Montreal Canadiens: Three Players Due For Big Bounce Back Seasons

The Montreal Canadiens did not get a lot of great bounces in the 2021-22 season. They fired head coach Dominique Ducharme after winning just eight of their first 45 games.

After losing their first three contests under new head coach Martin St. Louis, the team was averaging one win every six games. Things got better from there, but pretty much anything that could have gone wrong last season, did.

Carey Price barely played at all. Shea Weber didn’t play a single game. Jeff Petry’s play fell off a cliff and he asked for a trade. Cole Caufield’s anticipated breakout season started with a tremendous thud. Pretty much everyone played below their expected level, especially in the first half of the season.

The good news is, that season is over. It ended with players like Caufield and Petry playing much better, Nick Suzuki proving he could be a top line centre of the future and a few other players like Rem Pitlick and Christian Dvorak finishing the season on a high note as well.

Heading into the 2022-23 season, many players are due for a better year than the previous one. There is just no way so many players can play below their expected level once again. Some players are going to have to bounce back to what we had come to expect from them in the past.

Who should be putting up much higher numbers in the coming season than we saw from them last year? Many players really, after a disaster of a season, but these three players really stand out and should be much closer to their previous season highs than they were in the awful 2021-22 season for the Montreal Canadiens.