The Anaheim Ducks find themselves in a serious predicament, is it time for Kent Hughes to pounce?
It’s been a quiet summer in town, and Montreal Canadiens GM Kent Hughes probably wishes it hadn’t been, but at the same time, it could have been worse. He could have had a Pat Verbeek kind of summer. The Anaheim Ducks’ GM saw his star center, Leo Carlsson, sign an $18 million offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers, and since he didn’t want to lose him, he had to match it. When he signed the offer sheet, Verbeek was initially blamed for not getting his house in order before Carlsson became eligible for one. Still, it later surfaced that he tried to sign him to an extension, and the player wanted to wait and see.
Now, Carlsson has a $18M cap hit, and Verbeek still has to sign RFA Cutter Gauthier, who knows exactly what Carlsson got. As a result, the 41-goal scorer last season has reportedly turned down a $13M-a-year offer from the Ducks, and Verbeek now finds himself in a pickle. Anaheim has just over $9 million in cap space and will need to make moves if he wants to keep Gauthier. Since he traded for him just two years ago for Jamie Drysdale and a second-round pick, he likely wants to keep him.
Is it time for Hughes to pounce and take advantage of Verbeek’s spot of bother? It could be an option if the Canadiens GM is convinced he can’t do better than the players the Ducks may be willing to unload. If there’s even a small chance left that the Habs could land one of the players that had been identified as a target, Hughes should steer clear of opting for a quick fix.
The Sick Podcast’s Alexis Lavoie-Martel has suggested that Mikael Granlund could be an interesting target for the Canadiens. The 34-year-old left-shot center only has two years left on his contract, which carries a $7 million cap hit, and as such, he would be a good stopgap solution, but is it worth it? He could produce 50 points playing alongside Ivan Demidov, but in two years, he’ll be off the books, and the team will have nothing to show for that trade.
If you’re only going to go out and get a placeholder to hold the fort until Michael Hage is ready to fill that second-line center role, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to use one of your young players who will still be with the team when that happens and will have benefited from that experience? You could conceivably give Oliver Kapanen more experience as a second-line center, have him play through matchups, and if and when he’s pushed down the center-line depth by Hage, he will be an even better player after having gone through that.
Hughes has made it clear that he’s not about to make a move to make a move or to appease impatient fans. It feels like the organization knows exactly what it wants, and unless they can get it on the trade or free-agent market, they’ll stick to betting on internal growth. Of course, one of these days, there will come a time when the ticking of the clock on Nick Suzuki’s contract gets louder, and the pressure on Hughes to use the money his players have left on the table gets more intense, but we’re not there, not yet anyway.
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