- The Athletic’s Arpon Basu reports that the Montreal Canadiens are likely to let center Phillip Danault test the market. While this may be a shock to some, there’s a sort of backstory to this. It was widely reported last summer that general manager Marc Bergevin had offered Danault a six-year deal with a $5MM cap hit. That’s still Montreal’s offer, according to Basu and others. Montreal and Danault are both keeping the door open in case he can’t receive better offers on the open market, leading one to believe that the relationship is still amicable between the two. However, it’s reasonable to think that Danault would receive a better offer from a variety of teams desperate to improve their center depth, making a return to Montreal anything but certain.
Canadiens Rumors
Montreal Canadiens Sign Alex Belzile
The Montreal Canadiens will bring back a depth forward, signing Alex Belzile to a one-year, two-way contract. The deal will pay him $750K in the NHL and $250K in the AHL, though also includes a $300K minor league guarantee.
Belzile, 29, will have one of the more interesting NHL debuts to recount years after he retires. Undrafted, he played eight full seasons in the minor leagues before suiting up for the Canadiens in the bubble playoffs a year ago. He played six games for the team then, and returned for two more during the season this year. Still, his place is as a minor league depth piece and injury replacement.
The Laval Rocket certainly won’t complain. Since arriving in Laval, Belzile has been a force, scoring 30 goals and 82 points in 111 games. Unless he really impresses in camp, that’s likely where he’s headed once again. At the end of the one-year deal, Belzile will once again be an unrestricted free agent.
Uncertainty Surrounding Shea Weber For Next Season
Following a trip to the Stanley Cup Final, it would seem hard to believe at first that Montreal wouldn’t consider protecting their captain from Seattle in the upcoming expansion draft. However, it appears that this will be the case. TVA Sports’ Renaud Lavoie reports (Twitter link) that the Canadiens won’t protect defenseman Shea Weber after recent medical evaluations revealed that he could miss all of next season and potentially longer due to injury.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman relays that the issue is a left foot or ankle problem that has been lingering for several years. He had surgery to repair a tendon in that area in 2018 and also missed time with that same issue two years later. The injury isn’t going away and the team, the league, and the NHLPA are now doing due diligence to determine next steps for the 35-year-old.
On the ice, Weber’s absence would be a significant loss for the Canadiens. While he had been slowing down in recent years, he still logged heavy minutes for Montreal and averaged 22:42 per game this season (second-most to Jeff Petry by two seconds) while recording 19 points in 48 games. His ice time increased significantly in the playoffs despite playing through a thumb injury, logging more than 25 minutes a night while still chipping in with six points in 22 games.
On the expansion front, this situation creates some clarity as the team would simply protect Petry, Ben Chiarot, and Joel Edmundson with Brett Kulak serving as the notable rearguard left unprotected.
However, it creates a big hole on Montreal’s back end as well with no real certainty on what they’ll be able to do. While he will be eligible to be placed on LTIR, the Canadiens may not be able to do much to replace him unless they can determine that he will miss all of next season. In that situation, they’d be permitted to spend up to his $7.857MM over the Upper Limit of the salary cap but if they feel he could come back at some point, they’d be more restricted in what they could do and might only be able to fill his spot with a low-cost internal replacement.
Still on the contract front, Weber’s deal still has five years remaining on it but only $12MM in cash payments due to the front-loaded nature of the contract, one that is now illegal and subject to recapture. PuckPedia has a Twitter thread about the short-term salary cap recapture potential for both teams if Weber was to retire. (Montreal’s cap recapture potential ends after the 2022-23 season while Nashville’s will last the duration of the contract.) However, the likeliest scenario at this point is that Weber doesn’t retire, collects his salary which sits at $6MM next season, and no recapture penalties would apply to either team.
The Canadiens were already eyeing down a busy offseason with several notable players in need of new contracts. This development with their captain and one of their top blueliners could very well make it that much busier for GM Marc Bergevin.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Montreal Canadiens Extend Luke Richardson
A day after signing head coach Dominique Ducharme to an extension, the Montreal Canadiens are at it again. This time it’s top assistant Luke Richardson who gets the three-year deal, keeping him in the organization through the 2023-24 season.
Richardson, 52, took over for Ducharme in the playoffs after the head coach tested positive for COVID and impressed many around the league with his calm demeanor. There was some speculation that the former NHL defenseman would be given an opportunity to lead another team, but since all of the vacancies have been filled up, it made a lot of sense for him to return to Montreal, if he wasn’t already planning on doing so.
The Canadiens were lauded this postseason for the physical play of their defense corps, using their size to quickly shut down rush opportunities and punish attackers whenever they got close to Carey Price. One might compare it to the way that the 6’3″ Richardson played throughout his 1,417 game NHL career, which came with more than 2,000 penalty minutes.
Those 1,400+ games put him among the all-time leaders in the spot, sitting just one spot ahead of Hall of Fame defenseman Al MacInnis. While Richardson certainly never had a chance at the Hall—his career-high of 21 points saw to that—the sheer number of games played will command respect in any room. With four years of head coaching experience in the AHL and now even a taste of it at the NHL level, you can be sure that Richardson’s name will come up over the next few seasons as a top candidate for any vacant jobs.
Dominique Ducharme Loses Interim Tag, Signs Extension
The Montreal Canadiens have officially named Dominique Ducharme the 31st full-time head coach in franchise history. The team has removed the interim tag and signed Ducharme to a three-year contract extension through the 2023-24 season. Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic tweets that the deal is believed to be worth $1.7MM per season. GM Marc Bergevin released a statement on his new coach:
Dominique has managed to set his system in place and establish himself as a head coach in a very unusual season with challenging circumstances. While our team has gone through its fair share of adversity, he has shown a lot of control over the situation as well as showing calm and great leadership. These are important qualities that we look for in a head coach and he fully deserves the chance to lead our team and take it to the next level.
The 48-year-old head coach took over from Claude Julien earlier this season after serving as an assistant since 2018 and ended up taking the Canadiens all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. Though he missed part of the playoffs due to a positive COVID test, the systems that Ducharme instituted in Montreal carried them throughout the playoffs as a strong defensive team that attacked opportunistically off turnovers. It got them past the North Division-leading Toronto Maple Leafs, swept the Winnipeg Jets, and defeated the hugely favored Vegas Golden Knights, before eventually breaking down against the defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning. With that playoff success, it seemed obvious that Ducharme would be retained as head coach and today’s news makes it official.
Even though he did have all that postseason glory, it’s important to note that the Canadiens did go 15-16 under Ducharme in the regular season. There are countless factors that go into that record, including a tough schedule caused by a COVID shutout, but this isn’t a proven name that Montreal is going with. Still, there are reasons to believe that Ducharme can be a successful NHL head coach right away, starting with his strong history in the QMJHL. He won a league title in 2013, taking home the CHL Coach of the Year trophy for his efforts. He has led Team Canada to a gold medal at the Hlinka-Gretzky tournament and the World Juniors as well, though that 2018 team was loaded with NHL talent including Cale Makar, Robert Thomas, and Carter Hart.
With their coach locked up, the Canadiens can now focus on other offseason negotiations. Phillip Danault, Joel Armia, Corey Perry, Eric Staal, Tomas Tatar, Jon Merrill and Erik Gustafsson are all pending unrestricted free agents, while Artturi Lehkonen and Jesperi Kotkaniemi are both scheduled to become RFAs. There’s plenty of work left to do for Bergevin and his staff, but he won’t have to worry about who is behind the bench moving forward.
Canadiens To Prioritize Re-Signing Pending Free Agents
Off-season chatter around the NHL has been heating up in recent days. The league and its fans are operating on a tight schedule, with the protection lists for the Seattle expansion draft due just a week from today. Teams all over the league are looking to shift their roster makeup under a flat salary cap, posing decisions on player prioritization. Along those lines, The Fourth Period reports that the Montreal Canadiens are likely to focus on re-signing their pending free agents before dipping their toes into the market. That’s especially interesting coming on the heels of winger Corey Perry saying that he’s got more hockey left in the tank. Re-signing him seems rather inevitable at this point. With this rumor, it’s also reasonable to speculate that Montreal will do whatever they can to make deals work for Phillip Danault and Joel Armia, the former of which will demand a serious investment from Habs management.
Poll: Will Phillip Danault Re-Sign In Montreal?
The Montreal Canadiens’ unexpected Stanley Cup Final run means that now, all eyes are turned on how the team and general manager Marc Bergevin will alter the roster this offseason. Montreal struggled with the $81.5MM salary cap already, making a flurry of reassignments and emergency call-ups during the regular season in order to stay cap-compliant.
That decision-making will come under intense scrutiny this offseason for many reasons, mostly due to a very large number of unrestricted free agents to deal with. The biggest one of them all is undoubtedly Phillip Danault.
The Quebec-born center has finished high on Selke ballots in recent years. His defensive prowess was put on full display in the playoffs, shutting down Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, Kyle Connor, Blake Wheeler, Max Pacioretty, and Mark Stone en route to a Stanley Cup Final berth.
However, it hasn’t always been an easy road for Danault in Montreal. After being continually forced into more defensive assignments by former head coach Claude Julien, Danault left sentiments at the end of the 2019-20 campaign that he may not want to re-sign. Those feelings, from an outsiders’ perspective, at least, have certainly changed. Danault played an incredibly crucial role in Montreal’s success, both in the regular season and playoffs.
It’s for that reason that Danault is expected to receive a big payday on a longer-term deal this offseason. Yet, Montreal’s priorities remain unclear. Are they willing to invest that much money in a player with somewhat limited offensive upside, or do they feel as though Danault is truly an integral piece to the team?
So we ask you, PHR faithful, where do you think Phillip Danault ends up this offseason? Do you think he’s able to work out a deal in Montreal, or will he head elsewhere?
Mobile users, click here to vote!
Dominique Ducharme In Discussions To Remain As Montreal Head Coach
As the Montreal Canadiens hosted their end-of-season media availability, general manager Marc Bergevin said the team is engaging in talks with Dominique Ducharme to officially become the team’s head coach.
It was a tale of two seasons for Montreal under Ducharme. While Montreal started strong out of the gate, a short string of unexpected losses led to the firing of head coach Claude Julien. On February 24, 2021, Ducharme was named the team’s interim head coach. It didn’t seem that Julien’s firing had made much of an impact on the team’s performance, however. Under Ducharme in the regular season, the Habs posted just a 15-16-7 record, clinching a playoff berth as the league’s 18th-ranked team due to this year’s divisional alignments. It all makes Montreal’s run to the Stanley Cup Final, in which the team still went 13-9, even more impressive.
What Montreal saw from Ducharme this season, in their eyes, has been enough to earn him the job. While the team’s on-ice performance may not have blown off doors immediately, Ducharme was able to guide the group through a tough first-round matchup against the Toronto Maple Leafs and onwards. Under his tutelage, the team gelled at the right time, losing to a team that’s now won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in the Tampa Bay Lightning.
As Montreal makes an effort to bring back their core next season, things may look a little different. The flat salary cap may have an effect on who they can and can’t afford to bring back. Montreal is hoping that by potentially retaining Ducharme in his role, they can catch lightning in a bottle once again moving forward.
Corey Perry Not Considering Retirement
After two straight Stanley Cup Finals appearances, Corey Perry isn’t ready to hang up his skates. The veteran forward explained at his end-of-year press availability that he has no intentions of retiring. He didn’t stop there though, explaining that he would love to return to the Montreal Canadiens if possible.
Yes I intend to play hockey next year. I think there is still a lot of good hockey left in me. I would love to come back here and experience Montreal for being Montreal. It was a weird year with family not being here and all that. But definitely, to people out there looking at Montreal as a spot to land and come play, it’s been everything that you could imagine. It’s a first class organization and everything they do here is done with a purpose. I really enjoyed my time.
Perry, 36, settled for close to a league-minimum contract with the Canadiens this season, earning just $750K with no performance bonuses. That was of course in addition to the $2MM he earned from an Anaheim Ducks buyout, something he’ll collect again next season and the year after that. While many wrote him off, Perry seemed rejuvenated by the young core in Montreal, scoring 21 points in 49 games during the regular season and becoming a force for the team in the playoffs.
If he wants to return to Montreal, it seems like an easy contract to work out for the Canadiens, who should still have a spot for him in the bottom-six. It’s not like he’ll be demanding a huge raise at this point in his career and given that Joel Armia, Phillip Danault, Eric Staal, and Tomas Tatar are all pending unrestricted free agents, there will be roster spots to fill.
Still, perhaps there will be other teams that come calling on Perry if he makes it to free agency next month. Those clubs that can’t seem to get over the playoff hump could potentially still see the 2007 Stanley Cup champion as a difference-maker in the postseason. Perry does have 167 career playoff games, where he has scored 108 points including ten game-winning goals.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images
Free Agent Focus: Montreal Canadiens
Free agency is now just under a month away and many teams are already looking ahead to when it opens up. There will be several prominent players set to hit the open market in late July while many teams have key restricted free agents to re-sign as well. The Montreal Canadiens come bitterly into the offseason after a Stanley Cup Final loss, but a large amount of unrestricted free agents mean it’s a pivotal time for the franchise.
Key Restricted Free Agents
F Artturi Lehkonen – An up-and-down season ended strongly for the first Finnish Canadiens RFA. While in part due to the shortened season, Lehkonen had his worst offensive season to date, failing to post either 10 goals or 20 points for the first time in his five-year NHL career. He didn’t fare too well under either Claude Julien or Dominique Ducharme, at least in the regular season. It resulted in the lowest usage of his career, being played just 13:25 minutes per game. However, when the opportunity arose during their playoff run, Lehkonen rose to the challenge. Taking the left-wing spot with Phillip Danault and Brendan Gallagher, Lehkonen helped formed a line that shut down opponents’ top players for the majority of the playoffs. He added an overtime series winner to boot, as one of his three playoff goals sent Montreal to the Stanley Cup Final. Yet the reality stands that Lehkonen was inconsistent at best overall this season, and his next deal will likely reflect that. A shorter-term deal should be expected for a depth player like Lehkonen.
F Jesperi Kotkaniemi – It’s hard to know what to make of Montreal’s 2018 top draft pick at this stage in his career. Coming off of his entry-level deal, Kotkaniemi has broken expectations during each of his playoffs runs, totaling nine goals and 12 points in 29 games. Yet Kotkaniemi didn’t even score that amount in a full 56-game campaign this year, potting only five goals. While the young Finnish center has oozed potential during Montreal’s playoff appearances, he hasn’t been able to perform at the same level over the course of his regular seasons. With all that being said, it’s extremely unlikely that general manager Marc Bergevin commits to Kotkaniemi long-term this offseason. At just 21 years old, Kotkaniemi still has four more seasons of RFA eligibility. It’s impossible to imagine that Montreal would give him a deal longer than that, instead allowing Kotkaniemi to live up to his potential over the course of a lower-stakes bridge deal.
Other RFAs: F Joseph Blandisi, F Michael Pezzetta, F Ryan Poehling, F Jacob Lucchini, D Otto Leskinen, D Cale Fleury, G Michael McNiven
Key Unrestricted Free Agents
F Phillip Danault – Danault had largely been regarded as one of the more underrated defensive centers in the NHL over the past few seasons. That’s no longer the case. Danault’s shot-suppressing expertise was on full display throughout the regular season and playoffs. And while his offense took a backseat in the playoffs with just one goal and four points in 22 contests, he’s scored 124 points in 205 games over his past three seasons. The offense will come back next season if history is any indicator. It’s why Danault is expected to get a significant raise on his $3.083MM cap hit. With Danault possibly receiving offers over $5MM and even $6MM on the open market, Montreal will have to shell out the cash to retain their Quebec-born top-six center.
F Tomas Tatar – Montreal’s usage of Tatar this season, especially in the playoffs, was puzzling to many. It was just last year where Tatar had emerged to lead the Habs in scoring with 61 points in just 68 games. While Tatar was limited to just 30 points in 50 games this year, his line with Danault and Gallagher had performed extremely well from a possession standpoint. Even through the beginning of their first-round series against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tatar’s line had succeeded at silencing Toronto’s top talent. Yet Tatar soon found himself scratched for the rest of the playoff run, with Lehkonen taking his role on that line. It’s hard to expect that Montreal will want to retain Tatar at this point, especially with outside teams knowing what they can get out of him. Expect Tatar to be in a top-six role again next season — just not with Montreal.
Other UFAs: F Corey Perry, F Joel Armia, F Eric Staal, F Michael Frolik, F Jordan Weal, F Alex Belzile, D Jonathon Merrill, D Erik Gustafsson, D Gustav Olofsson, G Charlie Lindgren
Projected Cap Space
While Montreal sits with a respectable $14.7MM in cap space, the team has a lot of expiring talent. Retaining the expected pieces and building on this roster’s weaknesses will likely bring Bergevin and Montreal into a tricky dance with the salary cap yet again next season. And while no drastic moves are expected from this year’s Stanley Cup finalist, it might be challenging for Montreal to navigate the free-agent waters after they’ve re-signed key pieces. However, Montreal’s camaraderie and team strength were on full display this season. It’s the type of performance that incentivizes players to take pay cuts to play for a winner, something that may very well be a reality for Montreal this offseason.
Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. Contract information courtesy of CapFriendly.