As a team like the Edmonton Oilers attempt to build their team of the future by locking up their top young forwards, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to long-term deals to be the centerpieces of the franchise, there are other teams who are building in different ways. The Montreal Canadiens locked up star goaltender Carey Price to an eight-year, $84MM deal that starts next year and will keep him locked up until he hits 40-years old. While few dispute the fact that he is one of the top goaltender in the NHL if not the best, there are questions about whether it was smart to invest so much money into a 30-year-old goalie. In fact, if you also factor in the nine years remaining at $7.86MM per year for defenseman Shea Weber, the Canadiens have its core as well.
Starting next year, the Canadiens will be giving those two 30-something players a combined $18.36MM. That’s comparable to the $21MM that McDavid and Draisaitl will make next year. However, Brendan Kelly of the Montreal Gazette writes that investing all your money in a defenseman and a goalie is not the right way to build a winner. He looks at the blueprints for both the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Chicago Blackhawks, two teams who have put together winning formulas and suggests that in neither case was the goaltender the star of the franchise. Neither was the top two players a defenseman and a goalie. Both franchises won based on superstar forwards, one great defenseman and a solid goalie.
Add in the fact that both players are on the wrong side of 30 and are locked up until the 2025-26 season, both could bring down the franchise with all that much money that will be locked into two players who eventually be in their late 30s. The other problem is with that much invested in those two, there will be little money to focus on offense. All great teams always have a number one center and can Montreal pay for one?
Kelly also adds that while he does believe that Price is the best goalie in the world, Price has not been as dominating in the playoffs and certainly has not single-handedly won the team many playoff series. He cites only two Habs’ goaltenders who have worked playoff “magic” in the last 25 years, including Jose Theodore’s dominance in 2002 against the Boston Bruins and Jaroslav Halak’s 2010 playoff performance against Washington and Pittsburgh. Price has not done that yet although he has nine years still to accomplish this.
Price was unable to be a difference-maker against the New York Rangers team in the playoffs this past year, Kelly said. And while the team didn’t lose the series because of Price, the team just wasn’t good enough to beat an average Rangers squad. How will the rest of the team improve when there is little to no money to bolster their offense?
Nashville gave Weber that 14 year deal, not Montreal.
Technically Philadelphia did. Nashville matched
Ah
I thought Philly offer sheeted Subban, but I was wrong.
But Montreal traded for that deal instead of keeping Subban which could be a horrid deal for Montreal in the future.
Montreal didn’t give Shea Weber that 12-year deal…last season was his first in Montreal.
I dunno what I think about the strategy of where to invest. Sure the superstar forward formula has worked for Pitt and Chicago, but what if you lack the pieces to beat them at that game? Do you throw money at a worse version of their formula or do you try to make something else work instead?
Pittsburgh also had a pretty good goalie at a pretty solid price tag as well. He was becoming too expensive at the 5+ mil he was due to make and thus the reason he is in Las Vegas. But I think you need to have a solid goalie and the Pens used the #1 overall pick in the draft to get one
Agreed. A goalie is probably the most important thing if a team hopes to make a postseason run. Good playoff teams have a good goalie, or at the very least, a goalie that gets hot during the playoffs. Great playoff teams have the surrounding cast to provide that goaltender with the scoring needed. Montreal is fine with Price in net, he hasn’t been his all-world self in the playoffs, but he also isn’t the reason why Montreal hasn’t had much playoff success recently.
A superstar goalie and defenseman as their core seemed to work pretty well for New Jersey for over a decade.
Unfair comparison to compare Montreal to those teams. Hard to lock up young superstar forwards when u rarely draft in the top 5.