We are still in the dead of summer, but training camp is less than a month away.
The Montreal Canadiens, despite having a deep desire to add a top-six forward, have not made any additions to the NHL club, though the AHL team in Laval has undergone a massive overhaul.
We haven’t done a mailbag in ages, and usually these come with a preamble to set the stage for where the Canadiens find themselves. Well, from a player personnel perspective, they find themselves in a pretty similar situation as at the end of last season.
However, that doesn’t mean they’re standing still.
When you’re one of the youngest teams in the league and still have a top-10 prospect pool despite that youth and despite reaching the Eastern Conference final, you’re still in a very enviable spot with a very real path to improve organically.
There’s still time for the Canadiens to make the trade they want to make — and the start of training camp, or even the start of the season, is not a deadline — but the fact they are in no rush speaks to their luxury of time. Their true contention window has not yet opened, and may not for another year or two — however long it takes for Lane Hutson, Juraj Slafkovský and Ivan Demidov to hit their primes. So, while there is some urgency in the Canadiens’ front office, there is also an awareness that the wrong move could scuttle the whole project.
While we wait out the most uneventful Canadiens offseason of the Jeff Gorton/Kent Hughes era, let’s get to the mailbag.
(Questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Montreal changed the structure and personnel in the medical department two years ago. Before doing so, we were consistently losing more man-games to injury than almost any other team. The last two years have not been as bad. What, if anything, has changed? — Grant M.
Well, Grant, a lot has changed.
Jim Ramsay replaced Graham Rynbend as the team’s head athletic trainer in June 2023, not long after the New York Rangers let him go. Gorton’s familiarity with Ramsay, not to mention coach Martin St. Louis’ familiarity with him from playing for the Rangers, made him a natural hire.
The Canadiens were coming off a brutal 2022-23 season — the first full season of the current regime — when long-term injuries to Cole Caufield, Slafkovský, Sean Monahan, Kirby Dach, Christian Dvorak, Josh Anderson, Joel Armia, Kaiden Guhle, Mike Matheson, David Savard and Arber Xhekaj scuttled any hope of competitiveness. Only two players on that team — Nick Suzuki and Johnathan Kovacevic — played more than 70 games.
Injuries routinely took longer to heal than initially announced. That stopped with Ramsay’s arrival. Players greatly appreciated the precision of the recovery timelines they were given because they were almost always accurate, and Ramsay strongly discouraged players from playing through injuries, especially when the games were essentially meaningless early in his tenure.
That same offseason saw the retirement of Dr. David Mulder as the team’s head physician after 60 years with the organization. He was replaced by Dr. Dan Deckelbaum, who has since been replaced by Dr. Thierry Pauyo.
Pauyo played four years of hockey at Amherst College, a Division III school, before graduating with honours from Harvard Medical School and doing his residency at McGill. His area of expertise, aside from orthopedic surgery, is injury prevention. If you understand French, I would recommend watching this long interview with Pauyo to get a sense of his work and research.
One analogy he related in that interview was imagining a man who is in charge of pulling drowning people out of a river before asking the question of why they are falling in the river to begin with, and solving that problem instead.
So, between Ramsay’s approach and Pauyo’s research focus, prevention has become a big point of emphasis for the Canadiens medical staff, not to mention just how robust that staff is. In addition to Pauyo, the Canadiens website lists four more physicians, two dentists, three sports medicine physicians and an additional orthopedic surgeon on staff.
There is some inherent luck involved in remaining relatively healthy. But sometimes, you can create the conditions to get lucky, and the Canadiens appear to have done that with the overhaul of their medical staff.
Who do you think has the higher ceiling – Adam Engström, Jayden Struble or Arber Xhekaj? Putting aside NHL experience, who is the best fit for the Habs moving forward among these three? — Paul B.
This, Paul, is a critical question for the Canadiens, especially now as they are scouring the trade market and using their surplus on defence as capital in that search.
It is no secret Engström’s name is floating around out there. Teams have asked about him in trade discussions, and the Canadiens are open to those discussions. Engström has yet to be traded, largely because the Canadiens see him as having considerable value. That is, in part, due to the fact teams are enquiring about his availability, but it is also because the Canadiens feel Engström could help their blue line.
And this is where the question becomes critical. The blue line already has Lane Hutson, Noah Dobson, Mike Matheson and Alexandre Carrier, none of whom are overly imposing physically. Neither is Engström. And neither is David Reinbacher, though there is some physical edge to his game when he reaches his peak comfort zone.
The question then becomes how much of the same thing one blue line can have, especially when that thing is not what has traditionally won in the playoffs. If you look two years into the future and have a defence of Hutson and Dobson on a top pair, Guhle and Reinbacher on a second pair and Matheson and Engström on a third pair, you could make the argument that the Canadiens’ defence would simply skate opponents out of the building.
But can a defence skate opponents out of the building in the playoffs? There hasn’t been much historical evidence of that working in the spring. However, the Carolina Hurricanes’ defence was not particularly mean and nasty last spring, and they won the Stanley Cup. Now, the Hurricanes’ defence was not exactly as offensively inclined as our hypothetical Canadiens blue line two years from now, but it was not a particularly physical group either, defending largely with its feet and smarts.
So, to get back to Paul’s question, where does that leave Xhekaj and Struble? Well, they represent the other side of that coin for the Canadiens, in case they determine that you need at least some of that nasty element on a blue line to win in the playoffs. If so, the scarcity of that player profile in Montreal increases the importance of Xhekaj and/or Struble.
The answer to your question, Paul, is therefore far more philosophical than a straight player comparison. Identifying who is the best fit depends highly on what kind of blue line you envision the Canadiens having when they are ready to win the Stanley Cup, and what kind of blue line you believe will enable them to do that. Can they double down on mobility and still win when the brand of hockey gets harder and the rules become a bit more blurry? Or do they need to maintain some more snarl in their blue line?
If the answer to those questions is unclear, fret not. The front office is likely grappling with that same question as we speak.
Amid the well-founded optimism about the organization, do we forget just how much this team’s success rests on Suzuki maintaining his ironman streak? — Lucas M.
I don’t think anyone forgets this, Lucas. Suzuki finished fifth in Hart Trophy voting this season, played in the Olympics, won the Selke Trophy in an absolute landslide, was sixth in NHL scoring and had at least a point in 63 games, second only to Connor McDavid’s 68. Any team that has a player like that would be severely weakened if he were suddenly gone for an extended period of time, but centre ice being the position where the Canadiens have the least depth, it would be particularly devastating to Montreal.
Suzuki is a star, a top-10 forward in the league and a leader who has the unquestioned respect of his room and his coach.
I think everyone knows he drives the bus in Montreal.
When you look back at other NHL teams that were as young as this Habs core and on the cusp of contention, what were some glaring mistakes made by management groups that sabotaged the process? — Gordon A.
The 2015-16 Buffalo Sabres are the team I always think of, Gordon. Their collection of young talent was ridiculous: Jack Eichel (19), Sam Reinhart (20), Rasmus Ristolainen (21), Linus Ullmark (22), Evan Rodrigues (22), Jake McCabe (22), Zemgus Girgensons (22), Ryan O’Reilly (24), Robin Lehner (24), Marcus Foligno (24) and Evander Kane (24).
Not all of those players were perfect, but that was a group that could grow together and do some damage.
Those Sabres lacked patience. They signed Kyle Okposo to a seven-year deal worth $6 million a year that offseason. The intent was clear, because Okposo is a great character guy and was a productive player. But he was also an example of why you avoid pouring too much money into a complementary piece.
And then, one by one, all those young pieces left in trades — which the Sabres often lost — and had almost immediate success elsewhere. O’Reilly, Eichel, Reinhart and Rodrigues won the Stanley Cup somewhere else. Not all the young players listed above knew the same success away from Buffalo, but several did. Ullmark won the Vezina Trophy in Boston, Foligno became an elite bottom-six checker in Minnesota, and on and on.
The Canadiens appear to be displaying a lot of patience, and the strongest endorsement for their summer of inactivity is that they avoided doing something like overpaying for Okposo, a good player and an excellent person who was overpaid out of desperation to do something for the sake of doing something.
Is there chatter about the Habs landing Connor McDavid at some point, or is that just a fantasy of mine? What would this scenario look like, and how could the Habs and Oilers make that happen? — Andrew R.
There is definitely chatter, Andrew. But that’s all it is.
For now.
If the Oilers conclude that they have no choice but to deal McDavid because he communicates to them that he will not extend beyond his current two-year deal, the Canadiens would be well-positioned to make a pitch that would satisfy both the Oilers in terms of adding young players and McDavid in terms of providing him with a chance to win.
There is a season to be played in Edmonton before any of this becomes a reality, but if this season does not go well for the Oilers, the Canadiens will make their pitch. There should be little doubt about that. This is where having a competitive team while also having a top-10 prospect pool comes in handy.
As Suzuki and Caufield start to hit their prime years, when do you think Montreal’s approach of patience begins to shift towards urgency? The reality is that there’s more than a half-decade gap between the core stars on this team (Suzuki to Demidov). As a fan, I’m wondering if teams in this situation think about which player’s/players’ prime to gear towards. E.g., is Montreal’s contention window best when Suzuki and Caufield are 26-28, but Demidov/Hutson/Slaff are still 21-23? Or would management see the all-in window as more so towards when Demidov/Hutson/Slaf have hit 25-26, but Suzuki and Caufield are hitting their 30s? — Jen Z.
This is yet another dilemma the Canadiens have to tackle in addition to the philosophical debate on their blue line referenced earlier.
But I think the real urgency, Jen, will be when Hutson, Demidov and Slafkovský hit their primes. This will be the opening of the Canadiens’ real contention window. At that point, they should still have Suzuki, Caufield, Dobson and Guhle in their primes, which gives them a critical mass of prime-aged talent all working together. Not to mention Jacob Fowler hitting his prime at roughly the same time, giving the team perhaps the best goaltending tandem in the NHL with Jakub Dobeš.
Not to be too repetitive, but this is why the urgency is not quite at its peak yet. As great as Suzuki and Caufield are, a team with the trio of Hutson, Demidov and Slafkovský entering the truly dominant years of their careers together should be a scary proposition for opposing teams. And if the Canadiens don’t have a dominant team at that point, then I think you will see real urgency kick in.
That is when being somewhat reckless will be far more justified than it is right now.
The salary cap situation of the Habs is amazing, but I wonder if it can become an issue. Would the players welcome a star free agent making $15 million-plus? How do we add the two to three key missing pieces while accepting the current salary structure as a constraint? — Pierre D.
I’m glad you asked this, Pierre, because it is a common misconception.
The players who created the Canadiens’ favourable cap situation by accepting below-market contracts did so in the hopes the team would add precisely the type of player you are referring to. That is what the extra money is for: to add finishing talent, needle-moving talent that will complete this rebuild and give all those players who accepted those contracts a chance to win, which is all they really want.
That is what is special about this group. The money is not as important as the winning, and that is why they all left money on the table.
A bigger issue would be if the Canadiens didn’t add that player, if they didn’t spend the money they left on the table to give them a chance to win. That is why management feels pressure to act this offseason, because it knows this is what the core expects — the trade-off for the team-friendly deals. That pressure works two ways. Spending that extra money on the wrong player, on a complementary piece or pieces instead of a true needle-mover, would be falling short of those expectations from the core.
So, you end up with the offseason we are currently seeing, where the Canadiens are trying to use that money with precision and a vision toward completing everyone’s ultimate goal.