Canadiens GM Hughes on off-season plans: ‘We will be very engaged’
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Heading into the 2024-25 season, the Montreal Canadiens’ hope was to be playing meaningful games and in the mix competing for a playoff spot in March.
Montreal has succeeded on that front as one of the hottest teams in the NHL at 8-1-3 in their past 12 games and sit in the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference where they are two points clear of the New York Islanders.
But not too long ago, the Canadiens had played their way out of conversation prior to the 4 Nations Face-Off, losing eight of nine games heading into mid-February, including a pair of losses on home ice on Super Bowl weekend.
The losing skid prior to the break and hot run after caused Montreal general manager Kent Hughes to evaluate his team on the fly heading into the trade deadline, balancing of whether to reward his team or sell off the pending unrestricted free agents on the roster and collect more future assets.
In the end, Hughes rewarded his team by not trading any players at the deadline and even inked pending UFA forward Jake Evans to a four-year contract extension.
“You always learn from your players when they have the opportunity to play really important games — how they respond, how they react in those moments,” Hughes told The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun on Wednesday. “To me, there’s a growth element to the team, there’s a growth element to your coaching staff because they haven’t been in those situations at the NHL level as coaches.
“So yeah, it’s certainly helpful for us in terms of securing more answers or feeling more comfortable as you make decisions going into the summer and moving forward.”
Hughes has a critical off-season awaiting him when the Canadiens’ season comes to an end.
Blue-chip prospects like forward Ivan Demidov and defenceman David Reinbacher are expected to compete for roster spots as soon as next year to add to a core that already has captain Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky and Kaiden Guhle all signed long term and a leading Calder Trophy candidate in defenceman Lane Hutson.
But there is a glaring need for a No. 2 centre behind Suzuki while continuing to find roster upgrades where possible as the Canadiens head into a summer with plenty of draft picks and salary cap flexibility.
Hughes understands with Montreal still in the very early stages of exiting the part of the rebuild where they finished in the bottom five three years in a row, now isn’t the time to think short term when it comes to trying to improve his team.
“We will be very engaged in terms of exploring ways that we can make us a better hockey team, but we’re not going to … we can’t be short-sighted in how we go about it, that’s all,” Hughes said. “We’ve got to consider the present and the future in every decision that we make given that we have a lot of really good young hockey players that we expect to be with us for a very long time.”