Montreal Canadiens: Analytics Can’t Save Jonathan Drouin Anymore
By Scott Cowan
Free Agency Departures, One-For-One Trade
So great, Montreal has a potential future star coming through the pipeline, off-season addition Alexander Radulov and veteran stars in Max Pacioretty and Carey Price got them back into the playoffs, and everything’s coming up Gravy. Surely, there isn’t a way they could possibly screw this up right? Maybe? Pretty please?
Well, unfortunately, at this time in Habs franchise history, as long as GM Marc Bergevin was a part of the picture, bad things were guaranteed to happen. Mention the positives of the Bergevin era all you want, but in my mind, there are no positives. Bergevin ran the Canadiens into the ground and then some until they could practically see the core of the Earth.
His stubborn, continued refusal to build for the future and penchant for trading away draft capitol for the likes of Steve Ott, Brian Flynn, Jon Merrill, Erik Gustafsson, and Dwight King among others, left the Habs as a team who could make the playoffs one year and then completely collapse the next.
That’s not how you build a winning hockey organization, and when things fell apart, they really fell apart, to the point where you wonder if someone sprinkled termites into the Habs team chemistry. This team was like rotten wood you find next to the beach. It smells bad, it serves no purpose, it can’t do anything, and yet Bergevin continued to trot it around on his high horse like it was an accomplishment, and he did the very same thing, with one Jonathan Drouin.
In many ways, the summer of 2017 was the end of any good the Canadiens had going for them. Bergevin lowballed both Radulov and Markov in free agency leading to them signing elsewhere with no returns to show for it, and Price would unfortunately start to return to his frustratingly inconsistent self of old.
Well, at least Sergachev is still around, right? Wrong, as Bergevin, on June 15th, 2017, dealt Sergachev in essentially a one-for-one with the Tampa Bay Lightning, in exchange for Drouin. Just Drouin. No more, no less, nothing else, not even a cookie. While it might seem like a literal eternity ago now, Drouin at the time was seen as an, as stated, promising former third-overall pick who just didn’t quite put it all together in Tampa Bay, aside from an impressive playoff performance in 15-16 and a solid follow up campaign in 2016-17.
Playing for the QMJHL’s Halifax Mooseheads however, Drouin’s numbers were quite simply video-game like, and this coupled with his potential was enough for Bergevin to take a chance on the Sainte-Agathe native.