Montreal Canadiens news and notes
- The Arizona Coyotes beat the Edmonton Oilers in their final game, moving ahead of the Canadiens in the standing and locking the Habs into the fifth-best draft lottery odds. [NHL.com]
- David St-Louis evaluates Lane Hutson’s two-game stint:
- Alex Burrows sees a lot of Shea Weber in Logan Mailloux. [TVA Sports]
- Parsing the roster battles on defence for next season. [La Presse]
- Martin St-Louis got the most out of his key players this year, and that will be noticed by players around the league looking for their next home. [The Athletic]
- Nick Suzuki saw the difficulty even a decent team like Detroit has making the playoffs, but he feels the Habs have all the pieces in place throughout the organization to avoid the futility the other bottom-half teams in the Atlantic Division are facing. [Radio-Canada]
- Suzuki earned the Molson Cup for the season and is the team’s nominee for the King Clancy Trophy, which goes to a player who shows leadership on and off the ice. [RDS]
- Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovský have accepted their invitations to play in the World Championship, which begins on May 10. [Canadiens.com]
- Samuel Montembeault enjoyed hearing that Kent Hughes said he was the team’s number-one goalie going forward, but he plans to put in the work to retain that role. [La Presse]
- If you missed the news yesterday, Logan Mailloux, Justin Barron, Jayden Struble, and a medically cleared Joshua Roy were assigned to the Laval Rocket for a critical two-game series with the Belleville Senators. [La Presse]
- After Belleville’s shootout win last night, nothing short of two regulation wins — and one dropped point by Utica in its final three games — will get Laval into the post-season. [AHL.com]
- Mailloux has been named to the AHL All-Rookie Team. [AHL.com]
- PWHL Montreal gets many of its top players back full of confidence from a gold medal performance at the World Championship. [La Presse]
Around the league and elsewhere
- The Board of Governors will have a vote today to approve the sale of the Arizona Coyotes to Salt Lake City prospective owner Ryan Smith. [Sportsnet]
- Ahead of their final game, the Coyotes brought back Shane Doan’s retirement banner, which had been left behind at Gila River Arena. [Sportsnet]
- The league has released the schedule for the first game of each of the four Eastern Conference playoff series. [NHL.com]
- Gary Bettman is happy with the 16-team playoff format the league has. [TSN]
- One good reason not to include a play-in aspect:
- There will be one more chance for Montreal fans to applaud the career of Marc-Andre Fleury as the goaltender has signed on for one final season, during which he will turn 40. [TSN]
- Jeff Carter has announced his retirement after 19 NHL seasons. [NHL.com]
- Nikita Kucherov joined Connor McDavid on an exclusive list of five NHL players to record a 100-assist season. [NHL.com]
