Kent Hughes has done a lot since being appointed as the Montreal Canadiens' GM, but which of his moves has been his best?
Monday marked the fourth anniversary of Kent Hughes’ appointment as the Montreal Canadiens GM, and it doesn’t take a very in-depth look to say that it has been a success so far. When he first took on the helm, the Habs had 23 points in 41 games and were going absolutely nowhere while rookie Cole Caufield was struggling to find the back of the net under Dominique Ducharme.
Since then, the man has done a lot, from firing Ducharme to hiring Martin St-Louis, trading Artturi Lehkonen and Tyler Toffoli in his first half season, drafting Juraj Slafkovsky and Lane Hutson in 2022, David Reinbacher in 2023, Ivan Demidov and Michael Hage in 2024 and Alexander Zharovsky in 2025, pulling off big trades at the draft to get the likes of Kirby Dach, Alex Newhook and Noah Dobson, giving the Habs a real analytics’ department and investing in skills coaching, while also being able to sign his best players to team-friendly deals.
Nobody’s perfect, and in hindsight, trading Lehkonen for Justin Barron wasn’t a great move, although it was partly redeemed when he was flipped for Alexandre Carrier. The Dach and Newhook trades have not worked out as expected, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.
On the Laraque-Gonzalez show on Monday, the two hosts were trying to establish which one of Hughes’ moves had been the best. They couldn’t come to an agreement, but they both had valid options, I must say. Georges Laraque said Hughes’ best move was drafting Ivan Demidov, while Stephane Gonzalez argued it was drafting Lane Hutson in 2022.
Personally, I agree with Gonzalez. Not because I believe that Hutson is better than Demidov, it’s too early to know which of the two will have the bigger impact on the franchise, while it seems clear that they both will have a significant one. Instead, because drafting Demidov was an easy pick, he was a ripe fruit there for the picking after the likes of Macklin Celebrini, Artyom Levshunov, Beckett Sennecke, and Cayden Lindstrom had been taken off the board. Picking Hutson, however, took both guts and vision. Every team passed on him, sometimes twice over, but Hughes decided to gamble on the youngster he had seen play so often, and his scouting staff liked.
Just a couple of weeks ago, in his mid-season review, Hughes admitted that he had no idea that the young blueliner would become so good, so fast, but he still had the vision to know that he was worth betting on. For me, that’s why he’s the GM’s best move, well, that, and his performances obviously. With 118 points in just 133 games, he is the player with the highest points-per-game average from his draft year. He won the Calder Trophy, and by the looks of it, he will soon be in the conversation for the Norris Trophy. He’s currently third in scoring amongst the league’s defensemen with 50 points in 49 games, and he trails Zach Werensky by two points and Cale Makar by three. Furthermore, he has a plus-16 rating while Werensky’s stands at just plus-five.
Night in, night out, the youngster plays over 20 minutes, and his hockey IQ and creativity have made the Canadiens’ power play a force to be reckoned with. Furthermore, Hughes has managed to ink him to an eight-year contract. The youngster lives and breathes hockey, is always the first player on the ice, and often the last one off it. For all these reasons, his selection is Kent Hughes’ best move in the previous four years.
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