It was a strange trade deadline for the Montreal Canadiens and the latest episode of The Rebuild takes fans behind the scenes.
This week’s episode of Crave’s docuseries The Rebuild: Inside the Montreal Canadiens focuses on the trade deadline and everything that happened or didn’t happen on that day. With the trade deadline on March 6 and the Montreal Canadiens on a California road trip that day this year, the Habs’ brass chose to hit the road with the team.
While that might have meant fewer members of the media to deal with than if the war room had been set up in Brossard, it also meant that Kent Hughes and his team were right in the players’ faces since the trade room was adjacent to the team’s meal room, which apparently wasn’t ideal. According to Jeff Gorton, the team will learn from that experience.
As you will no doubt recall, the Canadiens were rumoured to have been active on trade deadline day but having just missed the cut to file a big trade with the league, and that’s exactly what the episode showed. Hughes was on the phone until the very last minute and when he hung up with the mystery executive from another team, the Habs wondered if the deadline had been missed.
Interestingly, we also see that had one deal come through, the Canadiens would also have made a second one. Presumably, one of those might have involved sniper Patrik Laine who had only played five games in the season and who did confirm at locker room clear out day that he could have played again. While he said he back then that he wasn’t worried about whether he’d find work again in the NHL, at the time of writing, on the eve of training camps opening across the league, he remains a free agent, a trade at the deadline might just have helped his cause.
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