There are more tasks as a team’s general manager than simply player acquisition. Sure, it’s a big part, and quite possibly the most important, but it’s not the only task. Player selection and acquisition is one thing, player development is another, and a third – which the general manager doesn’t necessarily control themselves – is deployment.
Acquiring Zachary Bolduc for Logan Mailloux like Montreal Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes did on Tuesday is one thing. He shore up a weakness by dealing from a strength and got the more experienced (and successful) NHL player while both are the same age. After making the trade and making some organizational depth signings, Hughes spoke to the media, and there was one thing he said that struck me more than anything else.
Hughes was asked by Stu Cowan of the Montreal Gazette about whether Ivan Demidov could play centre for the Canadiens, who still have a hole at second-line centre.
“I think anything is a possibility,” Hughes said. “People texted me about Bolduc too and said he played centre. When you have young players, someone like Demidov, with all the expectations coming from Russia you want him to settle in first. In Zachary’s case he’s coming to his home team, I think you want to put him in an environment to have success before we start pushing new elements on him.”
And there it was.
It wasn’t that long ago that Montreal traded a young, promising defenceman they took in the first round for a local forward. Bolduc is not Jonathan Drouin, and Mailloux is not Mikhail Sergachev, let’s get that out of the way. I am not even sure if Hughes had Drouin’s acquisition and move to centre in mind when he spoke to the media. In all likelihood, he didn’t. That doesn’t change the fact that what Hughes said was a clear statement of intent.
When Drouin was acquired, then-general manager Marc Bergevin didn’t outright say Drouin would be his number one centre, he said it would be up to Claude Julien. It could be that when training camp starts, they try different things. It was the other part of Hughes’ quote: Putting players in an environment to succeed.
Bergevin often said that the NHL is not a development league, and he is right, but development happens in the NHL and you still have to have it in mind. Drouin wasn’t put at centre with his success in mind, he was put there with team success in mind.
You are hard pressed to find moves this current administration has made that are outright bad. Sure some had various degrees of success, but even his less positive moves have turned into positives (Justin Barron not working out? No problem, swap him for Alexandre Carrier being a prime example). The main thing they have done is have the players’ success at heart, whether it is hiring Adam Nicholas to lead the team’s player development group, or hiring a coach like Martin St-Louis who was as much teacher as he is coach, especially early on in his tenure.
The shift of mindset is the main reason the Canadiens are where they are. Pretty much every player in the Canadiens organization has gotten better since Hughes and Jeff Gorton were hired. Some have improved more than others, but the reason the Canadiens are in a position to add only three years after starting a rebuild is because their focus is on the players. When your players get better, your team gets better.
Every major acquisition Kent Hughes has made has been under 30. Yes, that’s part of rebuilding, but even now, even when trying to get back to the playoffs, he adds major pieces at 25 and 22 years old. Even Patrik Laine was 26 when acquired last year in a move more focused on current gains rather than future ones.
“When you can add experience and keep it young that would be ideal,” Hughes said. “I think that’s the case in Noah Dobson when you get a young guy who played in the NHL as a teenager. He’s 25 but has a significant amount of experience and at the same time can grow with our group so that’s important. Bolduc is a little bit younger, he’s not a rookie and he’s coming from a team that had a lot of experience around him.”
It’s also an understanding that things take time, and because of that, acquiring players with a bit of runway gives you that time to combine moves together.
“At the end of the day,” Hughes continued. “The reality is we’re not going to put the perfect team together over the course of one summer. I think as we go about doing things, we recognize we have things we’d like to accomplish I just don’t see us accomplishing it all at once.”
The Canadiens offseason doesn’t move them from playoff bubble team to contender, but it moves them in that direction without sacrificing anything in the future. As Hughes says, it was unrealistic to expect everything to happen in one summer (even though the summer isn’t done quite yet) but that also doesn’t mean you have to sit idly by and wait.
