for anywhere near $4.3 million.

The former Preds sniper would have been an excellent fit on the left side of the Canadiens lineup next season, but with Bergevin still focused on this season, it appears he may have missed a perfect opportunity to add some scoring punch to the left side next season.