It doesn't look like the Montreal Canadiens' fans will have new players to cheer on this season, but it doesn't mean they won't have a good team.
NHL.com is taking an inside look at all 32 franchises in the run-up to the season, and this past weekend, it put the spotlight on the Montreal Canadiens. Unsurprisingly, the article focused on the Habs’ two big signings of the offseason: the contract extensions of Ivan Demidov and Jakub Dobes, with some insight from GM Kent Hughes.
Adam Kimelman’s article has an interesting quote from Hughes:
"It's way more credit to our players and to the culture that we have here […] When you create a place where guys want to work hard to get better and to accomplish a common goal, I don't think there's anything ... I used to say to my kids all the time, if you go have a record-breaking year scoring goals in college, it's not like 20 years from now everyone's coming back to celebrate the 40-goal season you had. They come back to celebrate something you accomplished together.”
That desire to win something together motivated the players to sign manageable deals, but Hughes also deserves credit for getting them to sign. He’s been the pivotal piece of what’s going on in Montreal.
When Geoff Molson pulled the trigger and hired Hughes as his GM, he made an incredibly important move. Not only is the GM doing a fantastic job building the team’s young core, but he also seems to have a strong relationship with the players. The dynamic between the GM and the player was especially evident when Hughes and Demidov spoke to the media on July 1; at times, they looked like old friends chatting and joking.
Just as Martin St-Louis can relate to players because he's been in their shoes, Hughes can build relationships with them the same way he did as an agent. His experience has helped him understand how players think and what they want from an NHL career, and that’s how he has managed to get so many of his young players to sign not only team-friendly deals but also long-term deals with minimal trade protection.
Much like St-Louis, Hughes is his own man and won’t give in to popular pressure when it comes to making decisions. The GM has stayed on the sidelines when teams have thrown a lot of money at players in free agency; he’s spent years building a good salary structure, and he won’t throw it all away to appease popular pressure. He’s been active on the trade market, but he’s been unable to land the pieces he’s after so far, and he won’t settle for anything less than what he had identified as the pieces his team needs.
It’s a lot harder to land precise targets than it is to just accumulate talented assets in the hope that they will fit in, but it’s the stage the Canadiens are at right now. Furthermore, now that they’ve made it deep into the playoffs, other teams are seeing them as real contenders, and they’re in no rush to help them improve even further. There hasn’t been much to report on the news front for the Habs this summer, but that’s not a bad thing; it just means that Hughes is sticking to his plan and that he won’t waste the money his core left on the table by signing bottom-six players that won’t really move the needle. Good things come to those who wait, as the saying goes.
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