BROSSARD, Que.— You could almost hear the collective groan from Canadiens fans when general manager Kent Hughes announced on Tuesday afternoon that, after trading Casey DeSmith to clear out the logjam in front of his team’s net, he was bringing in veteran winger Tanner Pearson.
The optic that the move solved one problem while creating another was right there. Hughes collected a 2025 third-round pick for DeSmith and created space for a saner competition between the remaining goaltenders, and that was good.
But Pearson’s arrival meant more of a pile-up at forward, where fans were hopeful the space opened up by the summer departures of Jonathan Drouin, Mike Hoffman and Rem Pitlick would be filled by emerging players who appear ready to meet the full-time rigours of NHL duty. Not by a winger on the wrong side of 30, who had multiple surgeries and was limited to just 14 unremarkable games last season.
Surely, they understand both youth and development won’t be best served without some veteran insulation, and we’re guessing they can acknowledge that the Canadiens could do worse than adding a Stanley Cup champion as insulation.
But fans of teams in all situations — those of teams who are contending for a Stanley Cup, like the Carolina Hurricanes will be this season, but especially those of teams just emerging from the infancy stage of a rebuild, like the Canadiens are — want to believe the players who deserve to play will have the opportunity to do exactly that, and Pearson’s arrival cast some doubt on that being the case in Montreal this season.
Maybe the fans of this team sighed in relief when they heard Hughes say as he addressed the media on Wednesday while the 72 players invited to Canadiens camp ran through medical and physical testing, “If we have a young player who shows us he belongs, I think we’ve shown we’ll make the necessary adjustments to give them a spot.”
Or maybe they dismissed that comment altogether, thinking the Canadiens' decision to graduate four defencemen last season who were born after the year 2000 was made purely out of necessity.
Of course, that ignores what the coaches actually did in playing Kaiden Guhle first-pairing minutes out of the gate and religiously playing Jordan Harris and Arber Xhekaj ahead of veteran Chris Wideman, but you can’t blame the fans for wanting to see more of that type of action before believing the team is as committed to the youth movement as they would hope they are.
These fans have reason to be a little skeptical. They can see the Canadiens are —with the exception of Christian Dvorak, who won’t be able to return from last spring’s knee surgery prior to November — healthier they have been in over two years, and they can see how that might complicate things for head coach Martin St. Louis, who now might have a harder time than he did a year ago ensuring young and emerging players get opportunities.
A player of Pearson’s background joining the team on the eve of camp would only deepen that skepticism.
When talking about having to choose between the kids and players like Pearson and Sean Monahan, who’s entering his 11th NHL season, St. Louis acknowledged how difficult of a balancing act it can actually be.
“I think the biggest thing is their body of work, and if they had that big of a body of work it’s because they’ve had consistency,” he said of his veteran forwards. “It’s a fine line when you know what you have with this player and you know, again, what you’re going to get from this player day-in, day-out (versus) a potential player that probably has a higher ceiling but we’re not sure about the consistency of that player right now.”
“It’s a fine line,” St. Louis repeated. “It’s a juggling act a little bit, there’s no doubt about it…”
St. Louis will have to perform it without dropping the balls.
Not that he or Hughes should be making their decisions purely based on what the fans do or don’t want, but it should be a consideration that the fans’ patience with the Canadiens’ rebuild is hinging on seeing the young players get the opportunities they earn.
The fans are guaranteed to see that process remain intact on the team’s blue line. And they’re still getting a glimpse of it at the top of the forward group, where it’s likely five players under the age of 25 are going to be deployed.
But they want to know that it will continue throughout the lineup; that giving Pearson the benefit of the doubt his experience — and his expiring $3.25-million salary —affords him will still have its limits, especially given that he’s coming in at less than 100 per cent, according to Hughes.
They want to be assured Joel Armia, who hasn’t proven to be consistent and doesn’t possess a resume as glowing as Pearson’s, isn’t guaranteed the spot his contract (which will count for $3.5 million against the salary cap this season and next) suggests he should have. And they don’t want to see either of those players playing ahead of 21-year-old Emil Heineman should the young Swede appear like a much more effective player than Pearson or Armia over the next three-and-a-half weeks.
St. Louis said, “It’s a good problem to have hard decisions to make.”
“We’ve gotta make decisions that are going to help the team now but also not hurt the team for the future,” he added. “Those are not easy decisions, but we’re going to take everything into consideration and make the best educated decisions we can make.”
As long as they’re made objectively, there will be a lot less groaning from the people paying to watch the Canadiens.
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