Montreal Canadiens: Grading Marc Bergevin’s Offseason Moves
Drafting Logan Mailloux
From the best moment of the offseason, let’s head straight to the worst. I don’t want this article to focus on what Mailloux did and why this move was so horrid, as it would politicize the entire piece, if you want to read my thoughts on that, I wrote this an hour after the pick was made. Now let’s try to separate the drafting of Mailloux the person and Mailloux the player for a moment.
Logan Mailloux is a hulking defenceman with good offensive potential. He produced well against men in the third tier of Swedish hockey, scoring 7 goals and 15 points in 19 games; but he also got caved in defensively. He’s a project on the ice, just as he is off it. Before the news of his antics came out, he sat at 61st in my draft rankings, so this is not a player I’d have drafted in the first round anyway. I would have loved to add Logan Stankoven, Aatu Raty, Stanislav Svozil or Francesco Pinelli, better players whose drafting would not have alienated so many fans.
Grade: F
Rounds 2-7
The rest of the draft class was a bit uninspiring, I spent three months really digging into the available prospects of this draft class going into Draft Day and I was just disappointed with the Habs’ haul. There are certainly some bright spots but I really believe the Habs left a whole lot of value on the table. Quite a few players I like a lot were indeed picked by the Habs but at the expense of passing on some players with far higher potential. Bergevin and Timmins had the final two selections of the second round and picked Riley Kidney and Oliver Kapanen, passing on Stanislav Svozil, Simon Robertsson, Sasha Pastujov, Samu Salminen, and Ayrton Martino, five players I would have been very comfortable taking in the first round.
Riley Kidney has some interesting playmaking and puck carrying abilities but he is constantly forced to the perimeter in the offensive zone against pretty weak defences in the QMJHL and I just struggle to see him translating his skill to the NHL. Oliver Kapanen (Kasperi’s cousin) is, however, one of my favourite picks of the Habs’ class. His style of play is amusingly reminiscent of Christian Dvorak’s: he’s not the best skater, he shows glimpses of good defensive ability, he’s dominant in the faceoff dot, he drives offence well and he scores a bunch of dirty goals by tips and rebounds and has a deadly wrister from the slot; good value at #63.
The next pick, 87th overall, Dmitri Kostenko has been hitting some highlight reels and is drawing Mattias Norlinder comparisons as a result, which I disagree with. He does have some good hands and a booming shot, which has garnered him 2 goals and 4 points in his first 3 VHL games of the season (Russia’s AHL), he scored 1 goal and 10 points through 40 games in that league last season, so there’s been a progression. But I would only have taken this swing in the fifth round and onwards since he lacks a lot of on-ice awareness and gets burned constantly defensively as a result and he doesn’t have the skating to recover from those mistakes. Passing on Dylan Duke (and literally trading away the pick Tampa used to draft him) was criminal at this stage.
It gets better from this point onwards, William Trudeau was the 113th selection in the fourth round, and his story is a really heartwarming one of a local underdog and I don’t dislike the swing, considering he has a promising development curve (he was on nobody’s radar just last year and earned a draft pick) but his upside is limited and better players were passed on. Still, Trudeau is a very smart defenseman who can thrive on the PK and can help insulate a more offensively-minded partner. Even so, If Trudeau plays with a steady partner, he has some puck-moving and offensive skills, just nothing that really stands out, his is not a selection I mind at all.
In the fifth round, the Habs swung on Daniil Sobolev, whose defensive ability, aggressiveness, intelligence and passing make him a very modern defensive defenseman, which I quite appreciate. He’s a project, to be sure, but a worthwhile gamble in the fifth round. Eight picks later, Timmins picked Joshua Roy, who went first overall in the 2019 QMJHL draft, ahead of 2021 first-rounders Zach Dean and Zachary L’Heureux. Roy is young for his draft class and seems to have started to take his fitness really seriously, so he might break out offensively next season and make the Habs’ selection of him look genius. Roy has a real goalscorer’s shot, his issue is finding soft ice to actually use it, something he can learn from Cole Caufield.
In the sixth round, Xavier Simoneau was picked, which made me very happy. He’s an undersized playmaking winger who just hustles every shift and has real skill, he was also passed over in both the 2019 and 2020 drafts because of his size. If you want some great analysis on his style of play and desire to improve, please do read this article by Jack Han.
Last but not least, Timmins took a real swing on a massive and agile goalie whose stats look bad as a result of playing on a terrible team, in Joe Vrbetic. His .881 SV% looks ugly, but he plays for the North Bay Battalion and those stats were from his D-1 season since the OHL missed last season. As far as recent Habs’ draft swings on goalies go (Jakub Dobes, Frederik Nissen-Dichow and Cayden Primeau) Vrbetic is my second favourite.
As a whole, the Habs drafted extremely conservatively and missed on some extremely talented players. While I’m a real fan of Kapanen, Sobolev, Roy and Simoneau, it is in the first three rounds where a class is made or broken, and I just don’t love the result here.
Grade: B –