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.
A Solid Base
The Montreal Canadiens do have a solid base. In my opinion, the sky is the limit for Cole Caufield. He almost won the Calder Trophy for the best rookie in two months of play, and I think that a big contract could be on the horizon for Caufield, maybe even as soon as this offseason.
Nick Suzuki is a fantastic 200 foot player and (not-so-future?) captain. He might not turn into a premier offensive pivot, but as a 1A or 1B option on a team would make them incredibly difficult to beat.
Especially when the other 1A/1B center would be Shane Wright. I will gladly eat a metric ton of crow if the Montreal Canadiens do not select Wright first overall, but I will also believe that Kent Hughes would be making a mistake not selecting Wright. Similar to Suzuki, Wright may never become a superstar in the way that a Matthews or McDavid are, but it will be hard to see him not turning into a great NHL caliber center.
The problems start coming on the back end. As entertaining as Alexander Romanov is to watch, he is definitely not a top pairing defender. He took amazing strides this year in his play, and is still young enough to grow in his game, so I am not as pessimistic as others can be on Romanov, but seeing him becoming the top guy on an elite or great defensive group is hard.
And then there is a bunch of question marks. Jordan Harris, Justin Barron and Kaiden Guhle all project to be good, but can two of them make a top pairing on a contender? Time will tell.
And then the goaltending. Carey Price is done being an elite starter in the league. I would go so far to say that he will not be a starter in the traditional sense ever again. Injuries have piled up, and if you want Price to be at 100% in the playoffs, he is going to have to miss a lot of regular season games. But he makes $10.5 million, leaving not a ton of wiggle room for a 1B or heavily used backup.
And who knows if Price can hold up again? He was absolutely incredible in the Finals run, but can he be trusted to do that again? And anyways, by the time Suzuki, Caufield, Guhle, Wright, Barron and Harris are at their peaks, Price will either be retired or a clear cut backup.
So what other options are there? There is Cayden Primeau, the former 7th round pick. He has somewhat stalled in his development, but is still only 22 years old. For example, Igor Shesterkin made his NHL debut at 24, and really came into his own this year at the age of 26, and he was picked 3 rounds and 3 years before Primeau.
But goalies are notoriously difficult to project, and I think it would be foolish to try to put all hope on Primeau.
Rebuild Mentality
It is not just the high draft picks that need to hit, but you need to be great at finding a lot of value late in the draft. And the best way to do that is to just accrue a huge amount of draft picks, which rookie General Manager Kent Hughes did a fantastic job of this year.
He has to keep it up though.
Montreal still needs to fill out their farm system. Joel Armia, Jeff Petry and Josh Anderson are all prime examples of players that have to be moved if there is an offer of draft picks and prospects on the table.
Especially Anderson. He played the best of those three by far last season, and has a lot of value. But again, the Canadiens need to look at the future. Anderson is already 28 years old, and plays a really physical game that relies heavily on his footspeed. Those are two attributes that decline really quickly compared to hockey IQ, stickhandling and shooting.
It might just be PTSD from the Bergevin regime, but I am really worried that the drafting of Shane Wright could signal the end of this attempted rebuild. Because Bergevin did not like rebuilds, and seemed to be content in mediocrity and “seeing what happens.”
And that was how we wound up with a bubble team for so many years. Every year, the Canadiens would come down to the wire as to whether they would make the playoffs or not. Or they would be in the basement. Bergevin’s teams had those two options, but late in his term there was no chance in Montreal competing with the big boys.
Call me jaded or whatever you want, but I want more. I want a team that contends for the Stanley Cup year after year. One that is firmly in the playoff picture in February and its seen as a disappointment that they don’t get past the first round, rather than a surprise that they managed it. The only way to do that is to build up more prospects and be bad for another year to try to get another elite talent to add to the prospect pool.
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