Montreal Canadiens: Jonathan Drouin Likely To Be Healthy Scratch In Opener

The Montreal Canadiens came to training camp with a plethora of forwards under contract. Well, with 74 players in attendance on day one, they had a plethora of everything.

But among those six dozen plus players there were a lot of veteran forwards under contracts with high salaries. This left little room for young forwards like Rafael Harvey-Pinard and Jesse Ylonen to finally crack the lineup full-time.

It also made it difficult on a couple of veteran forwards who didn’t have terrific camps. It looks like one of those NHL regulars is going to sit as a healthy scratch tonight.

Canadiens appear ready to scratch Jonathan Drouin

Jonathan Drouin, a skilled left winger who never lived up to the ridiculous hype that surrounded his arrival in Montreal in 2017. He was acquired for Mikhail Sergachev, who was a top ten pick the previous spring, and the Habs management team tried to turn him into a first line centre for some reason.

It didn’t work, though he did have a decent season, but he has really fallen out of favour among the fanbase in recent years. Most of that has been due to his absence from the lineup.

Last season, Drouin played 34 of the team’s 82 games, missing more than half the season with injury. He scored six goals and 20 points in those 34 games. The year before, he played 44 games, scoring just two goals and 23 points before taking the rest of the season off to deal with anxiety and insomnia.

In 2019-20, he also missed significant time with injury, playing just 27 of the team’s 71 games in the Covid shortened campaign. He had seven goals and 15 points in those games and put up seven points in ten playoff games that summer.

His production has been okay, and quite consistent as well. Drouin almost always plays somewhere between a 45-55 point pace every season, no matter how many games he plays. The issue is, he has missed 104 of the teams 209 games over the past three seasons. That’s almost exactly half of the team’s games.

Most of that was due to injury, but it seems like Drouin may miss his first game while healthy tonight. He took part in practice, rotating in on a line with Juraj Slafkovsky and Christian Dvorak, but he was splitting that time with Brendan Gallagher and he is not going to sit out.

Maybe Slafkovsky is going to be sent down eventually and they envision Drouin playing with Dvorak and Gallagher at that point. But right now, it sure looks like Drouin is going to sit out.

Heading into the final year of a contract with a cap hit of $5.5 million, it isn’t ideal that Drouin is not playing at all. It would be great if he played well enough for half the season that the team got a half decent return for him at the trade deadline.

The 27 year old will surely get his chance at some point. It will be interesting to see how he responds to being sat out when he does eventually get put into the lineup.

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