The Montreal Canadiens Should Be Bad Next Year And Why That Is Good

I know I am going to be getting some flack for this one. First of all, I am saying that we should hope for the Montreal Canadiens to be bad again this coming year. And also Marc Bergevin will be mentioned a couple of times.

Yes, the much maligned Marc Bergevin. Right now, the former Canadiens General Manager is an amorphous blob that used to be a dead horse after months of being pulverized by any Montreal Canadiens fan with a pen, internet connection or a rooftop to shout from.

But, to add my own unique dent into a separate dead horse, those who don’t learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it.

Maybe its harsh to call the Marc Bergevin era an abject failure. There were some good years in there, especially near the beginning, but looking at where he began and where he ended up, it’s hard to be happy with the progression.

Let’s look at the last 4 teams in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Despite being eliminated in 4 games by the Colorado Avalanche, the Edmonton Oilers reaped the rewards of a long rebuild, finally. I don’t have to go into Edmonton’s much maligned rebuild, and time will tell if this year was a flash in the pan or not, but the Oilers do have a lot of homegrown talent. Pretty much all of Edmonton’s best players are their own high draft picks. Their problem is more of a team building nature.

The New York Rangers got a rocket boost to their rebuild via the fact that apparently every single player wants to play in the Big Apple. Artemi Panarin and Adam Fox were gifted to the Blueshirts, but the first and second overall picks in back-to-back drafts doesn’t hurt, along with amassing draft picks to pick up players like K’Andre Miller and Filip Chytil with their second 1st round draft picks in each of those years.

And now in the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time in what feels like forever are the Colorado Avalanche. Their top line players Mikko Rantanen, Gabriel Landeskog and Nathan Mackinnon are all top 10 draft picks, not to mention Cale Makar and Bowen Byran who were each picked at 4th overall.

The outlier of the group is the Tampa Bay Lightning. Its hard to find a bad season in recent memory for the Bolts, because they are just a drafting machine. Somehow, the team went from a core carried by Ben Bishop, Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis to one with Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point and Andrei Vasilevskiy.

Though if you do go back far enough, Stamkos and Victor Hedman were top two picks and have played an enormous role in the team’s recent success, but the team still struggled when it was just the two of them trying to carry a mediocre roster.

The moral of the story? It takes more than just one high draft pick to make a Stanley Cup contender. Even the contenders that didn’t live up to their potential this year have a lot of high draft picks: like a certain blue-and-white team incredibly envious of a different blue-and-white team in the Final.