Defenceman David Reinbacher will make his season debut Wednesday when the Laval Rocket play the Manitoba Moose in AHL action at Place Bell (7 p.m., RDS).
Reinbacher, selected by the Canadiens in the first round (fifth overall) of the 2023 NHL Draft, had surgery on his left knee on Oct. 1 after being injured in an NHL pre-season game against the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Bell Centre. At the time, the Canadiens said they expected the 20-year-old Austrian would be sidelined for 5-6 months.
The knee injury was a big blow to the development of Reinbacher, who was coming off a disappointing season with Kloten HC in the Swiss-A League. Reinbacher had 1-10-11 totals in 35 games and was minus-15 last season as Kloten went through three head coaches and finished in 13th place in the 14-team league with a 17-29-6 record. Reinbacher also suffered two injuries last season — one to his knee and one to his hand.
After Kloten’s season finished, the 6-foot-3, 207-pound Reinbacher played 11 games with the Rocket, posting 2-3-5 totals and a plus-6.
“It was a difficult year in Kloten,” Rob Ramage, the Canadiens’ director of player development, said about Reinbacher when training camp opened last September. “They had three coaches and didn’t make the playoffs. So he faced some adversity, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s going to happen during his career. I found his game last year at (training) camp mature. He was more mature on the ice than he was off the ice. Off the ice has caught up this year.”
Ramage added at the time that the key for young defencemen like Reinbacher and Logan Mailloux — selected in the first round (31st overall) of the 2021 NHL Draft — is not to get too far ahead of themselves. Mailloux, 21, has played 39 games with the Rocket this season, posting 9-14-23 totals and a plus-1. The 6-foot-3, 213-pounder has also played seven games with the Canadiens this season, posting 2-2-4 totals and a minus-5.
“Young defencemen, you can end up digging the puck out of your net a lot if you get ahead of yourself and they’re very conscious of that,” Ramage said at training camp about Mailloux and Reinbacher. “We’ve talked about that with both those guys with their defensive abilities. I think they take that personally They want to show: Yeah, we can defend — it’s not just our offence that stands out.
“As defenceman that’s important. There’s not a lot of (Cale) Makars and (Quinn) Hughes in the world,” Ramage added about the star defencemen with the Colorado Avalanche and Vancouver Canucks. “You still have to be able to defend.”
Heading into Wednesday night’s game, the Rocket had the best record in the AHL (31-13-3) under first-year head coach Pascal Vincent, who was head coach of the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets last season.
“He really cultivates a winning culture down there,” the Rocket’s Owen Beck said about Vincent after getting called up to the Canadiens earlier this season. “I think right from the get-go everybody wasn’t really sure how Laval was going to do this season. We were a pretty young group. There were quite a few changes (including head coach J.F. Houle leaving to become head coach at Clarkson University, his alma mater) but right from the get-go he established that we were going to be a winning team and that we were going to buy into the system and play the right way and that’s exactly what we did.”
Beck, selected by the Canadiens in the second round (33rd overall) of the 2022 NHL Draft, has 13-17-30 totals in 44 games as an AHL rookie with the Rocket. The 21-year-old forward has no points in six games with the Canadiens.