Montreal Canadiens: Mike Hoffman And The Sharks Never-Ending Rebuild
By Scott Cowan
Honestly, I don’t have any words. Genuinely, I don’t have a clue how to start this article, even as a longtime follower of the Montreal Canadiens and similar NHL teams.
Okay, well, let’s begin here. Just in case you forgot, former Habs forward Mike Hoffman was once a first-line, 70-point winger with the Florida Panthers alongside Evgenii Dadonov, Aleksander Barkov, and Jonathan Huberdeau. He had five consecutive 50+ point seasons from 2015 to 2019.
Why do I bring that up you ask? Well, because in 10 games with the San Jose Sharks this season, Hoffman is -7 and has 11 shots on goal total (yes total). Overall, Hoffman’s stint in Montreal was a bust and a bad one at that, but this? This is an entirely new level of terrible, and it doesn’t just extend to Hoffman, but to the entire Sharks roster, coaching staff and management.
Obviously, when mentioning this one has to similarly mention how it hasn’t been the easiest past few, well… decades or so for the Canadiens. Sprinkled between a few Cinderella playoff runs in 2014, 2010, and 2021, has been a long, long period of suffering with terrible prospect development and a GM in Marc Bergevin who just kept plugging holes until the entire foundation collapsed in 2021-22.
Since then, however, GM Kent Hughes and VP Jeff Gorton have done what they can to clean up the mess Bergevin left behind, and to be fair, they’ve done a pretty darn good job of it thus far with the Canadiens.
While the Canadiens are still far from being a playoff calibre team, they’re fun to watch and have been involved in numerous exciting back and forth games. Obviously, the flaws are still evident, like the remnants of the Bergevin era in Joel Armia clogging up cap space, or the continue struggles of 2022 first overall pick Juraj Slafkovsky, who thankfully showed some noted improvement in Montreal’s 6-3 loss to the St. Louis Blues on Saturday.
Things are far from perfect, but the picture is becoming clearer for the Canadiens, and, well, as I stated in the onset, there are other teams whose picture is not only not clear but completely smashed to pieces on the ground like a divorced woman’s wedding photo.
Listen folks, the Sharks are not just bad, they’re not just terrible, and they’re not just atrocious, this is genuinely one of the most incompetent teams in NHL history.