It was another successful regular season for the Laval Rocket after winning the North Division for a second straight year. Unfortunately, it was an early playoff exit as they would lose in the first round to the Toronto Marlies.
This offseason has seen significant change for Laval as Pascal Vincent left the organization to join the Seattle Kraken as an assistant coach. A few weeks later, the team announced that Daniel Jacob would be replacing him as head coach.
Jacob has a lot of experience as an assistant head coach at the AHL level, as he was with Laval from 2018-19 through 2020-21, before one-year stops with the San Diego Gulls and Syracuse Crunch, before returning to Laval as part of Vincent's staff as an assistant coach.
Montreal Canadiens doing all they can to help Daniel Jacob in his first year as head coach
While Jacob has been a long-time assistant head coach, this will be his first season as head coach in professional hockey. General manager Kent Hughes seems to recognize that and has done a great job adding talent this offseason to give him the best chance to be successful.
While the Canadiens have been unable to add to their NHL roster, they have made several trades that will bolster the AHL roster. This offseason, they have traded for three players with extensive AHL experience in Brett Berard, Hunter McKown, and most recently Sasha Pastujov. All three of these players have at least 145 career AHL games.
In addition to that, they brought back Jared Davidson (160 AHL games) and signed goalie Kaapo Kahkonen, who has played over 100 games in both the NHL and the AHL.
On top of that, there are some top prospects who are going to be competing for a spot on the Canadiens' roster this training camp. This group includes Owen Beck, Florian Xhekaj, David Reinbacher, and Adam Engstrom, and whoever doesn't start in the NHL will only add to this really good AHL roster for Daniel Jacob.
It is tough to follow a coach who won the division in back-to-back seasons but the Montreal Canadiens have done a good job in setting up Daniel Jacob to potentially make it three straight years with a division title.
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