Which Former Client Will Montreal Canadiens General Manager Kent Hughes Acquire Next?

Montreal Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes has been on the job for just over two years.

The team was in a freefall when he was added to the managerial team and he has begun to tinker and retool enough that the nose of the plane is pointing upward once again. There is still going to be some time before it can climb to any sort of heights worth phoning home about, but it is heading in the right direction.

The question is what moves will he pull off in order to continue trending in the right direction. Sometimes when you look at past decisions, you can start to see consistencies and predict what a general manager will do next. Or, at the very least, understand what kind of player they will look to acquire.

Kind of like knowing Marc Bergevin was going to trade for a depth defenseman who scored about two goals per year, no matter how many of them he already had on the roster. From Davis Drewiske to Jon Merrill, there was no shortage of defensive defensemen joining the Canadiens when Bergevin was calling the shots.

It really should not have surprised anyone that he signed Karl Alzner to a monster contract.

What type of player does Kent Hughes like to acquire? Well, it has only been two years but a couple of things are starting to become clear. He likes to target young players instead of draft picks, like we saw with the Kirby Dach and Alex Newhook trades.

He also likes to bring in people he is familiar with already. Hughes was a prominent agent in the hockey world before taking over as the Canadiens general manager and Newhook was one of his clients. So was Mike Matheson and those two players were featured in two of Hughes biggest trades so far.

Colin White was also a client of Hughes and he was just claimed off waivers by the Canadiens yesterday. Hughes also spoke about his familiarity with Martin St. Louis when he named him the team's head coach. The pair have children close to the same age that both grew up in eastern United States and played together frequently.

Hughes and St. Louis often watched them together, and of course chatted about the game of hockey and commented on how they would run things if they were in charge, like every other fan in the building.

So, with familiarity being important to Hughes, and keeping that in mind, who could he target next?