Montreal Canadiens GM Kent Hughes spoke on the Basu and Godin Notebook this week, and what he had to say may surprise some.
Montreal Canadiens GM Kent Hughes was a guest on the excellent Basu and Godin Notebook this week, and in an interesting interview, he came back on his team’s elimination by the Washington Capitals last season. If you thought that the fact that the Habs were manhandled and bullied by the likes of Tom Wilson convinced Montreal’s brass that the team needed to get better, you need to think again.
Hughes said the Canadiens had big players like Joel Armia (6-foot-3 and 215 pounds), Kirby Dach (6-foot-4 and 221 pounds) and Josh Anderson (6-foot-3 and 226 pounds). For the GM, what might have been lacking was not so much the size as the competitiveness. He didn’t come out and say it, but it sounds like it was one of the reasons why they moved on from Armia despite his usefulness on the penalty kill.
What is the competitiveness he’s looking for in his team? The two players he used as examples are both well under 6 feet tall: Lane Hutson (5-foot-9, 162 pounds) and Brendan Gallagher (5-foot-9 and 185 pounds). It’s easy to see what he means: despite their respective sizes, those two players do win puck battles.
Whenever Hutson loses the puck in the offensive zone, he backchecks like a moth drawn to a flame and hassles the player like a dog after a bone. As for Gallagher, he might have slowed down, but when he goes into a corner to retrieve a puck, he will battle with intensity and be an absolute nuisance for the other side. If he’s in front of the net, he will battle for territory, and he will get under the defensemen’s skin. Sure, he will be hunched over going back to the bench, but he will have given everything he has.
That tells us two things: the kind of dedicated play the Canadiens are after from their players, but also that Gallagher is still held in high esteem by this organization despite the fact that the speed has decreased and the production has followed. If you thought he might be an easy scratch as the team gets healthier, you might need to think again on that as well.
It’s also interesting to note that Hughes won’t alter his course of action with the team depending on the style of whichever team has won or wins the Stanley Cup next. He won’t be a copycat because if he were, he believes he would set himself back. He believes in what he’s building and in his organization's strengths; he’s not about to do a 180 and give up some speed and skill to get tough guys on the ice. That shouldn’t be too surprising, really. After all, on the day he was hired, he said that in an ideal world, his version of the Canadiens would be a fast-paced, offensive team. We may not live in an ideal world, but Hughes is working hard to achieve his vision, and it’s going well for him.
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