Much is up in the air with your Montreal Canadiens.
For the first quarter of the season, the Habs looked like they were heading straight back to the basement of the league and yet another lottery draft pick.
Then in the second quarter, the CH suddenly transformed themselves into one of the hottest teams in the NHL, surprising pretty well everyone, including, I would guess, the players themselves and team management.
Right here, right now, the Habs seem to have reverted back to the mean, as in they’re still doing all right but they’re not pulling off crazy heroics every night. Bottom line is that the post-Christmas run had the team punching way above its weight.
After Tuesday’s 4-1 loss to the mighty Winnipeg Jets, the team is now on a three-game losing streak and worse yet, Kaiden Guhle, who has been looking great, fell badly and left the game. On Wednesday, Jayden Struble was recalled from the Laval Rocket and the team announced that “Guhle sustained a lacerated quadricep muscle, which was surgically repaired. He was released from the hospital today and will be out indefinitely.”
That is, it goes without saying, horrendous news. He is the team’s most consistent D-man and with him out perhaps for the rest of the season, it makes it much more likely the Habs will not be “in the mix” come playoff time.
Which brings us to la question qui tue — What advice do the city’s thousands of armchair/bar stool GMs have for general manager Kent Hughes regarding the trade deadline? Put it another way — will the Canadiens be buyers or sellers on March 7?
It might seem a long way away, but it ain’t. Montreal has only 12 games to play between now and the deadline. It’s such a small number of games because there is a break Feb. 12-20 for the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament.
My take is they won’t be notable buyers or sellers. If they fall right off the cliff — more of a possibility now that Guhle’s gone — then they’ll be sellers. But they’re limited in terms of selling because they don’t have much to auction off. The pending unrestricted free agents are Jake Evans, David Savard, Christian Dvorak, and Joel Armia, and, other than Evans, no team is really going to give much of anything for these guys.
At a certain point Evans was scoring goals like Mario Lemieux, but he’s cooled off since and good as he is as a third or fourth-line centre, you are NOT getting a first-rounder for him.
The most likely scenario is that come March 7, the team will keep all those players just in case they get into the playoffs. Fact is all of them would be useful if there is any post-season play coming.
It is too early in the team’s rebuild to make any big moves at the trade deadline, said Habs fan Jean-Michel, who was at the bar in NextDoor Pub & Grill on Sherbrooke St. in N.D.G. just before the Habs-Jets game Tuesday.
“We have (Jacob) Fowler in the NCAA, we have (Ivan) Demidov in the KHL, we have very good players coming, we have a good base in Laval,” Jean-Michel said. “Savard is aging. We could sell Savard at the deadline. Jake Evans is someone we need to keep. We should re-sign him. If we’re still in the mix and we have a chance to be in the playoffs, keep the group together. But we’re not going to win the Cup this year. So if you do anything, you do it for the future. There’s no reset like with (former GM Marc) Bergevin. We’re not going to win the Cup now.”
In other words, don’t sell the future for the present, which seems a quite reasonable point to make and which is a view I’m sure is shared by Habs management.
Jake Goodman believes the team is a seller this year.
“We need to try to stay on course and rebuild,” Goodman said. “I think we’ll put together a decent season in the end, but it’s not our year. We should still focus on rebuilding and not make any decisions we’ll regret.”
Ryan Hops, who was having a drink with Goodman at NextDoor, said this is the year to do nothing at the deadline.
“To get a fourth-round pick for David Savard or Joel Armia? Just hold on to them,” Hops said. “We can use them like our own rentals.”
What Hops means is that some teams go and trade for pending free agents and use them as a rental, just for this run. Well you could do that with the players you already have that will become free agents after the season.
“We already have so many draft picks,” Hops added. “What’s the point of another fourth-round draft pick? If we were going to get a first-rounder for Jake Evans, maybe, but we’re not going to. They’re worth more to us than they are to other teams and we’d have to replace them with other bodies.”