Montreal Has Signed Forwards All Offseason. The Defense Is Still Broken.
The number that keeps pulling me back isn't 49. It's 8. Lane Hutson produced at a 41-percent share of Montreal's defensive output last season — that's the headline figure I've been hammering since July — but the depth chart tells the quieter, more damning half of the story: Mike Matheson, the second defenseman on this roster, contributed at just 8 percent. That's not a gap. That's a chasm with a plank thrown across it and a prayer that nobody heavy tries to cross.
Put the raw season lines next to each other and the problem becomes impossible to wave away. Hutson: 10 goals, 39 assists, 49 points, plus-17, in 50 games. Matheson: 6 goals, 18 assists, 24 points, plus-9, in 46 games. Twenty-five points separate the top two defensemen on a team that finished 48–34 and then watched its offense crater to 2.8 goals per game when the stakes actually rose. That 25-point gap between your first and second defensive options isn't unusual on a rebuilding team. It is unusual — and genuinely alarming — on a team that has publicly declared itself a contender-in-progress. And below Matheson, the depth chart lists Alexandre Carrier at a 16-percent production share. The cliff doesn't stop at Matheson; it just keeps dropping.
What makes this particularly sharp is the contrast with how the front office has spent its offseason energy. Kirby Dach, one year at $3.6 million. Brett Berard, acquired from New York for William Trudeau. Ivan Demidov locked up for eight years. Every significant move this summer has touched a forward. The defensive depth problem — which I flagged in the piece on the 41-percent concentration risk — has received no visible answer. None of the material news from the past two weeks references a defensive acquisition. The Bolduc contract situation is still unresolved, and that's a forward conversation too.
Noah Dobson is on this roster and finished with 29 points in 49 games, which gives Montreal a legitimate third option on the back end, but the production share numbers make clear he's functioning more as a third defenseman than a true second. The depth chart confirms it: Matheson ranks second by playing time, and his 8-percent share against Hutson's 41 percent is the organizational tell. You can dress it up however you want, but a backup defenseman operating at roughly one-fifth of what the team needs from a number-two is a structural flaw, not a rounding error.
My read is this: the front office has correctly identified secondary scoring as a problem — the 2.8 goals-per-game collapse in the final ten games of the season makes that an obvious diagnosis — but it has treated the defensive depth issue as something that can wait, or something the youth curve will solve on its own. That's a bet I wouldn't make. Hutson is a genuine talent, a 49-point rookie defenseman who logged 23.1 minutes a night, and his development arc is legitimately exciting. But the value of a transcendent number-one defenseman is partially determined by the quality of what's behind him. Right now, what's behind Hutson is thin, and the offseason moves have done nothing to change that math. Training camp is approaching. The chasm is still there.