BROSSARD, Quebec — As Montreal Canadiens rookie camp kicked off Thursday, there was an interesting dynamic at the team’s suburban practice facility, with both sheets of ice populated by very different groups of players.
On one sheet, the Canadiens veterans were having a skate, led by director of hockey development Adam Nicholas, getting ready for the NHL season. On the other, rookie camp was getting started with one player who was pretty obviously on the wrong ice sheet.
Ivan Demidov enters the season not only as a rookie, but also as the odds-on favourite to be named the NHL’s rookie of the year. But there he was, skating alongside rookie camp invites and giving it everything he had.
One of the first drills was a three-quarter ice one-on-one drill, with the player with the puck starting along the wall, and the defending player getting a bit of a head start because he had to start by skating backwards. It was competitive.
The first pairing for this drill was Oliver Kapanen on offence and Owen Beck on defence, two players with a very similar profile, two players who will likely be competing for the same NHL job one day, perhaps as early as a few weeks from now. Kapanen took off with the puck, Beck tried to keep up as long as he could, skating backwards before pivoting and going stride for stride with Kapanen skating forwards. Once in the offensive zone, Beck tried to muscle Kapanen off the puck. Kapanen battled, maintained possession, and scored. The next time these two went at it, Beck dropped Kapanen with a WWE-style takedown.
Again, it was competitive.
Which brings us back to Demidov. At one point in the drill, Demidov had the puck, and the player assigned to defend him was Simon Lavigne, a tryout who played his second season on defence for Concordia University in U-Sports last year after completing a four-year career in the QMJHL with the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada, where he was team captain his final year.
It was, uhh, not competitive.
Demidov blew right by Lavigne, cut in front of him with the puck and roofed a shot under the bar short side on 2024 third-round draft pick Jacob Fowler, who won the Mike Richter award last season as the NCAA’s top goaltender.
Et notre premier fait saillant du camp des recrues revient à…
And our first Rookie Camp highlight goes to…#GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/gvwXjhgrxE
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) September 11, 2025
This is not meant as a commentary on Lavigne; it simply demonstrated the contrast between Demidov and some of the other players on the ice.
“I mean he … I don’t even know, he’s a good player,” Fowler said, chuckling. “I’ve skated with him a little bit in the summer and in rookie camp a bit here, and I think you guys all see it. He’s a special player and an even better person off the ice. His talent is, you know, some of the highest I’ve ever seen, but it’s also the way he works with it.
“It’s cool to see what he’s done so far, and it’s only going to get better.”
The Canadiens decided not to make Demidov available to speak to reporters Thursday, for some reason, though he did speak to the team’s website for a story posted Wednesday. But even though we couldn’t hear from the young man himself, he did a lot of talking with his play on the ice. And not just with what he did to Lavigne on that one drill.
Time and time again, Demidov demonstrated he should have been on the other ice sheet. And perhaps it’s most appropriate to hear from a goalie and a defenceman on what it was like to face him, since those will be his most common victims.
“It’s that you don’t really know what’s going to come,” Fowler said. “I feel with a lot of guys, you kind of know different tendencies and stuff like that. With him, it’s the way he reads the game as it comes to him. He doesn’t have an idea in his mind of what he’s going to do 10 minutes before he does it; he can read and react and do things as they come to him.”
When the long practice was over — it ran more than 90 minutes with a break to resurface the ice — rugged defence prospect Owen Protz was skating with a puck near centre ice when Demidov approached him. They gave each other a look, and next thing you know, the two of them are doing one-on-one stickhandling battles, taking turns trying to deke each other out. What might have seemed like a mismatch wasn’t one. Protz held his own pretty well.
But it prompted the question: How did he get roped into such a seemingly no-win situation?
“I think I was the one that initiated it,” Protz said with a laugh. “We kind of did one of these (gestures with his hands as if he’s stickhandling) and kind of looked at each other like, ‘Yeah? Want to do it? All right.’ It’s better than fighting in practice.
“It’s just fun. He’s a once-in-a-generation type of player, his skill’s unbelievable, he’s just such a good player. And even if I was worse, even if I was two or three years earlier in my career, I’d still want to do it. It’s just fun for me. He’s challenging.”
It was interesting to hear Protz describe what makes Demidov challenging compared with Fowler. Though both pointed to Demidov’s unpredictability, the goalie seemed to appreciate the fact it was spontaneous, and the defenceman appreciated the planning that went into it.
“How deceptive he is with each move,” Protz said. “He sets up plays so well for himself. He sees ice, and he plans ahead what he wants to do with the puck. Really, that’s what kind of separates great players from good players, it’s knowing what you want to do before you have the puck and seeing the ice and seeing the availability with that. Really, defending him, or trying to defend him, is playing like I always would, that’s stick on puck, try not to get undressed and just hope for the best.”
Protz didn’t have to hope for the best; he held his own just fine and even pulled one through Demidov’s legs at one point. And as far as the few times Demidov managed to get the better of him, Protz wasn’t sweating it too much.
“I mean,” he figured, “can’t really hit the guy in practice, right?”
A big season for Filip Mešár … the enforcer?
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the Canadiens used the No. 26 pick in the 2022 draft on Filip Mešár, a couple of hours after taking his friend and Slovak countryman Juraj Slafkovský at No. 1.
Two OHL seasons in Kitchener and one AHL season in Laval later, Mešár is already at his fourth rookie camp, and his position in the organization remains unclear. His rookie AHL season with the Laval Rocket began incredibly well, but two injuries derailed that, and Mešár knows he has yet to show the organization what he is fully capable of.
“Obviously, the last couple of years were not how I wanted them to be,” he said Thursday. “There were ups and downs, a bit of bad luck, but every year is an opportunity to prove something, to show something to management, and that’s what I’m going to do this year step by step, practice by practice, game by game.
“If I can stay healthy, I know what kind of player I am, and I know that I have a lot to prove to this organization.”
In fact, Mešár wants to add to what kind of player he is. The organization has made it known to him they would like to see more jam in his game, more competitiveness, more battling. And maybe Mešár has taken that to heart a bit too much.
“Obviously, just trying to stay healthy all season, but just do the things I can do on the ice,” he said. “So that’s be productive, be a good player with the puck, but also add some stuff like going more to the dirty areas, go to the net, maybe fight. I would love to have a first fight this year.
“That’s what I’ve been hearing from all the staff, they want me to be a more gritty player, so that’s what it’s going to be this year.”
Mešár was then told that perhaps the Canadiens don’t want him to be quite that gritty, but he did not back down. He wants to get into a fight this year.
“It would be good,” he said. “I would like to try maybe one fight, we’ll see what happens. Two years ago, I went to boxing classes for a year back home, so I have something. I know how to fight, but I’ve never fought on the ice before, so we’ll see. I just want to add some grit on the ice.”
Rocket coach Pascal Vincent, however, definitely did not mention fighting when discussing Wednesday what he sees as Mešár’s strengths.
“His start of the year last year was quite phenomenal; him, Beck and (Jared) Davidson was probably our best line for a while early in the season. And then he got injured. Twice. So that really slowed him down. But now he’s back to 100 percent. … I know what I’ve seen when he was 100 percent healthy last year, and he’s a pretty good player,” Vincent said.
“I think his ability to make plays at a very high speed, that’s what he can do. He can skate, he can shoot the puck, all of that, but his ability, when he has the puck on his stick, (he can) make plays at a very high speed. He’s very good at that.”
That is exactly what Mešár wants to be for a full season this year. Just with one added element.
“That’s how I want to play this year, just play confident, play with the puck,” he said, “and like I said, when I don’t have the puck, go more to those dirty areas.”
(Photo of Ivan Demidov in April: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)