Now that Carey Price's latest injury conundrum is in the past, back-to-back spectacular performances seemingly announced to the rest of the NHL the Canadiens star is ready to reclaim his title as the league's consensus best goaltender.
But Price’s apparent return to form puts Montreal in a curious situation. The team's early season struggles (Price's pre-injury poor play was a big contributing factor), combined with a brutal lack of finish, mean they'll be fighting uphill the rest of the season just to make the playoffs.
The Canadiens rank well in statistics that usually imply future success, ranking seventh in score-adjusted Corsi and sixth in expected goals for percentage at even strength, according to Corsica.Hockey, but sit just 28th in actual goal differential at even strength so far this season.
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Even for a bad team, you would expect to see some improvement in results over time. But the Canadiens are, at least at even strength, a good team. And yet, this isn’t the first time this group has had a long run of games where the percentages went against them this aggressively.
In fact, it’s happened to them each of the last three seasons.
Breaking their performance into rolling 10-game segments, we can see that the Canadiens started the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons red hot. But outside those segments, they’ve been a below-average team in PDO (on-ice shooting percentage and on-ice save percentage combined) for most of the time, with several huge dips at both even strength and in all situations.
Every team has ebbs and flows. The Canadiens have been extremely erratic, though, and considering the relatively frequent trouble they have with finishing, you have to wonder if, despite the general numbers being positive, there’s something at the roster construction level that prevents this team from being a true competitor.
With Marc Bergevin in his sixth season as general manager, patience has begun to run out for this group to get things done. What was once a young core of elite players has turned into an aging one. Bergevin’s three most important players in Max Pacioretty, Shea Weber and Carey Price are now 29, 32, and 30, respectively — the back end of what can be considered prime years for NHLers.
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What this means isn’t that these players are all of a sudden bad, but that the best seasons they will ever have are very likely in the past. To add, the Canadiens round out their core with players who should be in their prime years in Brendan Gallagher (25), Jonathan Drouin (22), and Alex Galchenyuk (23), and a strong veteran defenseman in Jeff Petry (29).
All of the Canadiens’ best players organizationally fit into either the back edge of prime years or the beginning of them, without any key prospects ready to make big impacts. This logically means they’re a team that wants to compete right now, not in a couple of years when Price, Weber, and Pacioretty may have declined a little bit.
Bergevin’s personnel moves in recent years would also point you in the direction that he believes this Canadiens team should be competing for a Stanley Cup right away, but the results simply haven’t been there.
However, after just a couple of wins with Price back in the lineup, the Canadiens are on the edge of a playoff spot even with that horrible start. If Bergevin does nothing, odds are this team will fight and claw its way into the postseason, but my question is whether or not that is their ceiling.
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Drouin has done an admirable job playing center for two months this season, but even with him there the Canadiens are lacking up the middle when it comes to scoring. That will always hold them back, and seems to hurt them more now that their defensive group is less mobile than usual.
If the Canadiens at their best are merely playoff fodder with all their best players in or at the end of their prime years, is it in the organization’s best interest to admit defeat and rebuild?
It’s a difficult question, because if you believe that this Canadiens roster cannot be reconstructed on the fly this season or the next one in order to give them a decent shot at making it to the promised land, what you’re banking on for playoff success is a roll of the dice.
Teams have caught fire in the playoffs before, and having Carey Price means they could steal a couple of rounds even if the team isn’t playing particularly well. Still, teams that rely on good fortune in the playoffs rarely end up carrying the Stanley Cup off the ice, so it’s not exactly an attractive proposition.
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The problem for the Canadiens is that the other option isn’t attractive, either. If they were to blow things up, first of all that would almost automatically necessitate a change in management, because it would be admitting a massive failure for a group that inherited a team with a top-five defenseman, a top-five winger and the best goaltender in the world when they took over. Considering that, Bergevin can't and won't be expected to make that choice.
Say the Canadiens make the call to upend management and move players like Price, Weber, Pacioretty and Petry. They could acquire amazing assets for those players, but without the organizational prospect depth of a team like the Maple Leafs of a couple years ago, they would be looking at a long-term rebuild in the five-year range.
Five years ages the aforementioned young core into veterans: Galchenyuk (28), Drouin (27), Gallagher (30), Artturi Lehkonen (27), Charles Hudon (28), starting the cycle all over again. Should the Canadiens’ hypothetical rebuild move on from them as well as they would be on the back ends of their best years when the team is ready to begin a competitive window again? Should they waste the peak years for all those players?
This is an unenviable position that the Canadiens are in, and the best course of action moving forward will vary greatly depending on who you ask. But based on the makeup of this team, even if you believe it’s for the best that they blow it all up and start over, I don’t believe it’s realistic for any management group to self-immolate to this degree.
Clearly, there are some changes that need to be made. Maybe Bergevin isn’t the right one to make them, but rebuilding isn’t realistic. At least not yet.