Ken Dryden doesn’t have much personal experience with rebuilding projects.
In his eight-year tenure as the Canadiens goaltender, he won the Stanley Cup six times. And, while the Toronto Maple Leafs never won the Cup in the five years he spent in the team’s front office, they were never out of the playoffs.
But Dryden, who was in town Tuesday as part of a salute to the teams that won four consecutive Cups from 1976 to 1979, has been watching the Canadiens’ rebuild from his home and he has been impressed with the fan support for a team that appears destined to miss the playoffs for a fourth consecutive season.
“I’m a little surprised because I know the supporters want something special,” said Dryden. “In most other cities, being good is enough. So being close to being good and disappointing without giving hope of going beyond that, that’s where the supporters get discouraged, when they can’t see that the team on the ice will be better tomorrow.
“We don’t have to win the Cup every year, we just have to know that the team is better than it was and that it is on its way to being much better than it is in the foreseeable future. I think that’s what the supporters perceive at the moment.”
Dryden thinks the Canadiens are that team, but Tuesday’s one-sided loss to the New York Rangers showed there is a lot of work to be done. It was Montreal’s fourth consecutive loss, dropping the Canadiens into the bottom five in the NHL standings.
The celebration coincided with the visit from the Rangers, who lost to the Canadiens in the 1979 Cup final.
The Rangers game also provided a measuring stick for the Canadiens’ current rebuild. The Rangers underwent a similar unthinkable rebuild. The team had been a contender for many years but it was growing old, and in February 2019 team president Glen Sather and general manager Jeff Gorton sent an open letter to fans announcing plans to blow the team up and start over.
Gorton wasn’t around to see the culmination of that plan, but his fingerprints are all over it. That’s the principal reason why the Canadiens hired him to work his magic in Montreal.
There are some similarities and differences in the rebuilding projects. Both teams have worked to stockpile draft picks and develop young players. Both teams have signed key players to long-term contracts.
The Rangers are ahead because they made two key free-agent signings — Artemi Panarin and Vincent Trocheck — and were able to trade for Harvard grad Adam Fox, who didn’t fit the Carolina Hurricanes’ plans.
They also had an elite goaltender in the pipeline to replace Henrik (King Henry) Lundqvist. The Rangers drafted Igor Shesterkin in the fourth round in 2014 and he was a KHL All-Star before signing with the Rangers in May 2019.
If you want to fantasize about what the Canadiens could look like next season, Shesterkin and the Rangers have yet to reach agreement on a contract extension and he could be an unrestricted free agent on July 1.
He has a history with Gorton and Nick Bobrov, whose father has a long association with Shesterkin’s previous team, St. Petersburg SKA. You have to think there would be interest here if he hits the open market although the pricetag will be high. Shesterkin is currently a relative bargain with a cap hit of $5,666,667 but he’ll be looking to join fellow Russians Sergei Bobrovsky ($10 million cap hit) and Andrei Vasilevskiy ($9.5 million). They are No. 2 and 3 in terms of cap hit behind Carey Price ($10.5 million through the 2025-26 season).
Tuesday’s game shows there’s a wide gap between the rebuilding Canadiens and the rebuilt Rangers. It might have been closer if Patrik Laine were healthy and Kaiden Guhle and Juraj Slafkovsky had been in the lineup, but there’s still a lot of work to be done and fans will have to be content to focus on the positives.
Outside of Nick Suzuki’s first goals of the season, there weren’t any on Tuesday, but it was encouraging that the dismal performance produced only a few scattered boos and the fans are still on board.
For now.