Why the Canadiens have the luxury of rolling the dice on a status quo offseason

The Montreal Canadiens are entering what has traditionally been a bit of a dead zone in the NHL offseason without having made any significant improvements to a young team that made a surprise run to the Eastern Conference final.

When Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes addressed the media after signing Ivan Demidov to an eight-year contract extension worth $9.15 million a year on July 1, he expressed confidence in his ability to make those improvements. He and president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton have established a history of aggressive moves since coming on board ahead of the 2022 offseason. They have made at least one significant trade in each offseason they have been in charge, and they are coming off perhaps their most impactful one with the additions of Noah Dobson and Zack Bolduc last summer.

But this is a different offseason, with several teams around the league looking to do the same thing the Canadiens want to accomplish and having a similarly deep well of young players and prospects with which to do it.

“We’re going to make this team better, I have no concerns about that,” Hughes said after signing Demidov on July 1. “But I can’t tell you when it is.”

Hughes has repeatedly stated that improvement might not come until November, which is the month of U.S. Thanksgiving and a moment in the season when teams generally take a hard look at where they’re trending. If the market conditions for acquiring a specific piece — in the Canadiens’ case, a top-six forward — don’t present themselves in July or August, they might when some teams stumble out of the gate and suddenly look at their situation in a different light.

If or when that happens, the Canadiens need to be properly armed with trade assets to pounce, which they must consider when evaluating any opportunities this summer. Do they use those trade assets for a less-than-ideal acquisition, or hang onto them and wait for that perfect piece?

The luxury for the Canadiens in making those assessments is that the alternative to making a move is still appealing. The status quo is far from a disaster because there are avenues for improvement within it.

Dom Luszczyszyn’s model projects the Canadiens’ team Net Rating to get a jump of plus-10.8 simply from aging — the third-highest jump in the league behind only Chicago and San Jose, two teams that missed the playoffs last season. Meanwhile, division rivals Tampa Bay, Florida and Toronto all find themselves among the bottom five in terms of aging impact, which means their Net Rating is moving in the wrong direction.

Hughes has used the term “organic growth” in the past, and while he would prefer to intervene and artificially boost that growth with an external addition, there are a few avenues through which the Canadiens’ organic growth can provide enough of a boost on its own while management continues scouring the market for the best possible opportunity to do something less organic.

The glow-ups

The primary sources of organic growth are Demidov, Lane Hutson and Juraj Slafkovský, simply because they’re at an age when upward spikes in production are common.

That’s especially true of Hutson and Slafkovský because they’re two years older than Demidov.

When looking at Slafkovský’s last three seasons and comparing them to other players who entered the NHL at 18 in the salary cap era and how they performed in their second, third and fourth seasons, two names came up as reasonable comparables: Andrei Svechnikov and David Pastrňák, who represent two different possible outcomes for Slafkovský.

Svechnikov had 172 points in 201 games in the three seasons following his rookie season in 2018-19, Pastrňák had 176 points in 208 games from 2015-18, and Slafkovský had 174 points in 243 games over his last three seasons.

In his fifth NHL season, Svechnikov battled injuries and put up 55 points in 64 games. He has not followed that early trajectory he set earlier in his career. Pastrňák’s fifth NHL season saw him reach point-per-game status for the first time with 81 points in 66 games, including 38 goals. He put up 95 points in 70 games, including a league-high 48 goals one year later at 23, laying the groundwork for his jump to superstar status at 26, when he scored 61 goals and had 113 points in 82 games.

Slafkovský’s been pretty healthy the last three years, and while Pastrňák’s trajectory seems like a best-case-scenario more than a realistic outcome, it would not be unreasonable to see a similar jump for Slafkovský in his fifth season, where he is comfortably a point-per-game player and beginning to gravitate toward the 40-goal plateau. Aleksander Barkov and Nathan MacKinnon also had big spikes in production in their fifth NHL season after debuting in the NHL at 18. Slafkovský has always wanted to belong with that kind of company, and he has a chance to prove it this season.

Hutson is a bit trickier to predict, which is a good thing for the Canadiens. Simply put, he doesn’t have a lot of comparables. Here is the list of the top scorers among NHL defencemen through their age-21 seasons since the 2004-05 lockout. Hutson’s lack of games played compared to his peers here jumps off the page.

The big name missing on that list is Cale Makar, only because his age-21 season was his rookie year. But Makar’s big breakout year was his third full season, with 86 points in 77 games, and Hutson is entering his third full season at a younger age than Makar entered his. A big jump from his 78 points last season would not be the least bit surprising.

Demidov is similarly difficult to peg, considering he has only one full season of work under his belt. As Slafkovský showed in starting slowly after signing a big contract extension in the summer of 2024, we don’t know how Demidov will react to his newfound status as an established core piece of this team and the expectations and pressure that come with it.

Goaltenders are typically difficult to project, but both Jakub Dobeš and Jacob Fowler have the potential for a glow-up this season. From the moment Marco Marciano took over as goalie coach on Jan. 28, Dobeš had 16.02 goals saved above expected, third in the league over that span, according to HockeyStats.com. Dobeš then led the Stanley Cup playoffs in that same statistic. It will be difficult to maintain that for a full season, but Dobeš provided a large sample of excellent play that he can build on, armed with a three-year contract extension to provide some security.

We’re not sure where Fowler will be playing this season, but with the inherent volatility of the position, it’s not difficult to envision a scenario where he is given an opportunity to grab the net and run with it.

Taking a step

Oliver Kapanen’s rookie season with the Canadiens seems to be falling too far below the radar, only because he is seen as a less-than-ideal second-line centre, and that’s the position he was asked to play as a rookie.

His underlying numbers were not flattering, but his 22 goals matched the rookie totals of Mathew Barzal, Connor Bedard, Jamie Benn, Taylor Hall, Gabriel Landeskog, William Nylander and Brady Tkachuk, not to mention all the players he surpassed with that total. Granted, Kapanen was an older rookie than all of those players at 22, but he still scored 22 goals in his first NHL season, tied for 100th in the league.

Kapanen might not be an ideal second-line centre, but you could do far worse than having a player who played that role as a rookie and survived, and if he can maintain that while making the necessary improvements to his game off the puck, the Canadiens will be better as a team.

Bolduc is another player who fits this category. While his ceiling is not as high as Demidov’s or Slafkovský’s, it is clearly higher than he showed last season. He had a lot of adjustments to make, playing in his native Quebec for a new coach on a new team in a new system with the heavy weight of expectations that is unique to Francophone players in Montreal.

Bolduc is a talented scorer, far more than his 12 goals last season would suggest. He showed it in St. Louis, and it would not be the least bit surprising if he pushed into the 20-goal range again as he did in his final season with the Blues.

A healthy runway

Kirby Dach and Alex Newhook are both 25. Their 26th birthdays are a week apart in January.

They are not young, but in terms of games played, they are not quite as old as their ages. Dach has played 306 games in seven NHL seasons, and since joining the Canadiens, he’s played 154 games in four seasons, or fewer than half the games he had available to him. For Newhook, it’s 179 games in three seasons in Montreal, or a little under 73 percent of his possible games.

They are not necessarily similar players, but the Canadiens got a version of Newhook last season that could be a difference-maker. He had the best start to a season of his career before a broken ankle put an end to that. He had 12 points in 17 games at the time of the injury, not world-beating numbers, but a solid contribution. He returned after the Olympic break and put up 13 points in 25 games, not quite as good, but not bad. In 19 playoff games, he added seven goals and 10 points. All told, it made for 20 goals in 61 regular-season and playoff games.

It was something for Newhook to build on.

For Dach, this is an old story, and people are likely tired of hearing it. He is running out of time to realize his tremendous potential, but the possibility still exists that he can play an injury-free season. His production last season was not nearly as encouraging as Newhook’s, but we — and more importantly, Canadiens management — have never seen a version of Dach that has been able to gather momentum.

He has the potential to contribute to the Canadiens’ organic growth, but the clock is most definitely ticking.

A healthy Kaiden Guhle would also contribute to the Canadiens’ improvement this season from a defensive standpoint. With Mike Matheson’s contract extension kicking in this season and expiring in 2031, just like Guhle’s, and with Hutson still being forced to play on the right side until the Canadiens can either play David Reinbacher there or acquire another option, Guhle’s role on the team appears tenuous. Because at some point, Hutson will be able to move back to his natural side on the left, and with Matheson around for the medium-term, that could make Guhle a third-pairing defenceman on the left side.

Guhle has played 94 regular-season games over the last two seasons. He has never played more than 70 in a single season. As with Dach, it is very intriguing to see what Guhle would look like when he’s able to gather momentum over a full season. The notion of being a third-pair defenceman is not all that appealing to him, but Guhle will need to prove he can be available to play the top-four role he sees himself filling.

Steady as she goes

Development curves naturally hit a point where a player peaks and then maintains that peak over a period of time. The longer that period lasts, the better. The Canadiens have several players who might have hit that point, and thus their challenge will be to maintain that level over the next few years.

Nick Suzuki, for example, has gone from 41 points six seasons ago to 61, 66, 77, 89 and finally 101 points last season. Could he have a higher level to go to? Perhaps. But if Suzuki can maintain this level over the next three or four years, the Canadiens will be thrilled.

Can Cole Caufield score more than his 51 goals last season? Perhaps. But, again, if he’s a 50-goal scorer for the next little while, the Canadiens will be in great shape.

Dobson is much the same, because his 39 even-strength points last season were the second-highest total of his career and just six shy of his big 70-point season with the New York Islanders in 2023-24. Maintaining that level of production with very little power-play time is a critical part of the Canadiens’ offence.

Matheson, Alexandre Carrier, Jake Evans, Josh Anderson and Phillip Danault also fall under this category, but for a different reason. Development curves, once that plateau ends, inevitably start to turn downward. It comes for everyone at some point, but players are especially susceptible to it when they are north of 30.

The good news for the Canadiens is that those are the only players on the roster right now who are north of 30, with goaltender Sam Montembeault joining them at the end of October, and there are more than enough players who are still on the right side of their development curves to easily offset any decline we might see from this group.