Montreal's Offseason Answers the Exact Questions March Asked
The number that should haunt this front office is 1.1. Not a player's points-per-game pace — though Nick Suzuki's 1.1 points per game is worth celebrating — but the 1.1-goal-per-game cliff Montreal walked off in the final stretch of the regular season. They averaged 3.9 goals over a 20-game window when the schedule was soft enough to run up scores. Then the games tightened, and they managed 2.8. That's not a slump. That's a structural problem announcing itself right on schedule, before the playoffs could do it instead.
What the numbers revealed was a roster with a brilliant top line and very little behind it. Suzuki, Cole Caufield's 23 goals, Ivan Demidov's remarkable rookie production — those three were genuine. Everything below them was thin. Zack Bolduc finished at minus-9 with 19 points in 50 games. Brendan Gallagher, 14 seasons into his Montreal career, contributed just 17 points at the bottom of the lineup. The secondary scoring layer that every playoff contender needs — the guys who pick up a game when the top line goes quiet — simply wasn't there when the margin for error shrank.
Kent Hughes appears to have read the same box score. The Gallagher trade to Vancouver was the first signal: no sentimentality, just a clean acknowledgment that the veteran core had run its course. Brett Berard arrived from the Rangers to add depth on the wing. Kirby Dach signed for $3.6 million on a one-year deal. These aren't headline moves, but that's precisely the point — they're the kind of additions that fill the production gap between your stars and your bottom six, which is exactly where Montreal bled out in March.
The defensive reconstruction is less complete, and that's where my skepticism lives. Lane Hutson was a revelation — 49 points as a rookie defenseman is a franchise-altering performance. But the drop to the second pairing is severe. Mike Matheson logged more ice time per game than Hutson while producing at a fraction of a legitimate top-four defenseman's rate. Noah Dobson is on the depth chart but contributed almost nothing in the games he played. Signing Maksymilian Szuber on a one-year, two-way contract is a reasonable depth move, but it doesn't close a gap that wide. My read is that the blue line behind Hutson remains the single biggest obstacle between this team and a meaningful playoff run.
Two unresolved threads complicate the picture further. Zack Bolduc is still unsigned, and the Koivunen-style extension floated in recent reporting would be an interesting bet on upside over results — because the results last season didn't earn a long-term commitment on their own merits. And then there's Juraj Slafkovsky, just named Slovakian hockey player of the year, which is a genuine honor that sits awkwardly against his production numbers. Forty points in 50 games is respectable; for the left wing position's standard, it's well below what a playoff contender needs from its top option at that spot. The award reflects his national standing. The production reflects a gap that the Canadiens haven't filled.
The offseason logic is sound. The moves address real problems rather than cosmetic ones, and locking Demidov into an eight-year extension before his price escalated further was the right call at the right time. But Montreal's margin in March wasn't just about secondary scoring — it was about whether this young core can sustain its level when the opponent's structure tightens and the goals stop coming easily. The additions help. The defensive depth and the left-wing hole are still open questions. And in the playoffs, open questions tend to get answered in the worst possible way.