Welcome back to Across The Border, where we take a look at the Montreal Canadiens’ prospects playing in the U.S. and track their progression throughout the year.
This time around, we’ll take a broader look at the Habs’ NCAA crop. We’ll start off with the one-two punch of NCAA All-Stars in Lane Hutson and Jacob Fowler, but also giving a bit of love to the likes of Rhett Pitlick, Sam Harris, Luke Tuch, Luke Mittelstadt, and Blake Biondi.
With the Hockey-East regular season in the rearview mirror and the playoffs starting over the weekend, the likes of Hutson, Tuch, and Fowler will have an opportunity to add more silverware to their cupboards and set themselves up for future success with the invaluable experience that comes with post-season runs.
Lane Hutson
Success through versatility
After another year at the helm of Boston University’s top power play and top defence pairing, not to mention the whole lot of trust put in him at the World Juniors as USA’s most utilized defenceman on their way to a gold medal, Hutson can call this season another resounding success.
However, success for a prospect means more than just accolades and point tallies. If you only look at the scoresheet and the highlights, you’ll miss something really important with Hutson: he’s rounding out his game.
Hutson’s ability to make plays under physical pressure, to shrug off opponents when skating up the ice, and to out-work forwards in the low slot has grown in leaps and bounds. This was especially evident at the World Juniors, where he was put in a very defensive position. Defensive zone faceoffs, the top penalty-killing unit, you name it.
His defensive awareness, engagement and stick work have also gone from decent elements of his game to true strengths. The only remaining hurdle to a fruitful NHL career for Hutson at the moment is his edgework. Offensively, he overcomes the lack of power, proper weight transfer and fluidity in his pivots with supreme timing and creativity in his cuts, weaves and spins. Defensively, however, there isn’t much he could do to circumvent his lack of pure mobility — except for foregoing his tendency to activate and create offensively and just sitting back. No one wants that.
Luke Tuch
Game-changing growth
I’ll be honest: before this season, I didn’t see Tuch as a potential NHLer. The combination of his playing style, his tendencies, and his decisions made him far too linear and inconsistent. Get the puck, skate in a straight line, only look up at the offensive blue line, make the wrong decision, turn a possession play into a 50/50 battle. Rinse and repeat.
However, playing in Boston University with Macklin Celebrini, who is so good at offering off-puck support, has forced Tuch to make passes he wouldn’t before, which has created a budding habit in Tuch’s game that was seldom seen in years prior: pre-scanning on retrievals.
Now much less linear in his approach to the game, Tuch has built on a strength — his ability to win board battles — to expand on a weakness: his vision off the wall. That progression has helped develop a clearer path to the NHL in Tuch’s game. He’s more likely now than before to carve out a future as a checking forward and forechecking specialist in the Habs’ bottom six.
Jacob Fowler
Success at every level
Fowler is a winner. It was clear last season with Youngstown in the USHL, and it’s just as clear this season with Boston College. It goes way beyond his impressive athleticism, his puck-tracking, and his active hands: Fowler has the mindset of an NHL goaltender.
We saw glimpses of it when the Habs posted highlights of their pre-draft interview with the 6’2″, 214-pound netminder: the confidence, the intelligence, the rigorous study of his opponents’ tendencies and handedness made him stand out in those conversations. But on the ice, it is just as evident. He would let in a bad goal early in the game and shake it off immediately, often following those moments by making dangerous chances seem like easy saves.
The biggest improvement in Fowler’s goaltending has been his stylistic adaptation to the NCAA game. He never had the mobility, edgework and footwork to pull off the Juuse Saros style of netminding we saw in Youngstown. The adaptation to a positioning-based goaltending style, where his chest is square to the shooter at all times, has allowed him to play to his aforementioned strengths.
Rhett Pitlick
From skill to translatability
Progression is rarely linear — some prospects come out of their shell early only to taper off in their early twenties, and for others, it’s the opposite. In most cases, a strong eye can allow you to predict what route their development would take.
Pitlick was always going to be a long-term project, but the ways in which he has shaped his game come as a shock to me.
Pitlick’s skill and speed were always his main assets. He would pick pucks up in the neutral zone and burst across lines, creating offence through exploiting opponents’ weaknesses at lower levels rather than through good habits. However, the progression in Pitlick’s board game, offensive zone timing, and spatial awareness aren’t typical for this mould of player.
The chemistry he has developed with Oliver Moore could be part of the equation — Moore is assuming a lot of the transition responsibilities which Pitlick was tasked with, allowing him to focus on finding space and positioning himself proactively. Either way, the progression in these areas has made Pitlick a more translatable forward than he previously was.
Unfortunately, the Habs only have five contract slots available as of right now, and way too many prospects to sign. It’s likely that Pitlick hits the open market after his NCAA tenure and becomes an impactful bottom-six piece on another team.
Luke Mittelstadt
Leaning into defence
Mittelstadt’s progression as an over-ager last year took a decent jump. His 21 points in 38 games for Minnesota in 2022-23, along with his three points in seven games at the World Juniors, were enough to get him drafted in the seventh round by Montreal.
Since then, the progression has stagnated. Mittelstadt currently sits at 18 points in 35 games, which is despite a current four-game streak in which he amassed five points. This would be cause for concern if it weren’t for the stylistic shift in his game.
Mittelstadt is a defenceman who creates offensively through activation. He sneaks up from the blue line, timing his route with the carrier and allowing him to receive a pass in the low slot. That’s how a lot of his offence came last year, and not much has changed this season.
What has changed this season is that Mittelstadt is pacing himself and allowing the game to dictate what he does. He isn’t activating blindly anymore. If he senses the opposing forwards cheating a bit in the defensive zone, he holds back. Off the rush, he lags back and allows his forwards to handle the offensive scenario. In doing so, Mittelstadt is learning to manage the game defensively, keep the play in front of him, and avoid leaving his team short a man on opposing rushes.
There’s a real outside chance at an NHLer in Mittelstadt, but the combination of mobility, offensive instincts and his growing reliability defensively could be elevated further. His reads are still inconsistent, he still has room to add weight and muscle on his 5’11” frame, and perhaps with time, it all comes together. It’s too early to tell how concrete that outcome is.
Blake Biondi
On the outside looking in
After a sophomore season that saw him score 17 goals and 28 points in 42 games, it seemed like Biondi was on an upwards trajectory that would make his selection in the fourth round of the 2020 NHL Draft (out of high school prep, in typical Trevor Timmins fashion) look great in hindsight.
In the two seasons since then, Biondi has failed to turn his off-puck instincts and heavy shot into a consistent toolkit. He is extremely streaky as a senior this year with Minnesota-Duluth. At the start of the 2023-24 campaign, he only scored points in two of his first 12 games, but in those two games, he scored two goals and then three assists respectively.
He picked up the pace midway through the season, earning pretty consistent results, but has disappeared again in the final stretch with a current five-game scoring drought. As a result, he stands at 18 points in 33 games as one of the oldest players on his team, good for seventh in scoring on the Bulldogs.
The silver lining with Biondi is the progression in his skating. The heavy, dull stride that made him so inefficient in previous years has become a bit more fluid, his posture has improved, and he is stronger on his skates. Despite that, Biondi is on the outside looking in for a contract with the Habs. Limited spots and more certain NHLers in the pool than him make his chances of signing in Montreal fairly slim.
Sam Harris
Secondary scoring
Harris is a year and a half younger than Biondi, and has the exact same amount of points in the exact same amount of games. However, Harris being a freshman also means that the Habs retain his rights until the end of the 2026-27 season, allowing them more time to take some contracts off their payroll and open up a slot for him, also allowing him to continue growing his game in the meantime.
The jump from the USHL to the NCAA is a difficult one. We’ve seen it with the likes of Jack Smith, Biondi, and more over the years: it takes skills that translate to make that jump seamlessly — and to a certain extent, Harris has done just that.
Harris’s combination of checking intelligence, intensity, drive, and goal-scoring prowess has given Denver a much-needed secondary scoring option. He hems defencemen in their own zone with intelligent pressure, cycles pucks well, and creates havoc at the net-front. His 13 goals in 35 games have mostly come at crucial times in a game — down by one, tied near the end of the match, you name it.
There are three long years to go in his NCAA career, but Harris could potentially come out the other side as an impactful top-six player for Denver. If he makes the NHL, it’ll likely be in a role not too dissimilar to the one he currently occupies for the Pioneers.
Thanks for reading — follow me on Twitter @HadiK_Scouting for more prospects-related content, and to keep up with the rest of my work!
