Three Cane Errors the Habs Won’t Make

May 17, 2024

Last night the Carolina Hurricanes were eliminated in six games from the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs by the New York Rangers. After eliminating the New York Islanders in five games in Round 1, the Canes could not overcome the Rangers. It’s a familiar end to the hockey season in Carolina – a team that looks built to contend for a cup has a strong regular season but are unable to find a new level to take them over the top in the playoffs.

The devastation is not as stark as it has been in Toronto – the Canes have had significantly more playoff success – but there is still room to pause and look at Carolina, and to consider the errors the Montreal Canadiens won’t make.

The Habs won’t taint the playoffs with distractions around contract negotiations.

It’s the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and your team is a legitimate contender. Your top goaltender is finally healthy and playing well. You have a tight defense group, at least for the rest of this season. Your forward group has some solid talent. And… your team is one of the best coached squads in the league.

So the story that is obviously going to break during the second round is that contract talks with your coach are not going well, and other teams are waiting to see what happens before they make their own coaching decisions. That’s how it goes in Tom Dundon’s world, apparently.

Oh, it will all get resolved, and Rod Brind’Amour will get paid. That’s how it is likely to go. So why allow the drama around your team while they’re competing in second round?

The Montreal Canadiens ended their season with a year left on their coach’s contract. Before they sat down for the end of season presser, the Habs had released an announcement that Martin St. Louis had been extended. This is not rocket science – it’s how you do it. Unless there are questions about the guy’s future in town, you find a way to deal with business before it becomes a storyline.

Rod couldn’t be blamed if he is announced as the new coach in Toronto before the weekend is out.

The Habs won’t go bargain bin shopping when their window is wide open.

There has been playoff hockey in Carolina every year since the 2018-19 season. The contention window is wide open under this current core. At the 2019 deadline, the Canes made no moves. In the 2020 COVID Cup season, the Canes made some strong moves, adding second-line centreman Vincent Trocheck and defensemen Sami Vatanen and Brady Skjei. Then they went back to their skimpy ways – in 2021 they acquired Cedric Paquette and Alex Galchenyuk and Max Domi was the big addition at the 2022 deadline.

Then in 2023, the trade deadline was a true bargain bin event with two players their teams had been trying to move all year finding their way to Carolina – Jesse Puljujarvi and Shayne Gostisbehere. This past season they did better, acquiring a goal scorer in Jake Guentzel. But what they desperately needed was a second-line centreman and they went back to the bargain bin, landing Evgeny Kuznetsov, the guy whose long-term team had given up on.

It’s not all bad. The Canes have drafted well and made great trades in the offseason. That’s when you build your team, for sure. But when your window is wide open you have to recognize it and add pieces to fix where you’re weak. The trade deadline is when a management group shows the team they believe in them and they’re in the fight with the players.

We’ve only seen GM Kent Hughes sell at the deadline. When the 2024 deadline was past, Hughes commented that he looked forward to being a buyer at the trade deadline. With the moves we have seen from him so far, we have every reason to believe he will nail it.

When Hughes arrived, the Habs were weak at right shot defense. He immediately went to work, adding Justin Barron at his first trade deadline, picking up Johnathan Kovacevic off waivers, and drafting David Reinbacher and Bogdan Konyushkov. Hughes identified they didn’t have a starting goaltender, so he went and added depth for Laval from Europe, and drafted three netminders in Jacob Fowler, Quentin Miller and Yevgeni VoloKhin. Then he moved Jake Allen to allow Sam Montembeault and Cayden Primeau the space to grow and prove themselves.

For this summer he’s identified goal scoring and physicality as the need, and we’re yet to see what Hughes will pull off. Here is the kicker. We have come to expect that he will pull off something good, and that he is bold enough to take risks to advance the Canadiens. There is every reason to expect he will be as incisive and ballsy at the trade deadline when the Habs window is open.

The Habs won’t allow emotions to drive key roster decisions.

The Canes needed a second line centreman at this past deadline, and missed out on a couple that were on the market. Any discussion of the second line centreman position brings us back to Jesperi Kotkaniemi.

On August 28, 2021, the Carolina Hurricanes announced they had tendered an offer sheet to Kotkaniemi. The signed offer was worth $6.1 million and included a $20 signing bonus, a nod to the number 20 worn by Sebastian Aho. The move came two years after then GM Marc Bergevin and the Canadiens signed Hurricanes star centreman Sebastian Aho to a five-year offer-sheet worth $42,295,000 offer sheet which the Hurricanes ultimately matched.

As I write this, I know there are Canes fans who will proclaim that the Canes had long coveted KK and saw him as the solution to their second-line centreman lack, and that there was no revenge involved. I’m sure there were hockey guys who saw KK having high potential – the Habs sure did. But I’m not naive enough to write this whole storyline off as scouting.

From the minute the Canes matched the Aho offer, pundits predicted their owner, Tom Dundon, would eventually seek payback. At the time, we didn’t think much of that prediction, since it is a fear that surrounds offer sheets generally. If I use an offer sheet, I will be vulnerable to my restricted free agents being targeted when the time comes. But when that Kotkaniemi offer inevitably came, there was vengeance written all over it.

The first clue was the $20 signing bonus. There was no value in the signing bonus except to make a point. The second clue was when GM Don Waddell spoke to the offer sheet. “Jesperi Kotkaniemi accepted our offer. He wants to come to Carolina.” The language was practically identical to what Bergevin said of Aho two years earlier. The third clue was the overpay. Yes, that’s how you win the offer sheet game, but there were already clear indications that Kotkaniemi wasn’t worth the offer they made him in the offer sheet, and he’s proving not worth the eight-year extension they gave him a year later.

Dundon got his revenge, but he also got KK, who spent much of the playoffs on the fourth line and finished the series with the Rangers with a stat line of one assist in 11 games. It has not worked, and KK’s future in Carolina has a big question mark.

In the meanwhile, Vincent Trocheck, the guy that didn’t fit in Carolina after they landed Kotkaniemi, is playing second line centre for the Rangers and killing it, while getting paid less than a million dollars more than KK. The Trocheck contract may look rough at the tail end, but for both the Canes and the Rangers, the window is open wide right now. Both teams need prime Trocheck, and one team has him.

As far as we know, no enemies have yet been made by HuGo in their time in Montreal. But we have heard rumblings that the Rangers may not be inclined to deal with the Habs because of how things ended with Jeff Gorton. The Rangers have three restricted free agents this summer – Kaapo Kakko, Ryan Lindgren and Braden Schneider – and no one knows their worth more than Gorton.

I’m not suggesting that an offer sheet is off the table for HuGo, but if they go that route they won’t make bad decisions for the team rooted in any emotional leftovers Gorton may have from his time in New York.

This will be a summer of change for the Carolina Hurricanes, perhaps cutting to the core. Theirs is a cautionary tale of having the vision to recognize your window, and the courage to make big deals to maximize it. No doubt the Habs are paying attention.