It has already been established that the 2024-25 Montreal Canadiens are the youngest team to ever make the NHL Playoffs, at 25.95 years. They are also making their first playoff appearance since 2021, the first time since the rebuild started in earnest.
That combination would normally lead to a lack of playoff experience. Take the Ottawa Senators, for example. They have an average age of 28, and are making their first playoff appearance since 2017. Among their players under 30, they have a total of 40 NHL playoff games. They don’t lack playoff experience as a whole, thanks to their veterans led by David Perron and Claude Giroux, among others.
The Canadiens do not have that lack of experience among their under-30 core. Certainly there are several players who will make their NHL playoff debuts, including players expected to play big roles, like Lane Hutson, Juraj Slafkovský, Kaiden Guhle, and Samuel Montembeault. But on the other side, there’s Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Patrik Laine, Alex Newhook, Alex Carrier, and, Christian Dvorak, and Jake Evans.
Thanks to those players, Montreal enters the playoffs with 141 NHL playoff games among their players under 30 years old. That doesn’t include Kirby Dach, who would add nine games to that total but is out for the rest of the season. Suzuki alone has 32 of those games.
The experience that Suzuki, Caufield, Evans, and Newhook have included a trip to the Stanley Cup final, with Newhook winning a championship with the Colorado Avalanche. Evans would have had even more games, had he not been the victim of a Mark Scheifele cheap shot in the first game of the second round in 2021.
Andrew Berkshire has been writing a great series on what makes Suzuki such a great player and captain, and the experience he gained in the 2020 and 2021 runs – weird as they were – will certainly help this group that feeds so much off of him.
Playoff experience isn’t the most important factor in who wins a playoff series, or even who wins the Stanley Cup, but it is a factor and the Canadiens enter with a significant leg up on other teams that would normally be in their situation. It is also what makes their playoff qualification such an important step for the organization, who likely know this isn’t the start of their real contending window.
The examples of young, talented teams that have to lose in the playoffs in order to eventually win a championship are plentiful, and one only has to look at the team the Canadiens are facing as an example. The Washington Capitals took lots of attempts to eventually take the step. On top of that, the only current Canadiens player to have played a playoff game at a sold-out Bell Centre is Brendan Gallagher, and it will be interesting to see how this team will react to seeing that kind of atmosphere when Game 3 gets underway.
The Canadiens are still rightfully heavy underdogs against a Capitals team that find themselves in the opposite situation than they were a year ago. Last year, they were the team to secure the final playoff berth in the conference and now they are atop the East standings. With the experience they already have and the experience they will get, the Canadiens can look across the rink and see just how quickly things can change.
