Montreal Canadiens: Jonathan Drouin Deserves One Last Chance

I wanted to title this post ‘Drouin Deserves A Second Chance…’ but that would be rather disingenuous now, wouldn’t it? And it depends on the person that you are talking to as to whether he has had too many chances, or never really had a chance.

Drouin came into the organization with an incredible amount of pressure on his shoulders. He was the third overall pick in 2013, right up there with Nathan Mackinnon, Aleksander Barkov, Seth Jones and Elias Lindholm.

Not only that, but Drouin was traded to Montreal for Mikhail Sergachev. Sergachev was Montreal’s 9th overall pick in the 2016 draft and was considered the Canadiens’ blue chip prospect. In fact, then General Manager Marc Bergevin had made a statement that he would not trade away Sergachev.

Not only that, but Drouin was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, which is about an hour out of Montreal. The Canadiens have always been proud of their hometown boys, but that has gone through a bit of a drought. So any player from Quebec will have the world put on their shoulders.

Not exactly the most fair situation to be thrust into as a young player.

Is there any question why Drouin needed a break for mental health reasons?

Who is to blame?

Whenever a situation comes up like this, the question is where does the blame lie? Is it because Drouin just isn’t the player everyone thought he was? Is it Bergevin’s fault for giving up all that he did? And then signing him to make Drouin the most expensive of Montreal’s forwards at the time.

One thing that I feel comfortable in saying is that Drouin is injury prone. He has missed 59 games just with wrist injuries since 2020. He has also missed games due to illness, upper body injuries and personal reasons. Without question, that is a lot of games over a short time. He has played just 105 games over the last three seasons.

But there has been a lot of hatred and bile and ridicule pointed towards Drouin that doesn’t necessarily seem fair.

There is plenty of things to blame hockey players for. In the last game that Montreal and Toronto played, William Nylander failed to backcheck on David Savard of all people, and it resulted in a goal and flipped the whole game on its head. There is no good reason why Nylander couldn’t have backchecked against Savard, so the blame goes solely on him.

Or that time that Mitch Marner flipped the puck over the glass while on the penalty kill. In the middle of the ice. With no one pressuring him. There was no reason for that, and the blame lies solely with Marner.

I guess those are both Toronto Maple Leafs examples, but its so easy. I guess you could say if a defender picked up the puck and threw it directly into his own net that it would be totally in fault of that play. But I don’t know what kind of player would do that…

But injuries are a different beast. Because what really makes a player injury prone? Is it genetic predisposition? Is it toughness? Should you just play through the pain? Because we saw what happened when Shea Weber played through multiple injuries during last year’s playoff run.

There are many different deficiencies in Drouin’s game that are worth pointing out. He can be streaky when he is on the ice, disinterested in the defensive zone, float-y in the offensive zone, and can struggle to provide offense on his own.

And it is important when analyzing Drouin and his career to mention that he is injury prone, but you have to be careful with the language used. I don’t feel that any of the injuries he has suffered has been ‘his fault’, if you can call any injury his fault.

Drouin does not play any sort of physical game in the slightest. He isn’t going out and looking for trouble. But the way that certain people seem to speak about him, it seems like it is all his fault and he is such a terrible player for being injured again.