Canadiens: Checking In On Four Former Fringe Habs Now Playing Overseas

It’s been a while since the Montreal Canadiens all-time roster was filled with mostly consistent, established NHL regulars, perennial all-stars, or even Hall of Famers. Sure, the 50s and 70s dynasties had their fair share of one-game wonders and bizarre callups, but in a time where backup goalies were a luxury and emergency players were a hot commodity, it makes a little bit more sense.

I’ve already discussed the utterly dreadful late 90s iteration of the Habs in bits and pieces. With the likes of Eric Houde, Andrei Bashkirov, Olivier Michaud, Patrick Labreque, Jean-Francois Jomphe, Dave Morrisette, Craig Darby, Francois Groleau, Matt Higgins, Xavier Delisle, Mathieu Descoteaux, Juha Lind and the honestly ridiculous amount of other random Quebec-born and similarly obscure players who saw regular minute.

It’s no wonder why this era is seen as (before this season) the lowest of the low for modern-day Canadiens teams. The 2021-22 Montreal Canadiens will unfortunately go down in history for all the wrong reasons. As bad as the late 1990’s Canadiens teams were, none failed as horribly as the most recent version of the team.

As I mentioned in my previous piece on the Canadiens draft history, things have picked up in bits and pieces in recent years, but only slightly. Case in point, the players I will be discussing today.

During the completely and utterly lost 2015-16 and 2017-18 seasons, the Habs turned to a lot of random, no-name callups to get the job done by season’s end, as the team got ravaged by injuries, inconsistencies, and quite frankly just poor performance, time and time again.

However, just because these players NHL careers didn’t work out, doesn’t mean they were done playing hockey. So with that being said, here’s a look at four former Habs callups now bouncing around the numerous leagues that exist overseas.