2023 Montreal Canadiens Top 25 Under 25: #22 Jayden Struble

Introduction

A year ago at this time, the discourse around Jayden Struble was whether he would cut his college career short to join the Montreal Canadiens. His university teammate, Jordan Harris, had just made the jump to the pros in the Habs organization – a move that had once seemed unlikely – after playing his full college career, and the fanbase was eager to see Struble join him at the same time.

The worry was that a final year at Northeastern University would get Struble to the point where he could decide to sign with another team instead. As the seasons pass, however, any concerns of top Canadiens prospects shunning the team that drafted them are disappearing. Following in the footsteps of Cayden Primeau, Jake Evans, Ryan Poehling, Cole Caufield, and Harris, and preceding deals for Sean Farrell and Jakub Dobeš, Struble signed his two-year entry-level contract and joined the AHL’s Laval Rocket.

Inking his first NHL contract on March 15, Struble played nine regular-season games in Laval and both post-season contests, registering one point for his new team in that time. In a departure from his college performances, he only had four penalty minutes versus the 56 he recorded in 31 NCAA games, an indication that he was tiptoeing into his professional career.

Voting

The majority of panellists had Struble inside the Top 25, though his stock has been slowly dropping for a couple of years. A consensus top-20 player in 2021, seven of his 12 votes were in that range a year ago, and this year he received only one that high.

T25U25 History

This is Struble’s fifth consecutive year cracking our Top 25 Under 25 since he was selected 46th overall in the 2019 NHL Draft. However, 22nd is the lowest he’s ever found himself, dropping below his debut position of 20th.

History of #22

Strengths

There are few physical limitations on Struble’s ceiling. He has all the underlying abilities a player could build a lengthy professional career upon. The base of them is his 200-pound frame that he uses to his advantage in net-front box-outs and puck battles, as well as to lay heavy hits.

Giving him the confidence to play that game is the above-average speed that allows him to make plays all over the ice, and not just within corridors that other large defencemen are limited to. The hits can come in open ice and the puck battles can occur high in his own end because the has the legs to match opposing forwards and recover into his proper position.

He’s a good transition player thanks to that speed, an imposing presence for any defender who had already felt the impact of his hits earlier in a game. He has the tools to single-handedly stop an offensive attack, steal the puck, and lead the offensive rush up the ice.

Weaknesses

Even after four years of play on a defensive-minded Northeastern team in a defensive-minded league overall, Struble hasn’t fully learned when to race out from his position to make a play and when to bide his time with a more conservative approach. He remains prone to getting beaten to the net after a missed hit or an aggressive lunge at the puck.

His style of play will lead to a fair amount of penalty minutes in his career; he had nearly 200 of them over four years in the NCAA. The more restrained version we witnessed in a short start in the AHL wasn’t him playing his best game, so he will need to find a balance between that pacified approach and the overaggressive moments he showed in college to reach his peak effectiveness.

The physical and defensive talents have always been features of his game that have slowly improved over the years. Other than the fact that several new players have entered the fold in the past couple of years, the biggest reason for his slide down the rankings is that his offensive game hasn’t taken the steps forward you’d like to see from an NHL prospect.

His senior year was a chance to combine all the lessons from his first three seasons and display the best version of himself. Offensively, however, the results were the worst of his entire tenure, with only 12 points and a single goal. He was too reluctant to take chances on offence, passing up opportunities to advance lower into the offensive zone to make a play in favour or maintaining his spot on the blue line.

He’s still a player whose value is mostly in his potential rather than his actual performance, and that’s becoming more of an issue now that he’s progressing through his 20s.

Projection

He will now have to develop his offensive game in the AHL with Laval, and that hasn’t been an environment conducive to that style of play. Mattias Norlinder has become a shadow of his former self in the minors, rarely showing off the dazzling offensive skills that had him pegged as one of the top prospects in the organization a few years ago. Justin Barron was instructed to focus on his defensive game at the start of the Rocket’s season last year before making the decision to abandon those lessons and play the more offensive style that he’d enjoyed success with earlier in his career, and earned regular NHL time because of it. The two biggest success stories from the AHL affiliate in recent years have been Michael Pezzetta and Rafaël Harvey-Pinard: two players who played an energetic forechecking game in Laval; two players who have shown just as good or better production upon reaching the NHL level.

The best chance for Struble to develop his offence would probably be in the NHL under Martin St-Louis and Stéphane Robidas, who got a lot more production out of the blue line in the latter half of the 2022-23 season. To get there, Struble would have to pass one of those players who established themselves last season and stay ahead of the up-and-coming prospects in the system, several of whom rank higher in this countdown.

It’s possible that he could carve out a third-pairing NHL role with just his defensive and transition skills, but that likely wouldn’t be in a Montreal Canadiens organization that has such a deep pool of blue-line talent. It would be a shame to see such a gifted player fail to develop the offensive side of his game he requires to complete the full package.

2023 Montreal Canadiens Top 25 Under 25: #23 Jacob Fowler

Montreal’s third-rounder in the 2023 NHL Draft has an opportunity to show that he’s the real deal.

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