Montreal Canadiens: Three Players Who Need A Strong Performance To Close Preseason

The Montreal Canadiens preseason will mercifully come to an end tonight. Eight exhibition games is more than enough to figure out who is ready for the regular season.

It was so many preseason games, the team began camp with a ridiculous 74 players in attendance. When you looked at the roster in the summer, there were like 30 players who had a chance of making the initial 23-man roster for opening night.

Add in another dozen or so who are sure to be headed to the Laval Rocket, a handful of players who were clearly destined to begin the season in the ECHL and some interesting prospects who were surely headed back to Junior and you had quite a lengthy list on the training camp roster.

Currently, the roster stands at about 30 if you don’t include players like Paul Byron, Joel Edmundson and Carey Price who are not going to be healthy on opening night. Edmundson should be back early in the season, Price is not going to play at all this season, and Byron’s status is somewhere, anywhere, between those two outcomes.

That means, we are down the number that we could have guessed in August. These are the 30 or so players that had any chance of making the initial roster. With just one more preseason game to play, there is still quite a bit at stake for a handful of players.

A couple of veterans have not looked great and could be in danger of losing their roster spot to a younger player. A couple of younger players have made good impressions but need to really prove they are ready since they can be sent to the AHL without having to pass through waivers.

So, who needs a good showing tonight in Game 8 of the preseason? A game that will be played in Bouctouche, New Brunswick as part of the Kraft Hockeyville festival. You know, the same Hockeyville that Sportsnet advertises all season long, and then doesn’t show up to actually put the game on tv? Yeah, that one.

Hopefully you have TVA Sports on your television set, or at least can find it online where there will be a free stream of the game. You need to sign up for a free account, but can watch a live stream with french announcing.

Anyway, once you find that game, these are three players that need to stand out, or they might not be in the starting lineup on opening night.