Sixteen teams missed the NHL playoffs this season, and you could count on one hand the number of franchises that wouldn't do a full organizational swap with the Montreal Canadiens. It feels like a 106-point campaign set a new floor for the Habs, and they are the second-youngest team in the league.
Maybe the Florida Panthers wouldn't exchange their win-now window with Montreal's wide-open future. There's an argument to be made that the San Jose Sharks would prefer to hang onto their own outstanding group of skilled forwards, elite young goalie, and prospects. Connor Bedard hasn't become a World beater along the lines of Nathan MacKinnon just yet, but perhaps Chicago would prefer to keep its chips all down on 98 Red.
Squads like the Calgary Flames, Vancouver Canucks, and New York Rangers are in the midst of, or just beginning, rebuilds that will take a half-decade or more. And for the rest of the summer, you're going to read about how Team X, Y, or Z is hoping to replicate Montreal's blueprint en route to a quicker-than-normal turnaround.
We've got some bad news for those franchises and their fans, however: it isn't going to happen. In a league where rebuilding from the ground up can take between 10 (Detroit Red Wings) and 14 (Buffalo Sabres) years, Montreal's four-year flip has been astounding. It also isn't replicable.
Canadiens' approach didn't stall out in the mushy middle like so many others
Going scorched Earth with a rebuild is easy. Trading everyone who is talented and tradable for the highest draft picks or best young players available over a 12- to 18-month period isn't difficult. Sure, wiser general managers will be able to extract more value from their trades than others, but in general, most team demolitions look the same.
Hitting on multiple draft picks--not just in the first round--and fleecing other teams for their own underrated NHL players is not easy. That is how so many organizations end up stuck on the outside of the playoffs or Stanley Cup parades looking in.
It wasn't hard for the Edmonton Oilers to bottom out and draft Connor McDavid. My cat Nico could have plotted that course, and there's no skill involved in winning the draft lottery. It's surrounding him with enough to win the championship that is remarkably difficult, and he's entering his 12th professional season with no rings for a reason.
Peter Chiarelli and Ken Holland are demonstrably outdated in their approach. The former hasn't had a general manager job in the NHL since the Oilers fired him seven years ago, and the latter is currently doing his best to set the Los Angeles Kings franchise back 10 years with his management decisions. How're Oilers fans feeling about the Stan Bowman retread? Take it away, Oilers Nation.
The Canadiens are largely in the spot they are in because they don't whiff on high draft picks, find diamonds in the rough in later rounds, pinpoint and hire the right people for key off-ice roles, know how to pry established NHL talent loose from other organizations without sacrificing their own youthful runway, while also avoiding the pitfalls that come from overpaying aging free agents. Which rebuilding team's fan base is ready and willing to say that their front office has it together enough to accomplish all of these things consistently for half a decade?
*crickets*
Canadiens are where they are because their galaxy brain moves actually paid off
Team president Jeff Gorton and general manager Kent Hughes inherited several key pieces of their current roster. Still, ownership deserves a ton of credit for knowing when to take the keys away from former GM Marc Bergevin. What would the Canadiens look like if he had been left in charge for another year? We'll never know, and while Bergevin's fingerprints are still all over this team, it was Gorton and Hughes who turned the promising pieces into a Lamborghini.
Hiring Martin St. Louis was a gamble, but sometimes gambles pay off. He's been the perfect voice to lead the Canadiens and has his team playing fearless hockey. The trades for Noah Dobson and Alex Newhook were also heavily questioned at the time, but Montreal isn't in the Eastern Conference Final without those two. Drafting Juraj Slavkovsky was met with audible groans, but that looks like a master stroke now.
Odds are good that every NHL general manager believes they are the smartest person in the room. It takes a certain kind of hubris to run a sports organization at the highest level, but Gorton and Hughes' big-brained ideas actually work. At least often enough that it has led to a team that seems poised to break Canada's Stanley Cup curse sometimes within the next few years--if not 2026 itself.
There's no blueprint for copycat teams to find in Montreal. Only a pie-in-the-sky dream that can't be reached without a vision that isn't a retread, executed by people who aren't stuck in an antiquated way of thinking about hockey.
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