The Montreal Canadiens, like every other team, have a 23 man roster...and they're using it as such.
I'm not sure what's bush league about it, they're managing their assets.
The situation will be resolved when they feel like they have a resolution.
I know previous management would have probably pissed away one of those assets, but that's not Hughes style.
I rate it.
This is the age-old "management vs. players/workers" perspective.
From an organization/asset-management perspective, you're completely right. They can do that and should, why wouldn't they? As fans of the Habs organization in general, we see it as a smart move and it is.
From a player/human perspective, it IS bush league, and I think that's fine to say as well. What's good for the overall organization is not necessarily good for every individual player. No goalie is going to see "Yes, please run a three-goalie system where I barely play and when I do, the decisions are made arbitrarily." These guys are ultra-competitive humans with very limited careers.
No player is going to have the attitude of "Sure, I'll risk millions of dollars in future salary and degraded performance so you hold onto your backup goalie for previous years or squeeze an earlier round pick out of a desperate team. No problem at all."
I'm coming from the latter perspective, you're coming from the former. Nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't make what I'm saying wrong.
That's not true at all. A lot of AHL teams carry 3 goalies. NCAA & junior teams also will carry 3 goalies.
As for the NHL, a lot of teams will carry 3 goalies. Buffalo, LA, Vegas, Toronto, San Jose & Arizona have all had 3 goalie systems over the past 2 years.
This isn't even the first time for Montreal.
During the Covid season, all teams had to carry 3 goalies. Charlie Lindgren played only 2 games that year due to that fact.
Prior to waivers & roster limits, a lot of teams carried 3 goalies. It wasn't unusual for teams to carry 28 players. 3 goalies, 9D, 16F.
It's why the NHL started waivers & roster limits, because a lot of good players were getting buried in deep organizations.
Fair enough on your 'prior to roster limits' point but there are a couple of issues here:
I don't think the Covid season should be used as an example of teams doing things 'business as usual' when it definitely wasn't. They were instructed to do this to keep the pool of players consistent and to not risk bringing in Covid from the outside due to an emergency call-up.
The teams you listed as well as teams running three goalies in recent years aren't exactly examples we want to follow (besides Vegas, obviously). Toronto probably does because they've had insanely injury-prone goalies and have had to do that out of pure necessity. This happened because we didn't move on from Allen or Primeau before this situation arose.
Even in interviews, Jeff Gorton said this wasn't planned at the beginning of the year. They definitely held on to them both to see if one would emerge and they could potentially trade the other for some value, but I would argue that this whole situation has negatively affected both, which has also negatively impacted their trade value.
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