For the last two weekends, Montreal Canadiens' prospect Michael Hage has been playing on the wing for the Michigan Wolverines, but that's nothing to worry about yet.
For years, the Montreal Canadiens have been looking for talent down the middle. In Nick Suzuki, they’ve got their top line center. This season, Oliver Kapanen has been centring Alex Newhook and Ivan Demidov with good results, and Kirby Dach looks like he’s ready to hit his stride skating alongside Zachary Bolduc and Brendan Gallagher. Meanwhile, Jake Evans has been a fixture on the fourth line, but that doesn’t mean the center line conundrum is fixed.
At the 2024 draft, Kent Hughes traded up to land Michael Hage, a talented young center who’s now in his sophomore season with Michigan University in the NCAA. In 12 games so far this season, he’s managed to rack up 17 points, which is more than satisfactory, especially since he got 34 points over 33 games in his rookie season. For the last two weeks, however, the youngster has been skating on the wing for the Wolverines.
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In an interview with Research Ground, Michigan coach Brandon Naurato explained what Hage needs to do to become a center at the highest level:
“For him to be an effective centre, he needs to play hard and be hard to play against once the games get tighter and open ice is harder to come by. It’s about figuring out how to create.”
To do that, a player needs to have the right frame, and the youngster certainly worked on that this summer, but now he needs to work on his game, and that’s what Naurato is guiding him through. It’s no secret that the Canadiens want Hage to become a center, and one could even say they need him to be one, but for now, they have to trust that Michigan is developing him the right way.
Whenever he’s ready to join the Canadiens, Martin St-Louis certainly won’t complain that he’s been through his paces to try and learn how to create space and opportunity for himself. Nobody can say what the future holds, but the organization has good reasons to believe that Hage will blossom into what it needs him to be.
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