Montreal Canadiens Five Best Free Agent Signings In Habs History

The Montreal Canadiens, like every team in the National Hockey League, are busy getting ready for next week’s NHL Draft. Soon after that will be the annual free agent frenzy, but that is only because the NHL schedule is still a little out of whack.

The league shut down in March of 2020 and is still playing catch up. They eventually played a summer postseason in 2020, and then had a 56 game 2021 schedule that didn’t begin until January. This led to the Stanley Cup being handed out in early July, 2021.

That meant this 2021-22 season had to be pushed back a little bit, though the Stanley Cup was awarded in late June. That will allow the league to get back on schedule in 2022-23, but they are still a couple of weeks behind normal this season.

Ordinarily, July 1st would be free agency day. It is the one day on the NHL calendar that sees NHL teams commit to spending more money than any other day all year. It is like general managers know they are on vacation as soon as their work is done so they just take care of as much business as quickly as possible.

That won’t be the case this season, but July 1, or Canada Day, is a reminder of contracts signed in previous years. It is a reminder of great deals and more often than not, deals that didn’t work out quite as well as expected.

Every team has hits and misses on this day in their history. So, even though it is a quiet day on the NHL calendar in 2022, we are going to take a look back at the five best free agents signed by the Montreal Canadiens in their history.

Of course, free agency didn’t really exist until the 1990’s and the Canadiens didn’t have the biggest budget back then. So, most of these signings are quite familiar to fans of the team today. Here are the top five.