Montreal Canadiens: Why Kent Hughes Fits Well as Habs New General Manager

The Montreal Canadiens fired general manager Marc Bergevin and his assistant, Trevor Timmins on November 28th.

They quickly brought in Jeff Gorton to be the team’s Vice President of Hockey Operations to essentially replace Bergevin but with a broader title. He immediately began his search for a new general manager for the team and finally announce who was hired yesterday.

Kent Hughes was picked as the 18th general manager in the history of the Montreal Canadiens franchise.

Hughes was a player agent in the NHL for the past 20 years. He represented stars like Patrice Bergeron, Kris Letang and Darnell Nurse, great young players such as Joe Veleno, Drake Batherson, Colin White, Anthony Beauviller and other familiar players like Anton Khudobin, Samuel Blais, Michael Matheson, Marco Scandella, Nick Paul, Alex Newhook and Nathan Beaulieu.

He also used to represent Vincent Lecavalier during his star studded NHL career.

While being an agent would make Hughes familiar with the NHL landscape for sure, it doesn’t exactly prepare him to be in the general manager’s chair. However, there are many aspects of what he did as an agent that will translate nicely into Hughes’ new role.

Hughes negotiated contracts for his players, and will continue to do exactly that but from the other side of the table. He would be quite familiar with any tricks or strategies general managers tend to use to get the best contract for the team, as he would be the one on the other end of the phone call hammering out a deal. Ultimately, he will know how to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on a contract, while keeping in mind every little minute detail of the collective bargaining agreement.

Again, he would be familiar with how player’s can use the CBA to their advantage and now he will be on the lookout for player’s looking to pull the same tricks. No one is going to be able to pull the wool over Hughes eyes while negotiating a contract extension because he knows every small detail that he can and can not get away with.

A lot of Hughes clients are either young players or have been with him since they were very young. Joe Veleno and Alex Newhook are two recent first round picks that were represented by Hughes. He wouldn’t have been able to land them as clients if he wasn’t traveling around North America scouting players for his agency to sign. He wouldn’t have “scouting” experience with a pro team, but an agent does as much scouting in a hockey season as any amateur scout.

Hughes is going to be quite familiar with the prospects in the upcoming draft, because he was out trying to find the best ones to sign as clients and he was probably scouting them since they were 14 or 15 years old. Agents can sign players long before they are eligible for an NHL Draft, so Hughes probably has a fairly extensive list of top prospects for not just the 2022 NHL Draft, but the 2023, 2024, and 2025 drafts as well.

Two of the most important things a general manager does is communicate with agents and with other general managers.

With decades of experience as an agent, Hughes will know exactly how to deal with agents because he will be able to tell them all the things he knows they want to hear. He will also be quite familiar with every general manager in the league since he represented 21 players on 15 different teams in the NHL this season alone.

Hughes is also from Montreal and is bilingual, which is a necessity for the general manager, especially after anglophone Jeff Gorton was hired to run the hockey operations.

The only area that Hughes lacks in is that he has never worked in an NHL front office before. Though he has been all around the outside of the front offices and would know how they are run, he hasn’t actually been a part of a hockey operations group of an NHL team in the past. Ideally, the general manager of the Montreal Canadiens would have some experience as an assistant elsewhere or a pro scout or some other hockey ops job.

However, that doesn’t really matter in this case, because Jeff Gorton has tons of that experience and is running the Canadiens management team.

When Gorton first met with the media shortly after being hired to join the Canadiens, he specifically said an ideal general manager would be someone with experience that is different from his own, like a player agent.

That’s what makes Hughes such a nice fit with Gorton. They will work in tandem and bring very different past experiences to the table as they collaborate and try to build this Canadiens team into a juggernaut once again.