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Brendan Gallagher

Brendan Gallagher Returns For Canadiens

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Although no formal announcement has been made about his activation from the injured reserve, the Montreal Canadiens will welcome back veteran forward Brendan Gallagher to their lineup tonight. Seemingly injured for this entire season, the Canadiens can now employ one of their best players, both on and off the ice.

After being a strong emotional leader for the Canadiens during their run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2021, Gallagher was rewarded with a 6-year, $39 million contract extension from Montreal. Unfortunately, for both Gallagher and Montreal, he has been wholly unable to play a full season since that contract was signed. In only 25 games played so far this year, the forward has four goals and five assists for the struggling Canadiens.

Nevertheless, with the Canadiens in rebuild mode, Gallagher is a strong leader to put around the younger players coming up to Montreal. Given his injury history lately, $6.5MM a year is quite a lot of money to spend on a player that seems unable to play a full 82 games, but Gallagher’s leadership should make the contract a bit more palatable for the Canadiens. As the Canadiens take on Tampa Bay Lightning tonight, Montreal is 1-7-2 in their last ten games, remaining in the bottom five of the NHL league standings.

Injury Notes: Canadiens, Greenway, Johnson

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The Montreal Canadiens have been absolutely ravaged by injuries yet again this season, missing key players for long stretches. While they have no playoff aspirations at this point in the season, there is still some promising news for the team health-wise. The Athletic’s Marc Antoine Godin reports that forwards Kirby Dach, Jake Evans, and Brendan Gallagher were all at practice today, albeit in non-contact jerseys.

All three have missed significant stretches of time this season, especially Gallagher, who’s played just 25 games with intermittent lower-body injuries. His latest absence has kept him out since January 3 and is past his original estimated return timeline of six weeks. Evans exited the lineup a few weeks later and was issued a 10-week recovery timeline from a knee injury. Dach has been out since the end of last month with a lower-body injury and has no timeline for a return.

All are important players to Montreal in their own right, but Dach has especially been impressive in his first season in Montreal. The third overall pick in 2019 has taken a significant step in his offensive development since being acquired from the Chicago Blackhawks, adding an even brighter star to an already bright future for the Canadiens.

  • Buffalo Sabres winger Jordan Greenway is out day-to-day with an upper-body injury, according to Bleacher Report contributor Joe Yerdon, adding to a bumpy season for him. The 26-year-old has just one goal in eight games since the Sabres acquired him at the trade deadline, and the team is quickly plummeting out of the Wild Card race.
  • On a positive note, The Denver Post’s Bennett Durando reports that Colorado Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson practiced in a regular jersey today, signaling he’s close to a return. Johnson has missed over a month with a foot injury but could draw back into the lineup soon ahead of the playoffs. The 34-year-old has seven assists in 51 games this season.

Montreal Canadiens Issue Injury Updates

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Once again this season, the Montreal Canadiens’ significant injury woes have forced them to make a set of announcements to update the hockey world on some of their players still working their way back to full health. Last time, the team issued four medical updates at once, and last night they officially announced new developments in the injury statuses of three players.

Firstly, the team announced that breakout forward Kirby Dach is out indefinitely with a lower-body injury. As we wrote in our coverage of the last major Canadiens injury update, Dach has been out since February 14th, with his absence first attributed to a non-COVID illness. The team then discovered that Dach’s illness symptoms were actually consistent with the effects of a lower-body injury, hence this new development.

Dach’s progress this season has been an encouraging early success for the Canadiens’ stated goal of revamping their player development process, and he has at times this season looked like one of the more dangerous offensive options at coach Martin St. Lous’ disposal. While it’s unclear if Dach will return this season, if his season does end at the 54-game, 35-point mark, the team can consider his first campaign in Montreal to be a strong one.

The second update the team issued concerns one of the team’s core veteran leaders: Brendan Gallagher. He is out with his own lower-body injury on a three-to-four-week recovery timeline. This means that it’s possible that Gallagher misses the rest of the season, as their final game is on April 13th, meaning Gallagher’s current timeline will be cutting it close.

If this injury does indeed cost Gallagher the remainder of his season, it will end what has been a disappointing campaign. While Gallagher has maintained his tenacious style of play, that trademark style seems to have taken its toll on his availability. He’s been in and out of the lineup for the last three seasons, and while the underlying numbers paint a prettier picture than his box score stats, Gallagher’s productivity has suffered as well.

If he has played his final game of this season, he’ll finish with just nine points in 25 games. Armed with a $6.5MM AAV deal that runs through 2026-27, getting their heart-and-soul player back to his old, productive self will be an important priority for the Canadiens organization.

The final injury update relates to rookie defenseman Arber Xhekaj, who underwent shoulder surgery and will miss the rest of the team’s season. Xhekaj, an undrafted product who surprisingly made the Canadiens out of training camp, has quickly become a fan favorite in Montreal.

His bruising, exceedingly physical style of play quickly endeared him to both Canadiens coaches and the Montreal market, and the understated skill he brought to the table indicated that there could be more in his future than a career as a simple physicality specialist.

He’ll finish his rookie campaign with 13 points and 101 penalty minutes in 51 games, and Canadiens fans will turn their attention to the other promising first-year-pro defensemen in their lineup: Kaiden Guhle, Jordan Harris, and Justin Barron.

While Xhekaj’s injury certainly takes a bite out of the entertainment value of the rest of the Canadiens’ games this season, seeing as the team won’t make the playoffs and is playing for pride alone over the next few weeks, having Xhekaj undergo surgery with an eye towards returning to full health for next season (rather than seeing him play through the injury/pain in order to help his team’s odds of winning, as some players have done in the past) seems like a wise course of action.

Brendan Gallagher Out Six Weeks With Lower-Body Injury

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It’s been a year to forget so far for Brendan Gallagher. With just nine points on the season, he’s on pace for the worst total of his career. Now, he might not even get close. The Canadiens have announced that Gallagher will miss a minimum of six weeks with a lower-body injury.

Gallagher, 30, had only recently returned from an injury that kept him out a month, playing three games before hitting the shelf again. The energy forward was once the heart and soul of the Canadiens’ forward unit, now he seems an afterthought as they move toward a new core without his help. There have been a lot of miles put on his body over the year, as Gallagher played a give-everything-you-have style nightly, going to war in the corners and in front of the net.

After scoring just seven goals in 56 games last season, and not completing a full 82-game schedule since 2018-19, it’s easy to wonder what the future holds for Gallagher in Montreal. Unfortunately, at least for Canadiens fans, a year before Marc Bergevin’s time as general manager ended, he gave out a six-year extension to Gallagher that will keep him with the team through 2026-27. He carries a $6.5MM cap hit, and holds a six-team no-trade clause.

It’s hard to see any way that Montreal gets their money out of that deal, and while that isn’t a problem this season as they try for the first-overall pick, it could be in the future as they are trying to compete. The best-case scenario at this point is that Gallagher takes all the time he needs to get fully healthy and can come back to contribute down the road.

Montreal Canadiens Issue Injury Updates

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The Montreal Canadiens have issued some injury updates, news covering several key players. Firstly, the team has revealed that rookie defenseman Kaiden Guhle has suffered a lower-body injury that will keep him out of the lineup for a minimum of eight weeks.

Additionally, forward Brendan Gallagher has suffered a lower-body injury and will be out for at least two weeks.

Finally, both Mike Matheson and Sean Monahan skated this morning, and are considered to be progressing well. Even so, both are expected to remain out of action for the next two weeks.

These developments are not especially encouraging ones for the Canadiens, who have been on a nightmarish stretch as of late. After an impressive start, the Canadiens have now lost six straight games and nine of their last ten.

Losing Guhle for eight weeks is a particularly disappointing development given how much of an important role he has played for the Canadiens in what has been an impressive rookie season.

Guhle has averaged the second-most minutes played of any regular Canadiens defenseman this season, behind only veteran blueliner David Savard.

He’s seen significant minutes on the penalty kill, and has impressed many with the poise he’s displayed in such unforgiving circumstances.

He now faces a relatively long recovery process, and in his absence, the Canadiens will be forced to rely even more on veterans Savard and Joel Edmundson, while also putting their glut of rookie blueliners under siege to an even greater degree than they have already been.

For Gallagher, another two-week absence due to injury is an unwelcome development, especially given the fact that he had just recently returned from an injury-related absence. Various ailments have laid waste to the veteran forward’s past two seasons, and is now seemingly derailing a third-straight campaign.

As for Matheson and Monahan, the news that they are progressing well is an important positive development for the Canadiens. While they’ll still remain out for the next two weeks, getting the two veterans on track to eventually return is a nice boost.

Monahan has been great in Montreal, scoring 17 points in 25 games, while Matheson has played significant minutes in the few games he’s skated in this year.

Picture courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

Montreal Canadiens Activate Brendan Gallagher

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The Montreal Canadiens have announced that forward Brendan Gallagher will play tonight, meaning he has been activated off of injured reserve.

Gallagher has been out for most of December with a lower-body injury. Partly due to his absence from their lineup, the Canadiens have struggled recently, winning just three of their last ten games.

Although Gallagher’s production isn’t what it once was (he scored just 24 points last season and has eight in 22 games this year) he remains an active producer of scoring chances and the analytics community has largely viewed his play quite positively.

One of the Canadiens’ most passionate leaders, Montreal will be hoping that Gallagher’s’ return to health can help their scoring attack. Backed by the league’s worst power play, the Canadiens have scored just four goals in their last three games.

Gallagher should be an improvement over some of the forwards the Canadiens have been playing. Now healthy and back in the lineup, Gallagher will hope to get back to the level of production he showed a few years ago, such as in 2019-20 when he scored at a 60-point pace.

Injury Notes: Avalanche, Gallagher, Moore, Malenstyn

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Although the Colorado Avalanche are comfortably in the Western Conference’s playoff picture at this point in the season, their 2022-23 campaign has been far from easy. Ravaged by a flood of injuries, we have rarely gotten to see an Avalanche squad hit the ice that closely resembles the team that won the Stanley Cup in the summer. Today, Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar issued some injury updates on players to the media, including Altitude Sports’ Marc Moser.

According to Bednar, Gabriel Landeskog, Bowen Byram, and Josh Manson are unfortunately not close to returning from their injuries. He did deliver some good news as well, though, noting that franchise center Nathan MacKinnon is nearing a return, and that penalty-killing specialist Andrew Cogliano would be returning to the lineup. While the Avalanche still won’t be near 100% anytime soon, the positive developments regarding a few players are certainly encouraging.

Some other injury news:

  • The Montreal Canadiens are dealing with their own rash of injuries, currently missing veterans such as Brendan Gallagher, Mike Matheson, Sean Monahan, and David Savard. The Canadiens have said, via Sportsnet’s Eric Engels, that Gallagher is the only one of that group that will be joining the team for their trip to Florida, meaning Montreal could be getting a crucial veteran leader back in their lineup in the near future.
  • Trevor Moore will be out for tonight’s game as his Los Angeles Kings take on the Vegas Golden Knights, per LA Kings Insider’s Zach Dooley. Dooley also notes that Moore, who has 19 points in 37 games this season, could be out for the team’s game against Colorado as well.
  • Washington Capitals head coach Peter Laviolette told reporters, including The Athletic’s Tarik El-Bashir, that forward Beck Malenstyn is “close” to a return from his finger injury. The 24-year-old 2016 fifth-rounder has played in five NHL games so far this year and could be in a position to pass his career-high of 12 NHL games played in a season, a high he set last year.

Canadiens Notes: Hoffman, Matheson, Gallagher, Monahan

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The Canadiens got both some good news and bad news on the injury front today.  The team announced (Twitter link) that winger Mike Hoffman will be activated off injured reserve and suit up tonight against Los Angeles.  The veteran has five goals and three assists through his first 16 games of the season and will at least give Montreal 12 healthy forwards to use after finishing up their road trip with only 11 healthy ones.

Meanwhile, defenseman Mike Matheson will be unavailable tonight due to an undisclosed injury.  He left practice early on Friday and while he took part in the morning skate, he obviously isn’t healthy enough to play.  The 28-year-old has six points in his first nine games with Montreal while logging a team-high 24:25 per night on the back end.

More from Montreal:

  • To make roster room for Hoffman’s activation, the Canadiens moved winger Brendan Gallagher to injured reserve. The veteran has missed the last four games due to a lower-body injury and is expected to miss at least a few more days before being cleared to return.  Montreal was eligible to back-date the placement and if they did so, Gallagher could be activated at any time.
  • Center Sean Monahan is still sporting a walking boot, notes Marc-Antoine Godin of The Athletic (Twitter link). He was able to play through his foot injury for a few games but left Monday’s game early and hasn’t skated since then.  There’s no timetable for his return.  Monahan figures to be one of the more prominent middlemen available at the trade deadline after putting up 17 points in his first 25 games so it’s likely that Montreal will play things safe with the injury and not rush him back.

Snapshots: Three Stars, Gallagher, Brodzinski

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The NHL released its Three Stars for last week, and Edmonton Oilers superstar Connor McDavid is back on top. With 11 points in four games, McDavid has extended his league scoring lead to five over teammate Leon Draisaitl and is approaching a level not seen in the league for quite some time. Mario Lemieux is the only player in the last 30 years to score at a pace better than McDavid’s current 1.88 P/GP rate over a full season. If he can keep it up, the Oilers’ captain could join a very select club that has scored more than 150 points in a single season. Only Wayne Gretzky (nine times), Lemieux (four), Steve Yzerman (one), Phil Esposito (one), and Bernie Nicholls (one) have reached that mark.

Second and third went to Dylan Cozens and Jason Robertson, a pair of youngsters that are vying for their own place among the league’s best. The Buffalo Sabres forward had nine points in four games and now has 24 in 25 games during his third season in the league. The 6’3″ center won’t turn 22 until February. Robertson, meanwhile, has been the talk of the hockey world for weeks, as he continues to pace the league in goals with 23 in 25 games. That puts him on pace to score 75, which would be the highest total since Teemu Selanne and Alexander Mogilny both hit 76 in 1992-93.

  • The Montreal Canadiens will be without Brendan Gallagher for the next two weeks, ruling him out with a lower-body injury. He’s going to be joined on the sideline by David Savard, who is listed as day-to-day but continues to be evaluated. While in years past Gallagher’s absence would be a devastating blow to the Canadiens’ forward group, the proverbial torch has been passed this season, with the 30-year-old playing the fewest minutes of his career and subsequently producing at a pedestrian pace. Gallagher has just three goals and eight points in 22 games so far.
  • The up-and-down season continues for Jonny Brodzinski, who is back with the New York Rangers after being sent down yesterday. That’s three transactions in three days for the minor league forward, who has yet to actually play in a game for New York. Through 17 matches with the Hartford Wolf Pack, the 29-year-old has two goals and nine points, not exactly the production he’s used to. Last season, Brodzinski scored 39 in 36 for Hartford while suiting up 22 times in the NHL.

Montreal Canadiens Place Mike Hoffman On Injured Reserve, Recall Rem Pitlick

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The Montreal Canadiens announced today that forward Mike Hoffman has been placed on injured reserve. In a corresponding move, the team has recalled forward Rem Pitlick from the Laval Rocket, Montreal’s AHL affiliate.

Additionally, the team announced that forward Brendan Gallagher is currently being evaluated for a lower-body injury and won’t play in the Canadiens’ game against the Calgary Flames tonight.

Hoffman, 33, has been out with a lower-body injury for more than a week now. The veteran sniper has gotten off to a so-so start for the Canadiens this season, scoring eight points in 16 games. In Hoffman’s absence, the Canadiens will hope that Evgenii Dadonov can heat up after a slow start and fill in for some of the goal-scoring they’d have expected a healthy Hoffman to provide.

With Gallagher out, the Canadiens needed to create space on their roster to recall a forward to replace him, which led to Hoffman’s placement on injured reserve. The forward they called up is Pitlick, who has had a rough start to the 2022-23 campaign, having gone scoreless in seven NHL games this year.

Pitlick looked like a savvy waiver claim last year as he scored 37 points in 66 games last season, a 46-point pace. But so far this year Pitlick has been squeezed by the Canadiens’ glut of middle-six forward options and has spent time in the AHL as a result.

Now back on Montreal’s roster with a chance to get some game action, Pitlick will hope to re-capture some of the luck and quality play that defined his performance last year.

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