I believe it’s important to be realistic about expectations for players. That doesn’t mean you can’t get hyped up. Sometimes even the hype undersells it; Look at Lane Hutson. However, last season it seemed like a lot of folks expected Kirby Dach to be the player he appeared to be to begin the 2023-24 season, or at least the player he was in 2022-23.
Unfortunately, recovery from injuries that long term is not always so simple. One of the bigger areas of the game where Dach typically takes over games is along the boards in the offensive zone. He uses his large frame with deceptively good mobility to gain leverage and overpower one, often two opponents to bring the puck free, and move it off the wall and into the middle of the ice.
If that is your bread and butter in the offensive zone, and you just missed a full year of hockey and professional development, and you’re trying to get sorted at NHL speed with that surgically repaired knee, how confident are you in using the knee for leverage?
To end that return season early by injuring the same knee must have been worse to deal with mentally than physically. It’s no secret that the biggest impediment to Dach’s career has been his health, and yet he has always been most effective when he plays with reckless abandon. That central conflict makes the likelihood of Dach hitting his potential much lower, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
On top of recovering physically and staying healthy, pushing past the mental hurdle of trusting a twice-repaired knee, it’s also the final season of Dach’s contract, after which he will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights in a growing-cap world. That’s a lot of pressure on his shoulders.
Personally, I’m rooting for him. Not just because he seems like a good dude and a good teammate, or because I love an underdog story, but because I do believe he can be a very good player.
Pushing past recency bias
After how rough last season was for Dach, we don’t talk enough about what kind of player he was before the knee injury in 2023-24. In his first season with the Canadiens, he was one of the few solid two-way performers on the roster.
Dach’s boardwork and net-front dominance led to him being a key cog in the power play, leading the team in points per 60 minutes at 4.85, over a full point ahead of Nick Suzuki, with a higher rate of goals and the same rate of assists.
When Dach was on the ice at five-on-five in 2022-23, the Canadiens improved their control of shot-attempt differential by 2.77%, shots on goal by 3.04%, goals by 7.83%, high-danger scoring chances by 5.05%, and expected goals by 4.44% according to Natural Stat Trick. Evolving Hockey had him as the Habs’ top forward in goals above replacement and expected goals above replacement that season.
Those metrics led to some in the fanbase and commentators to speculate that Dach might be better long term than Nick Suzuki, especially given the size disparity. Of course, Dach benefited both from playing with Suzuki and Suzuki taking top-line matchups game in and game out. Remember also that while he was very good, Suzuki then was not Nick now. And neither was Cole Caufield.
I don’t say this to knock people who thought Dach was better, but to highlight how good he was on a very thin team. The main issue for him was that he didn’t produce much at even strength; at just 1.35 points per hour, he ranked 13th on the Canadiens behind players like Mike Hoffman, Michael Pezzetta, and Rafael Harvey-Pinard.
Part of that was just bad luck, because the team didn’t fail to score or generate chances when he was on the ice — his on-ice expected goals for rate of 2.77 ranked third on the roster — but he only grabbed a point on 48.7% of the goals he was on the ice for.
I would argue that a significant second factor was a lack of both consistent and complimentary linemates.
Situational success
Because Sean Monahan was injured early in the 2022-23 season, Dach spent about 442 five-on-five minutes split between 18 different line combinations with time on ice together between six and 60 minutes. The one consistent line he had was alongside Suzuki and Caufield for about 360 minutes.
Martin St-Louis was hesitant to put that line together, which makes sense considering how weak the rest of the roster was due to injury on top of a rebuild. I refer to the time St-Louis succumbed to temptation in uniting that trio as his Mad Max era, because in my head when he looked at that lineup for the first time, he sprayed the silver on his face and yelled, “Witness me!”
It’s undeniable that Caufield, Suzuki, and Dach were fun together. They played against top lines and actually outplayed them most of the time, but the rest of the roster did not fair well when they were on the bench.
They also played like it was a power play at even strength, and while they scored 23 goals together in 35 games at evens, they also gave up 23. It was all gas, no brakes, and not a long-term fit.
Last season, Dach was stuck on a team that very quickly gelled with three consistent line combinations that did not include him in the middle, so once again he was stuck attempting to make something work out of the rest. That isn’t to say it was impossible for him to find his game and make it work, but it is a real factor to account for.
This season, there’s just much more possibility for fits for Dach’s gameplay.
To start off, Patrik Laine isn’t beginning the season on one leg. He’s still not a great even-strength player, but he should be able to get into shooting positions more often with some improved mobility. Zachary Bolduc is a versatile player that may not always stand out on a game-by-game basis, but provides a physical edge, solid defensive work, an ability to score off the rush, and a preference to shoot from the high slot. Many of Bolduc’s goals in St. Louis came from low-to-high passes from behind the net, something very much in Dach’s skill set.
The ideal scenario of course would be to find himself as a compliment to Ivan Demidov.
Best-case scenario
From where I’m sitting, the plan Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes have cooked up looks pretty familiar with a bevy of their tentpole players. Suzuki is very much in the Patrice Bergeron mould, tasked with the toughest jobs and trusted completely, a quiet leader. Cole Caufield is like some alternate universe Brad Marchand who isn’t a jerk. Juraj Slafkovsky, the power forward to fill the Milan Lucic/Nathan Horton role. Ivan Demidov fits nicely as David Pastrnak. Alexandre Carrier the undersized but tough-as-nails defenceman like Andrew Ference. Underrated veteran goalie Sam Montembeault that doesn’t always look fancy but gets results? A younger Tim Thomas. Arber Xhekaj as the intimidating defenceman who can take a shift without costing you, like Adam McQuaid. Kaiden Guhle, a bigger and likely better Johnny Boychuk. And while the players are much different, I believe the Noah Dobson acquisition was this management group’s Zdeno Chara move. Remember, Boston did that five years before they won. I’ve seen this movie before! Only this time there are also Lane Hutson and David Reinbacher.
I think they are hoping that Dach can be the David Krejci to this team, and if Dach can get back to himself along the boards, he can make a career by getting the puck off the wall and finding Demidov.
I’m sure part of the reason Hughes and Gorton appear to be modelling the Canadiens’ roster structure similar to what Gorton began with the Bruins almost two decades ago is because of the roster they inherited, but I think the more convincing angle is the versatility it gave the Bruins to remain competitive.
Between 2006-07 when the Bruins brought in Chara to 2023-24, the year after Patrice Bergeron retired, the Bruins won 811 of their 1404 regular season games, outdoing the Sidney Crosby-led Penguins, the Alexander Ovechkin-led Capitals, and everyone else. They played in 190 playoff games, and only the Penguins grabbed more wins than Boston’s 102, with 103.
Thankfully, all that success only led to one Stanley Cup for Boston, but they were without a doubt the most consistently excellent team for nearly 20 years. They did that without a marquee superstar from the draft, and they traded three of their four highest-drafted players in that timeline (Phil Kessel, Tyler Seguin, Dougie Hamilton) and lost all those trades. Still, because their core was so versatile, they kept going like they faced no adversity at all.
That is what I believe this management group is chasing. Dach’s style of play adds an element that can make the Canadiens a much more difficult team to play against, and this season he has more opportunity at his disposal than ever before. It’s up to Dach to make that possibility more than Kirby’s Dream Land.
Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.
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