“I’m happy to be here,” Demidov said the day he signed. “I can’t wait to play more games for this jersey. … It was easy because they wanted me to be here, I wanted to stay for the long term here and we just signed it so quickly.”<\/p>\n
Dobes was equally excited to sign a three-year, $16.05 million contract ($5.35 million AAV) on July 2 that also begins next season.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old began last season as the backup to Sam Montembeault<\/a>\u00a0but won his first six starts and took the No. 1 job. He went 29-10-4 with a 2.78 goals-against average and .901 save percentage in 43 games (42 starts), the most wins by a Canadiens rookie goalie since Ken Dryden<\/a>\u00a0(39) in 1971-72. Dobes also had a .908 save percentage while starting all 19 playoff games to help the Canadiens reach the third round for the first time since 2021.<\/p>\n “It’s exciting,” Dobes said. “I feel like we have a good group. End of the day I feel like everyone wants to win, which is really important to get the deal done and kept the guys together. I feel like everything was really smooth with all of us. I’m excited everyone is on the same page, and we want to do what’s best for us and the group.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I’m excited. I feel like we have a lot of potential in the next couple years to get something exciting done. We just, hopefully, will be better than last year. I’m really proud of the guys, everyone staying here and keeping the same team together pretty much.”<\/p>\n Demidov and Dobes are the latest to commit long term to the Canadiens, joining forwards Nick Suzuki<\/a>, Cole Caufield<\/a> and Juraj Slafkovsky<\/a>, and defensemen Lane Hutson<\/a>, Noah Dobson<\/a> and Kaiden Guhle<\/a>, to be under contract through at least the 2029-30 season.<\/p>\n The opportunity to be part of that core is why Demidov signed so quickly.<\/p>\n “Just take a look at our team,” he said. “We have a good core, and everyone is similar age and everyone wants to win the Cup. Everyone is hungry.”<\/p>\n That’s a sign of the environment that’s taken root since Hughes and president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton were hired during the 2021-22 season.<\/p>\n “It’s way more credit to our players and to the culture that we have here,” Hughes said. “When you create a place where guys want to work hard to get better and to accomplish a common goal, I don’t think there’s anything … I used to say to my kids all the time, if you go have a record-breaking year scoring goals in college, it’s not like 20 years from now everyone’s coming back to celebrate the 40-goal season you had. They come back to celebrate something you accomplished together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I’m happy to be here,” Demidov said the day he signed. “I can’t wait to play more games…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-814239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}