There is a funny thing about being a young goalie in the NHL. You can be good enough to play and still not have anywhere to play. That may be the situation Jacob Fowler finds himself in with the Montreal Canadiens.
Preparations are quietly underway at the CN Complex, where the Habs' training camp will begin in less than two weeks. All of the Canadiens' players are back in town, except for Juraj Slafkovsky, who is still in Slovakia.
The Montreal Canadiens are hoping to move from young up-and-comers to Stanley Cup contenders. Some folks might argue that their Eastern Conference Finals appearance last season proves they are already Stanley Cup contenders, but their performance in that series against the Carolina Hurricanes showed just how far away they still are.
In recent weeks, it has become clear that Gleb Pugachyov might start the next season not necessarily in the KHL, but rather in the MHL or the VHL. He still has a lot to prove, in fact.
For the second season in a row, the Montreal Canadiens had players win awards at the end of the season. This past season, Nick Suzuki won the Selke Trophy, and Cole Caufield won the Lady Byng Trophy, with Lane Hutson winning the Calder Trophy the year before that.
The NHL has had an interesting new millennium. It was a league sans a salary cap when the 2000s started… and then the owners locked the players out for an entire season.
The golf tournament and the rookie tournament are coming up, and hockey is finally in the air in Montreal. Barring a major turnaround, the Habs will head into training camp without a true top-6 center in the NHL.
It's early September, training camp starts at the end of the month, and two key players are still without contracts. You know exactly who I'm talking about; do I need to say it again?
For most Montreal Canadiens fans, the first time they are introduced to a new prospect is on draft night. It used to be much easier to keep tabs on prospects when most of the best players played in the CHL, but with many electing to play in Europe or the NCAA, it has become much harder to track their progress.
Ivan Demidov has been getting a lot of attention in Montreal since the day the Canadiens drafted him. That isn't going away anytime soon. Now Kris Letang has thrown a little more gasoline on the fire, suggesting that if everything goes right, Demidov could be close to a top-five player in the league within three years.
This morning, The Athletic published a ranking that's sure to get people talking. The list ranked players in order of importance: MVP, franchise players, stars, and role players.
He’s been linked to more than one team this summer, but speculation connecting Kirill Marchenko to the Montreal Canadiens isn’t going away. The latest report comes from podcast host Tony Marinaro and insider Jimmy Murphy, both of whom think it has real substance.
People will talk about the “Mount Rushmore” for a franchise, which is to say the four people, usually four players, that most define the franchise. Not always the four-best players, but the four that evoke the essence of the franchise.
Owen Beck seems to have quietly fallen into that dangerous category of hockey prospect: the guy people have started writing off before he's really been given much of a chance.
Since the start of the summer, the CH has been unable to sign a top-6 forward. We suspect this is the club's number-one priority, but no acquisition has been made so far.
Since the start of the offseason, there has been speculation about whether Kirill Marchenko will be traded. It's clear that the more time passes, the more it works against the Blue Jackets.
The Montreal Canadiens have seen many of their top prospects graduate to the NHL over the past few seasons. Despite this, the Canadiens still have a very solid prospect group. In the next few days, I’ll discuss my top 10 prospects in the Montreal Canadiens organization.
It's September. Patrik Laine still hasn't signed a contract. At this point, with training camps fast approaching, it's becoming increasingly likely that the former Canadiens player will sign a tryout contract with an NHL team for training camp.
It has been a remarkably quiet summer in Montreal when it comes to the Canadiens. Aside from extending two young players who still had a year remaining on their contracts, Kent Hughes has been unable, or perhaps unwilling to pay the asking price, to pull the trigger on a deal to address some of the team’s biggest needs.
The Montreal Canadiens are getting closer to the start of training camp, but there is still some business for general manager Kent Hughes to take care of.
Angela Price is always entertaining to follow on social media. After all, you never really know what she'll decide to reveal. I don't know if the Canadiens' PR team would also use the word “entertaining” to describe her… but anyway.
Ivan Demidov has had Montreal Canadiens fans buzzing from the moment he was drafted, and through his first 84 career games, he hasn’t let them down. The Russian winger was the runner-up to Matthew Schaefer for the Calder Trophy last season and flashed glimpses of greatness during Montreal’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Montreal Canadiens emerged from their rebuild with an appearance in the Eastern Conference Final last season. They also boast one of the deepest prospect pools in the sport, in what amounts to an enviable pairing of having their cake and eating it too.
Watching Mike Matheson in public appearances, in warmups, even during the games, you immediately sense the calm and quiet poise of a man who understands exactly where he sits in the universe.
The Montreal Canadiens already have one of the youngest rosters in the NHL, and that likely will not change for the next couple of seasons. Montreal has a ton of prospects who could be making the jump in the near future.
The Montreal Canadiens had a successful season culminating in an Eastern Conference Final appearance. Before next season, several questions remain about Montreal’s goaltending.
Last year around this time, I wrote that Montreal felt like a team crossing a threshold — scarred in the right ways, finally aligned, with real help still coming.
Since their founding in 1909, the Montreal Canadiens have been involved in several trades with teams across the NHL over multiple decades. There have been some high-profile players moved in and out of the team, with the Canadiens by far the most successful team in league history.