Staying healthy, otherwise known as Dach playing a full season.
What is the Teams Biggest Roadblock to Make the PLAYOFFS Next Season
- Thread starter Le Barron de HF
- Start date
-
We sincerely apologize for the extended downtime. Our hosting provider, XenForo Cloud, encountered a major issue with their backup system, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of some critical data from the past year.
What This Means for You:
- If you created an account after March 2024, it no longer exists. You will need to sign up again to access the forum.
- If you registered before March 2024 but changed your email, username, or password in the past year, those changes were lost. You’ll need to update your account details manually once you're logged in.
- Threads and posts created within the last year have been restored.
- Our 2025 light and dark themes were lost, so we are rebuilding them. Light theme is currently available, but work in progress
Our team is working with Xenforo Cloud to recover data using backups, sitemaps, and other available resources. We know this is frustrating, and we deeply regret the impact on our community. We are taking steps with Xenforo Cloud to ensure this never happens again. This is work in progress. Thank you for your patience and support as we work through this.
In the meantime, feel free to join our Discord Server
If the goal is to make the playoffs you will never win a cup.
We actually faired pretty well even when our only threat was the first line , if we can fill up the top 9 with some decent forwards watch out...
The lingering deadwood is the biggest impediment to progress - eating up valuable $alary cap room and # of contracts. This offseason, coming off the books will be:
Tanner Pearson $3.25m
Joel Edmundson $1.75m
Karl Alzner $0.83m
Colin White $0.78m
Chris Wideman $0.76m
Next summer is where it gets interesting when these contracts / % of salaries are gone:
Christian Dvorak $4.45 m
David Savard $3.5m
Joel Armia $3.4m
Jeff Petry $2.3m
Jake Allen $1.9m
Jake Evans? $1.7m
Mike Pezzatta? $0.81m
John Kovacevic? $0.77m
Tanner Pearson $3.25m
Joel Edmundson $1.75m
Karl Alzner $0.83m
Colin White $0.78m
Chris Wideman $0.76m
Next summer is where it gets interesting when these contracts / % of salaries are gone:
Christian Dvorak $4.45 m
David Savard $3.5m
Joel Armia $3.4m
Jeff Petry $2.3m
Jake Allen $1.9m
Jake Evans? $1.7m
Mike Pezzatta? $0.81m
John Kovacevic? $0.77m
The Dach we saw in preseason and the first game against the Leafs was one that was clearly taking a step forward. If we get that version, healthy, it will make a massive difference. We had moments where Jake Evans was the 2C last year. No team will win with that.
Right now we are sitting on ~18m in capspace with Price on LTIR and we only have Xhekaj and Barron needing to be re-signed. I'm not sure how you can say a lack of salary cap room is the biggest impediment.
Secondary scoring through staying healthy.
The direction the league is headed, the top line will need to average 30 goals a player. The second line will need to average 20 goals a player. That's 150 of 240 goals and essentially 3 goals for a game.
We're close to that with Slaf-Suzuki-Caufield. Newhook had 15g and 34 points in 55 games. That's solid second line production and puts him in that zone we need for the second line. Can Dach play a full season? I hope so. He's shown some of what he can do. Healthy, I think both players give the club 20g/50pt seasons. Who plays with them? I think it's Roy unless they acquire someone.
Gallagher and Armia seemed somewhat rejuvenated down the stretch. Was it due to meaningless games? Whatever the reason, they scored 33 goals combined. On a third line with Evans or Dvorak, can they do that again? Would go a long way to helping overall team production.
The direction the league is headed, the top line will need to average 30 goals a player. The second line will need to average 20 goals a player. That's 150 of 240 goals and essentially 3 goals for a game.
We're close to that with Slaf-Suzuki-Caufield. Newhook had 15g and 34 points in 55 games. That's solid second line production and puts him in that zone we need for the second line. Can Dach play a full season? I hope so. He's shown some of what he can do. Healthy, I think both players give the club 20g/50pt seasons. Who plays with them? I think it's Roy unless they acquire someone.
Gallagher and Armia seemed somewhat rejuvenated down the stretch. Was it due to meaningless games? Whatever the reason, they scored 33 goals combined. On a third line with Evans or Dvorak, can they do that again? Would go a long way to helping overall team production.
HuGo is righting the ship and there's light at the end of the tunnel, but they were handcuffed with a litany of bad contracts. It's an ongoing process of purging the unsustainable and developing new relationships of fair market value. My 2 cents.
VirginiaMtlExpat
Second most interesting man in the world.
Bergevin drove the team nearly in the abyss . With Hugues, Habs will make a step forward
There's no doubt we were severely handcuffed and still have a bunch of bad deals. But it's cleared up enough that it's no longer the biggest problem, like if we do nothing this summer beyond re-signing Xhekaj and Barron we will be sitting on something like 15m of cap space, so how can a lack of cap space be the biggest problem the team is facing when we are on track to be 15m below the cap?
Again, not only cap space but # of contracts out of 50, which handcuffed their ability to extricate themselves.
You'll have to provide some details on how # of contracts is an actual problem let alone the BIGGEST roadblock to making the playoffs. We have plenty of open contract slots.
Gorton says...................all he thinks about, is winning a CUP in Montreal.
Good to know eh............
O
Okay, I'll paint a picture but a brief one... they were in salary cap hell and are in the process of a rebuild. Because of the prior situation, they've taken relatively extreme measures to shed the bad contracts and now have a number of young assets who, at some point, will need to be signed or resigned long term. If the Habs choose to fast track the rebuild i.e. sign free agents with $15m available and catapult themselves into the playoffs - they risk undermining the solid foundation they've begun to establish organically.
And "risks undermining the solid foundation" relates to # of contract spots how exactly?
Biggest road block is how young most of our team is. A healthy and a more matured Dach does help and the D gets 1 year older. With Dach this season, I think we are looking at a pick around 10 vs 5.
PP and PK has to improve to be at least top 15.
Hard to say one thing as the biggest road block but if I had to pick one... Overall Group Still Too Young
PP and PK has to improve to be at least top 15.
Hard to say one thing as the biggest road block but if I had to pick one... Overall Group Still Too Young
Very young team... 2nd in the NHL tied with 3 others. They wont make it again next year.
2nd line scoring, D needs to mature (i think headed the right way), Goalies are average (dont have that elevated save to carry a team)
2nd line scoring, D needs to mature (i think headed the right way), Goalies are average (dont have that elevated save to carry a team)
Nobody's against adding another top pick, it's just what's the cost going to be?
Like this year without Dach missing the whole year we are probably sitting on the 10th OA pick instead. Was Dach missing a whole year of development and now becoming a question mark about whether he will be a core player or not worth going from Sennecke to Lindstrom?
And that argument probably comes down to how much a person believes in player development, quite a few think it's mostly irrelevant and a player will end up whatever he was meant to be so long as the injury doesn't cause permanent damage, others (myself included) will feel like the odds of him reaching his potential have now been lowered.
