The Montreal Canadiens made it back to the Conference Finals just 5 years after their Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2021. It’s been a quick reversal of fortunes for a club that completed a significant tear down in between. As we noted in the March Atlantic Division Notebook though, the work isn’t done.
The Canadiens have a strong cohort in their early prime centered around Cole Caufield and Nick Suzucki, who were big contributors to the Habs 2021 playoff run. If we align the roster with the roadmap, though, it’s not that group that should be expected to lead the team in contention. From the roadmap perspective, the contention cohort is centered around their top picks from the bottom out after the 2021 run. That means a group ed by Juraj Slafkovsky, Lane Hutson and Ivan Demidov and supported by the Caufield/Suzuki group is the best indication of the Canadiens ceiling.
While the biggest pieces of the Habs contention cohort have already arrived in the NHL, their pipeline is still reasonably well stocked. With baseline draft potential in each of the 2027-2029 drafts and near it in 2026, there is lots of opportunity to continue to fill their pipeline. Alternatively, there’s plenty of draft capital that could be used to acquire targeted additions to their current group as the did to add Noah Dobson last summer.
The Canadiens rebuild to date is a very interesting case study to watch going forward. With the contention cohort trailing a well rounded cohort already in its prime, there’s potential that Kent Hughes has found a way to actually accelerate a rebuild by rebuilding around some key young players from 2021. The Habs have not looked like the typical rebuild with oodles of cap space after the tear down and instead used it to add, like the Sean Monahan flip a few seasons ago. As they rise back up the standings though, their cap sheet is quite clean, with a lot of their core long term pieces locked up into the contention window while the veterans that they’ll likely need to move on are all pending UFAs by next summer.
