Kent Hughes might just have a penchant for surprise trades around the NHL Entry Draft.
With months of speculation surrounding Winnipeg Jets forward Pierre-Luc Dubois seemingly petering out this week, the Canadiens general manager ensured that the Habs faithful would still have something to talk about before Wednesday night’s event in Nashville. Alex Newhook’s acquisition on Tuesday afternoon immediately reminded observers of Hughes’ deal for Kirby Dach a year prior. However, Newhook arguably cost a dearer price than anticipated, doesn’t have Dach’s draft-position pedigree (or Dubois’s NHL track record), and arrives with the perception of having been jettisoned by a team that knows what it’s doing. As such, Hughes’s second surprise has met with a decidedly frostier reception than his first.
While Newhook is a mid-first rounder as opposed to a top-3 or top-5 selection, he’s not a dime-a-dozen player. When the trade broke, Jack Han compared him to Nick Suzuki in terms of trajectory and playing style. David St-Louis praised the player’s toolbox and anticipation, while head coach Martin St-Louis pointed out that Newhook plays bigger than his 5’10” frame. From a statistical perspective, Corey Sznajder commented on both Newhook’s struggles and his versatility, noting that the forward played dramatically different offensive roles between this year and last year — while also noting similarities to Dach’s profile when he arrived in Montreal.
Newhook clearly has skills that make him a much greater asset than the 30-point third-liner that he is on paper. However, that naturally raises the question: if Newhook is more than he appears to be, why will he be wearing bleu-blanc-et-rouge instead of burgundy?
Unlike the Dach situation, it’s more difficult to accuse the 2022 Stanley Cup champions of improper team management or talent evaluation. Moreover, Newhook was one of the few young homegrown players left in an organization that largely stripped their prospect/draft pick cupboard bare in their quest to lift Lord Stanley’s Grail. This scarcity meant that the Avalanche placed ample focus and attention on Newhook’s progression during his first two NHL campaigns. So if the Avalanche think Newhook is expendable, their reputation indicates that they’re probably correct.
But, it’s important to not assume that the Avalanche view Newhook as expendable because they think Newhook has plateaued as a solid-if-unspectacular third-liner. Colorado won the Stanley Cup with a star-studded veteran top-six forward corps: Nathan MacKinnon, Artturi Lehkonen, Valeri Nichushkin, Gabriel Landeskog, Mikko Rantanen, and Nazem Kadri. The year after, they lost Landeskog to injury, Kadri to free agency, and Nichushkin to an off-ice incident that is still shrouded in mystery. Pressed into action or recruited as replacements, Newhook, Logan O’Connor, J.T. Compher, and Evan Rodrigues could not fill that void and the Avalanche’s bid to repeat ended at the tentacles of the Seattle Kraken.
Faced with another year without Landeskog, continued uncertainty surrounding Nichushkin, and the potential departure of Compher and Rodrigues to free agency, the Avalanche faced a crossroads: retain one’s veterans and bolster them with external options — thereby potentially losing Newhook as a salary cap casualty, or press an unready Newhook into a top-six position and try and compete with a top-six at roughly the same level as the one that just exited the playoffs in the opening round. Colorado made their intentions clear on June 24th by acquiring Ryan Johansen from Nashville.
Ultimately, as a team with a finite competitive window and a need to maximize on-ice talent, the Avalanche likely didn’t give up on Newhook so much as they ran out of time to develop him. At the same time, the Avalanche had no reason to simply give Newhook, a restricted free agent under team control, away to the first taker. Thus, a mutually beneficial transaction was born. While Newhook is arguably a cap casualty, he is not a cap dump. The 31st and 37th selections probably won’t impact Colorado’s competitive window, but it gives the Avalanche assets that they can trade for help in the present, whether at the draft, during the season, or at the Trade Deadline.
In exchange, the Canadiens get an unpolished player who possesses many fundamental building blocks but hasn’t put them together into a cohesive player yet. They get a forward who tallied 1.73 5-on-5 points per game over the last two seasons, on par with what Lehkonen has done in Colorado (1.75) and surpassing Compher (1.42) and Rodrigues (1.41).
Finally, Newhook’s arrival puts more of a firm timeline on the Canadiens’ future. Newhook’s career and contract trajectory aligns much more closely with that of the existing core than an 18-year-old who will likely not see the NHL for at least two or three more years, meaning that the Canadiens intend to exit the tanking phase of the rebuild within a few years. The team isn’t trying to take shortcuts, but it appears to have no intention of emulating the likes of the Edmonton Oilers (nine consecutive playoff-less years) or the Buffalo Sabres (twelve consecutive and counting).
