Montreal Canadiens were all eagerly anticipating today as the day they would find out if Carey Price is plucked by the Seattle Kraken or not.
Well, it appears he will not be and that Cale Fleury will be the player taken, but that hasn’t been the only bit of news to come out of Canadiens camp so far today.
The team has also announced the addition of Trevor Letowski to the team’s coaching staff.
Letowski had a solid NHL career with the Phoenix Coyotes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Vancouver Canucks and Carolina Hurricanes. Though he was a top scorer in Junior and had a point per game in his second AHL season, he was more of a gritty, depth forward throughout his NHL career than spanned ten years.
Since retiring from playing in 2010 after two years in Kazakhstan, Letowski has been coaching in the Ontario Hockey League. He started as an assistant coach for the Sarnia Sting and worked his way up to the head coaching position, before jumping to the Windsor Spitfires to be their associate coach in 2015 and was quickly promoted to head coach there as well.
The 44 year old has had plenty of success behind the bench in the OHL. He served as the assistant coach for Canada’s World Under-18 team in 2014 and twice was named assistant coach for Canada’s World Junior squad. He won a gold medal there in 2018 when Dominique Ducharme was the head coach of the team.
The pair will now work together with the Montreal Canadiens.
Letowski also guided the Spitfires to a Memorial Cup title in 2017, the year before he was a champion at the World Juniors.
He has clearly had a lot of success coaching at the Junior level and working with young players. That will come in handy with a team that is going to be leaning heavily on Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Jesperi Kotkaniemi up front next season and hoping for Alexander Romanov to take a big step forward as well.
With Jean Francois Houle being named head coach of the Laval Rocket yesterday the organization’s coaching staff is starting to fill out nicely. It sounds like Alex Burrows and Luke Richardson will remain on the bench with Ducharme next season and Letowski steps in to fill the void that opened up when Kirk Muller left midway though last season.