Montreal Canadiens: Three Players Due For Big Bounce Back Seasons

Joel Armia

Joel Armia is definitely not known for his consistency with the Canadiens. Well, at least not  consistent offence. He has the hands and scoring touch to go on a bit of a hot streak from time to time, but also has lengthy stretches with little scoring where his effort level begins to be questioned.

Unfortunately for the big, Finnish winger, the offensive droughts were lengthier than usual last season. Again, the 29 year old was never known as an elite offensive player, but when he signed a four year contract with a cap hit of $3.4 million, it was hoped 2021-22 would showcase a little more offensive consistency.

That wouldn’t be further from what happened. Armia struggled to score just six goals and 14 points in 60 contests. This put him just ahead of Laurent Dauphin and Michael Pezzetta on the scoring charts, and both of those depth players played less games.

While consistent scoring was never Armia’s calling card, that would be consistently great defence and penalty killing. However, he did score at over a 20 goal pace in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons, and had a great showing in the 2021 postseason.

Dropping to six goals in 60 games just didn’t make sense, and we should expect Armia to find a role on the team’s third line and score at the rate of a 20 goal guy over the course of the 2022-23 season.