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Trade Deadline
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The Canadiens kept their roster intact on Friday after a major deal didn't get over the line. Cameron Bartlett / Getty Images
ANAHEIM, Calif. – From a team-building perspective, the NHL trade deadline is essentially useless.
It is a time of year for team-finishing, adding that final piece you are willing to overpay for, a potential difference-maker that can help deliver you to the promised land.
The Montreal Canadiens devoted practically all their time prior to Friday afternoon’s deadline, according to general manager Kent Hughes, to one trade that would have been a “significant deal” to move this project along. And when they weren’t able to get it done, it left them standing when the music stopped.
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Hughes refused to elaborate on what that deal might have been because he feels the Canadiens can revisit it in the summer, but that, in and of itself, reveals a lot about the deal.
It reveals it was a team-building deal, not a team-finishing one, and while Hughes was clearly disappointed at being unable to get it done in time to help this year’s team, he also made it clear this year’s team is not the priority.
There will be a huge guessing game as to what this mystery trade was, and there is no doubt it is a source of great curiosity, but the team-building nature of the deal suggests Canadiens management has not lost the plot.
Hughes appreciates the position the team has earned, with an inside track on a playoff spot for a second straight year, and was obviously willing to bet that this group of players will get it to the finish line. But he also doesn’t look at this opportunity as unique.
Far from it. He sees it as the norm going forward.
“I expect we’re in this kind of a race next year, and the year after, and the year after as well,” Hughes said. “So I certainly wouldn’t go into it thinking this year represents an opportunity to us that’s not going to exist in the future. We’ve got to make the playoffs one way or another, as do all these other teams, and there’s a lot of good hockey teams and they’re going to continue to get better. If we don’t stay the course with them, then we’re going to have an uphill battle for a long time.”
It has been clear from the start that the Canadiens would need to find a clear upgrade over what they already had to pull the trigger on a trade, and Hughes said they looked at some short-term fits. The high prices paid by some of their competitors for rentals is not what stopped the Canadiens from getting in on the action, Hughes insists. It was the fit, or the lack of one, that stopped them.
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“(The prices) would not have stopped us if it was the right player for us,” he said, “but we didn’t find (that player).”
The Canadiens players, led most vocally by captain Nick Suzuki, were hopeful management would not touch their group. They believe in their ability to reach the playoffs and make some noise when they get there, and while augmenting the group would have sent the players a message that management believed in them, doing nothing sends that same message in a different way.
Hughes pointed to how strong Montreal’s record has been since the return from the 4 Nations Face-Off a year ago — the Canadiens have a .645 points percentage in 86 games, fifth in the NHL over that span — as an encouraging sign of how far this team has come since the start of last season. When you add in the fact the Canadiens acquired Noah Dobson, Zack Bolduc, Alexandre Texier and Phillip Danault since the end of last season, there is reason for optimism.
“The glass is half full,” Hughes said. “I think that’s the way to look at it and I think that’s how our players look at it.”
The empty side of that glass, however, is that the mere fact a significant deal was in the works shows the extent to which Gorton and Hughes believe this is an incomplete team. That is not worthy of a breaking news alert on its own — both Gorton and Hughes have publicly stated the rebuild they embarked on four years ago is far from completion — but it does suggest a temporary fix to some of the holes in the lineup might have been a good backup plan to have. Whether that was someone to help address an overall lack of physicality, a rookie playing in the second-line centre hole, an imbalance on defence or inconsistent goaltending, the Canadiens had the assets to do something to help address at least one of those issues, with the physicality being the most cost-effective area of need.
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But Hughes appeared to take issue with the suggestion the Canadiens were hoarding assets in choosing to have that Plan B, and to be fair, it is difficult to look at any of the 20 trades made Friday and make a credible argument the Canadiens should have beaten that return.
“We traded a second-round pick for Phil Danault,” Hughes said. “If there was another deal that required that type of return that we thought moved the needle for us, we would have done that too. But I think part of the message to the group is we like these players, we’ve got a lot of good hockey players, we’ve got good hockey players that aren’t playing games right now for our team. For us to add to that logjam, we wanted to know that it really was meaningful enough for us to do it.”
Texier and Jayden Struble were scratched Friday night against the Anaheim Ducks, so that was the bar any new player needed to hit. It’s not that simple, but that’s essentially the calculation the Canadiens had to make.
But Hughes was not done defending the patient approach the Canadiens seemingly took Friday, because overall, they have not been all that patient.
“It’s not like we’ve tried to build this team uniquely through the draft,” Hughes said. “When we look at the number of picks we’ve traded away to this point, I think we’ve traded three first-round picks, four if you include (Alexander) Romanov being traded for a pick that was then traded for Kirby (Dach). We’ve traded, I think, three second-round picks so far. We’re not afraid to do that, and I don’t want to leave the impression to our fan base that we’re just going to keep drafting and drafting and drafting. We’re going to do what we need to do to keep moving the needle forward if we find those deals.
“But by the same token we’re not going to transact for the sake of transacting so that everybody’s happy in the moment, and then next year comes around and we’re all scratching our heads as to why we did it.”
Also, though the Canadiens made their players happy by not touching their group, as Suzuki and others publicly hoped for, Hughes was just as adamant that that too is a temporary situation.
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It is impossible to know for sure, but if the deal Gorton and Hughes were working on right up to the deadline and even past it is as significant as Hughes suggested, it is entirely possible, and perhaps even probable, that it would have involved someone from that group packing his bags Friday afternoon.
“Listen, we’re going to make moves again, and when we make those moves, I don’t know when that’s going to be, but we understand there’s a chance of subtraction from the group,” Hughes said. “So we like that everybody likes it here, but it’s not going to paralyze us from doing a trade that we think moves us where we want to go.”
And that is perhaps the primary lesson from an inactive trade deadline for the Canadiens; they are not yet where they want to go, and tried as hard as they could to complete a deal that would get them closer to that goal instead of making a cosmetic deal that would help this team in this year’s playoffs.
In a way, the Canadiens were in a win-win situation, one that allowed them to put all their eggs in one basket without suffering when that basket broke. The Canadiens could arguably defend anything they did Friday, including the fact they did nothing. If they’d added a rental or two, it would be understandable. If they made a hockey trade, understandable. And doing nothing is understandable as well.
The difference between the Canadiens and their Atlantic Division rivals in Detroit and Buffalo is they made the playoffs last year, while the Red Wings and Sabres did not, and have not for a decade or more. There is pressure in those markets to show some degree of success, or at least a path to success.
The Canadiens’ rebuild is four years old, not a decade-plus. They have some benefit of the doubt because they are ahead of schedule, and it is the shrewd moves this administration has made to date that allowed this team to get to this point as quickly as it did.
But this might have been the last trade deadline they will have that benefit of the doubt, where being prudent and calculated and measured is seen as a virtue instead of a missed opportunity.
On the other hand, maybe we’ll just need to wait a few months before judging the quality of this trade deadline for the Canadiens, because the open nature of that mystery trade means this day ended with a “to be continued.”
“I’d love to answer,” Hughes said, “but maybe you’ll find out this summer.”
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Arpon Basu has been the editor-in-chief of The Athletic Montréal since 2017. Previously, he worked for the NHL for six years as managing editor of LNH.com and a contributing writer on NHL.com. Follow Arpon on Twitter @ArponBasu
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