The Canadiens took a big step — and they’re still in the same place

Sports

add

MONTREAL – Throughout their regime, going on more than three years now, Montreal Canadiens executive vice-president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton and general manager Kent Hughes have tried their best to toe the line between transparency and protecting proprietary information.

In other words, they want their fans to be informed while preventing the other 31 teams in the NHL from knowing too much about their plans.

But their history has also shown us that they generally believe what they say, and they stick to it.

At the season-opening Canadiens golf tournament, for instance, Hughes said the Canadiens had reached a point in their rebuild where, if the team is competitive enough at the trade deadline, maybe they keep veterans on expiring contracts rather than selling them off for draft picks.

And when the Canadiens were indeed competing for a playoff spot at the trade deadline, that’s exactly what they did.

Hughes also said that day they had emerged from a purely asset accumulation phase and entered more of a team-building one, where specific holes would look to be filled by specific players with specific traits management felt the group needed. The Canadiens had already done that by acquiring Patrik Laine in the offseason to fill holes in their top six and on the power play and continued doing that by acquiring defenceman Alexandre Carrier to fill a glaring hole on the right side of the blue line not just this season, but perhaps more glaringly next season as well.

Listening to Gorton and Hughes answer questions for 45 minutes on Monday about what comes next for the Canadiens, it is clear the priority seems to be internal, organic growth, just as it was a year ago. There are still questions management has about some of their players, there are needs that might only be filled externally – perhaps most importantly at centre on the second line – and others that could be filled through that internal growth. There is a young, competitive farm team in Laval looking to win a Calder Cup in the AHL with players who will be looking to integrate the Canadiens lineup, one that risks being younger next season when it was already the youngest team to reach the playoffs in decades.

All of that needs to be managed at once. There’s the balance between veteran experience and young talent, the balance between skill and size and compete in the lineup, the balance between feeling excited about the step the Canadiens took in reaching the playoffs and the prudence required not to skip any steps in the overall rebuild process.

In many ways, the Canadiens took a step this season. And in many ways, they remain exactly where they were a year ago, with questions that don’t have clear answers.

And for a second straight offseason, that uncertainty is personified by one player: Kirby Dach.

When Gorton mentioned the qualities he is looking to add to the Canadiens roster, he painted in wide brush strokes. He’d like to add size, compete and skill. Who wouldn’t?

And when asked about how Dach fits in the team’s plans as he spends a second straight offseason recovering from a major knee injury, those are the three traits Gorton mentioned that Dach possesses.

“There’s certainly a place for him in our lineup; it’s going to be up to him where that’s going to be,” Gorton said. “He has size, he’s competitive, he’s got skill. He’s a very talented player. So I think a lot is in the balance of how his summer goes, how the rehab’s going to go. We saw last year, a slow start coming back from that, particularly in his skating, and he’d be the first to tell you that. … I think a lot, unfortunately, is going to be what kind of summer he has and what kind of start he has to camp. He’s going to need a big camp to get himself going and get started early.”

Hughes wouldn’t go so far as to say next season is Dach’s last chance, but it is going to be a big year for him, a contract year, a year where Dach can either claim his place in what the Canadiens are trying to become or play himself out of the team’s plans.

“I still believe in Kirby,” Hughes said. “He has so much potential as a player … but we still have a lot of questions about Kirby.”

To be clear, this is not about Dach. He is just an example of the uncertainty management still faces about the group it is still building. Aside from Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and perhaps the Canadiens’ goaltending situation, there is not a single player in the organization they don’t have questions about. Will Lane Hutson suffer a sophomore slump? Can Kaiden Guhle have a healthy season? Can Juraj Slafkovský play to his potential for a full season? Can Laine be a difference-maker with a full offseason to prepare? Can Mike Matheson continue to anchor the blue line?

And on and on.

“We’re not a finished product,” Gorton said. “There’s not one area of our team where we’re saying, ‘We’re done there.’”

Gorton’s answer about the gaping hole at second-line centre – a position once related to the Dach question, but no longer – was somewhat revealing based on his past history.

“There’s other ways of improving your skill level in your top six,” Gorton said. “I think if you look around the league, there are teams that have players that aren’t necessarily centres that are 100-point players that are driving lines and being very creative players. There’s more than one way to do this.”

If you look at this season, that description only applies to three players: Nikita Kucherov, David Pastrňák and impending unrestricted free agent Mitch Marner. But more generally, it would apply to Artemi Panarin, whom Gorton signed as a free agent with the New York Rangers to turbo-charge his rebuild in Manhattan.

Panarin, however, was almost a once-in-a-career opportunity, a player who wanted to play in New York and basically delivered himself there. You can’t count on that happening again.

And the reality is this administration seems to be OK with waiting for the right opportunity to present itself, because there is so much work left to be done and so many questions that remain unanswered that if it doesn’t happen this summer, that’s fine.

Both Gorton and Hughes made that clear.

“I do think we’re in a situation where we have talent coming, we have a nucleus that’s forming,” Gorton said. “I do think that we don’t necessarily chase something just to chase it.”

“I think when I said 2024 would be a big summer, I also said 2025 would probably be bigger,” Hughes said. “And I would assume that will continue to be the case, meaning each subsequent summer, until we arrive and we feel like we’ve got a team that’s capable of competing every year for a Stanley Cup.

“I think we can all agree, although we took strides, we’re not there yet.”

The Canadiens are willing to be aggressive to move this rebuild along this summer, but they are not desperate to do so. That seems obvious with the answers given Monday, and as history has shown, this administration does tend to stick to what it says, even if its executives are careful about what they say.

It is normal to want to hedge expectations for an explosive offseason because that is largely outside your control. But one thing that came through loud and clear, and repeatedly, on Monday was the need for internal improvement, especially in the face of what they learned in the Canadiens’ first-round playoff loss to the Washington Capitals.

That is something they can control.

“Compete is really the biggest thing, making sure we have people who are comfortable in a playoff environment to play in all situations,” Gorton said. “There’s really nothing we won’t look at to try and improve it.”

Hughes immediately had something to add.

“And I would say, along with Jeff’s comments about compete, we’ve got a lot of young players who lived it for the first time,” he said. “Some of them are big players, they just have to learn how to use their physical attributes to impact the game more in a playoff environment. And that’s new for them.”

This was one of a few comments Hughes made that strongly suggested they need more from Slafkovský. They have other young players who are big, sure, but he is the primary one, and Slafkovský spoke a lot Friday about now knowing what playoff hockey is all about and needing to be more physical from Day 1 of next season.

That is the reality of developing young players into competitors at the most competitive time of year. And when Gorton says the Canadiens need more compete, Hughes interjecting made it clear that can also come internally.

But the other reality that is more philosophical in nature is how many more young players can you incorporate onto a competitive team and still remain competitive?

Hughes fielded several questions about the Laval Rocket on Monday — more than usual. It’s somewhat normal because the Rocket are in the playoffs and have a legitimate chance at winning a championship.

Rocket coach Pascal Vincent was named the AHL’s coach of the year after leading Laval to the league’s best record in the regular season. But what made it so unusual was the youthful nature of that lineup.

Young teams rarely succeed in the AHL, and perhaps this young team will find making it through the playoffs difficult. It is a veteran’s league, by and large, and teams that normally have success are led by players who have very little chance of playing regularly in the NHL.

The Rocket have several players who have futures in Montreal, making these AHL playoffs doubly important to the Canadiens.

“More than anything, the consistency of the team, particularly considering the number of young players they have,” Hughes said when asked what impressed him about Laval’s season. “Consistency is normally the last thing we see with young players, so credit to the players and the coaching staff.”

If the organic improvement of Montreal’s young players is a priority heading into next season, and if several players are pushing to reach the NHL in Laval, and if you don’t want the Canadiens to be too young because you want them to remain competitive, how do you solve that puzzle?

“Part of doing it right is communication, culture, what we’re trying to do, ensuring that the culture we’re trying to build is not unique to the Montreal Canadiens, it’s organizational, and being able to stay true to that,” Hughes said. “So if we go sign a bunch of guys to four-year deals, there’s a bunch of guys in Laval saying, ‘What the hell just happened? My spot’s gone.’ And then it becomes much harder to show up at the rink the next day or the next season in Laval.

“These are things we need to be mindful of in how we do things.”

And so, even though Hughes said no decision has been made on impending unrestricted free agents Christian Dvorak and Joel Armia, it’s pretty clear that if they stay, it won’t be for long. And that probably goes for any unrestricted free agent the Canadiens might sign. Perhaps they acquire a long-term contract via trade, but that would need to fill a major long-term hole, such as second-line centre.

Otherwise, the Canadiens appear intent on making sure that feeling of “What the hell just happened?” is not felt by any of their young prospects.

Ultimately, are the Canadiens further along than they were at the start of the season? Of course they are. They’ve experienced the pressure of a playoff chase and a playoff series, they’ve experienced the euphoria of a packed Bell Centre at playoff time and the dejection of only managing to play two of those home playoff games. They’ve gained perspective on how hard it is to win and what it takes both mentally and physically.

All of that has enormous value.

But going back to the season-opening golf tournament, when Hughes said the Canadiens had entered a new phase of the rebuild, they are quite obviously still in that same phase, and it is probably the most difficult one. The one where you manage all the young talent you have acquired during the first phase, figure out how to best surround that young talent with veterans and experience and when to graduate that young talent into a competitive environment.

It is the phase where you turn a team that had grown accustomed to picking in the top five of the draft to one that expects to play playoff hockey every year, something this team has only done once. Doing it again will be very difficult.

Hughes and Gorton sent that message loud and clear to their players. And now, they’ve sent it to their fans.

“I don’t think it’s fast-forwarding anything,” Gorton said of the Canadiens’ playoff appearance. “I think we’ve come in here with a plan of what we want to do to rebuild this team. I think it’s certainly helpful in a lot of ways, the experience of it for our players, the need to show the rest of the league what it could be like to play here. There’s a lot of benefits from what the players were able to do this season.

“But we’re certainly not done. There’s a lot to do here.”

(Photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

2025 WNBA Championship odds: Liberty open as favorites

Sports

Next

trending_flat

Yankees’ Gerrit Cole dreams of pitching again after Tommy John surgery: ‘I miss playing’

Sports