NHL
MONTREAL — To get a real sense of what kind of world the Montreal Canadiens are navigating a day before the 2025 NHL Draft, it is worthwhile to look at what was said Thursday by two heads of hockey operations, a few hours and roughly 1,200 kilometres apart.
Not too long before Canadiens executive vice president of hockey operations, Jeff Gorton, addressed reporters at the Bell Centre, his Columbus Blue Jackets counterpart, Don Waddell, did the same in Ohio. These two men are, in a sense, indicative of what is happening in the NHL right now, because they are both after the same thing, and they are both somewhat frustrated that they have not been able to find it.
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The Canadiens and Blue Jackets finished the regular season two points apart in the standings, with the Canadiens needing to win their final game against a team made up of Carolina Hurricanes understudies to clinch their berth in the playoffs. There’s not much separating the two. The Canadiens have picks No. 16 and 17 in Friday night’s first round of the draft, the Blue Jackets have picks No. 14 and 20, and all four of those picks are on the market, readily available in a trade for whichever team is ready to offer up some actual NHL players.
The problem is, seemingly, that team does not exist.
“I think it’s different because there’s definitely a lot of conversations going on around the league, but I think the difference now is I believe there’s a number of teams that are really trying to take another step,” Gorton said. “There’s probably less sellers than normal this time of year. It’s pretty competitive, but there’s a lot of conversations.”
Gorton hates this obligation so close to the draft. He is guarded in everything he says because information is weaponized this time of year, and his job is to say something without saying a whole lot of anything. He’s good at it.
“We’ve had conversations about (moving up in the draft) and the other way, too, to move down,” he said. “It’s just about the cost right now. At 16 and 17, I think we’d be happy with that. But there are some players in the top 10 we like a lot and if the opportunity arises, we would do that, or maybe move up a couple of spots. We’ll see. We’re looking at everything, it’s a decent draft, some pretty quality players, so we’ll see what happens.”
Gorton’s entire media availability could be summarized by those two words: we’ll see. He said it roughly a half dozen times. And that’s fair, because the Canadiens have hopes to do something significant to improve the team, they have a willingness to be aggressive, to a certain point, using their deep well of draft picks and prospects. But they don’t know if they’ll be able to do that because there are other teams. It is not that dissimilar from where the Canadiens stood a year earlier.
“It’s definitely a different dynamic where there’s more teams out there rebuilding, we all know who they are,” Gorton said the day before the 2024 draft. “And sometimes, you’re swimming in the same pools.”
This year, it’s the total lack of rebuilding teams that is the problem, and the fact that there are so many teams in exactly the same situation as the Canadiens.
“There’s competition to do certain things and there are teams with more than one pick. There’s a lot of teams with more than one pick. There’s a lot of teams trying to move up,” Gorton said Thursday. “We can sense that, so we’ll see.”
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We’ll see.
This is what makes Waddell’s comments in Columbus relevant, because in many ways, the Canadiens share his current reality, and Waddell was a bit more generous with his characterization of that reality.
“Well right now, there seems to be a shortage of players because everybody wants players for players,” Waddell said. “There’s a few teams that maybe don’t have first-round picks that are looking for that, but most teams are looking to make hockey trades for players.
“It’s been a different year. I’ve got to be honest, for all my years I’ve been doing it, this has been … I don’t know where all the players went, because there doesn’t seem to be enough players to go around for everybody. I guess we’ll find out in another week or so.”
Again, we’ll see, but just a bit more detail.
Waddell is likely having very similar conversations with teams about his two first-round picks as the Canadiens are. One reality Waddell talked about was teams lacking a first-round pick — right now, that list is nine teams long — who would need to see what players are available before pulling the trigger on a deal, and that’s not only true to Columbus and Montreal, but just about every team between Buffalo at No. 9 and Montreal at No. 16 would at least entertain those conversations.
“We’ve had lots of discussions the last few weeks with a lot of teams, and there’s certainly some teams that don’t even have first-round picks that are waiting to see who might be available,” Waddell said. “They’ll start with 10, 11, 12 and try to work their way through.”
When Gorton was asked about where the talent level in this draft tends to drop off and whether that is somewhere in the 10 to 12 range, his initial response was, “I hope not.”
“I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s always the joke amongst us that your scouts will tell you there’s one pick less than where you’re picking,” Gorton continued. “We think there’s pretty good quality where we’re going to pick, where it’s ok. But I think at the top end there’s some really good players. There’s a leveling out somewhere in the draft where a lot of the players are similar for 10 or 15 picks.”
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Combine that with what Waddell said, and you get an idea of why Gorton said the leveling out lasts 10 or 15 picks, because 10 picks would get you to No. 17.
“The difference in this draft is you might take a player at 14 that other teams have (at) 25,” Waddell said. “I think everybody agrees the top seven guys are going to go one through seven in some order, but then the guy that goes eight, we might have 20th on our list. It doesn’t mean he’s not going to play, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad draft, it’s just after that first group of players, there’s certainly a drop off.”
So really, it’s understandable for Gorton to say “we’ll see” as often as he did, because there is a lot of variance in this draft. It is far more difficult than usual to foresee whether a player another team covets will be available when your pick comes up, whether that’s No. 14 for Columbus or No. 16 for Montreal.
And the added variable this year is the $7.5 million jump in the salary cap, which has changed the dynamics for teams looking to improve because there are far fewer teams that need to make moves simply for salary cap reasons. We’ve already seen two of those moves in the Mason Marchment and Evander Kane trades, but we won’t see nearly as many as we saw when the salary cap was essentially flat.
“I think a lot more teams feel like they’re in play over the next few days to do certain things,” Gorton said, “and that’s going to cause a logjam.”
And so, considering a logjam will result in some teams squeezing through and accomplishing what they hope to accomplish while others will be left standing without a chair when the music stops, Gorton stressed — and rightly so — that forcing something in this environment can sometimes be more detrimental than doing nothing at all.
“In the rebuild, we’ve always said we want to get better, want to keep moving this forward, and that’s what we plan on doing,” Gorton said. “It’s hard. It’s hard to improve every year. We’re going to make decisions that fit into what we set out to do, which is to build a team that has the ability to compete every year for a long period of time, so we’re not going to do anything to stunt that just to move it forward 5 percent. We’ll stay with the plan and the hope is that we’ll continue to grow and we’re better, but we’ll see what happens.
“This is a big weekend for us and a big summer for us, but we’re not going to do anything stupid.”
The Canadiens are one of several teams swimming in a very shallow, crowded pool. Drowning in that pool is indeed something they should look to avoid.
(Photo: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)
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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