No chance Hudon earns that contract when MTL keeps playing him 4th line minutes in 2018-19 again.

Once Pacioretty is traded, one of the better side effects will be that Hudon is finally giving some decent minutes in the middle 6.

I would rather buyout Alzner in a year or two instead of giving the Islanders Bitten and Harris to just take him... That makes no sense. We're rebuilding... we should be doing the opposite

Absolutely, but Alzner would still play for any NHL team ... ANY team ... it just wouldn't be top-4 minutes for many/most. Is he overpaid? Absolutely. If you offered him around the league at $2.75M, you'd have 30 other GMs asking to take him. He's solid, savvy and, by the end of last season, was not a liability. He had a bad start on a team that had a bad start. He had never played outside of Washington and he was slow to adapt to the Montreal system. Add to that Weber going down and a rotation of partners. In then second half of the season, he was actually a pretty solid player.

I agree that Alzner is going to be fine and had a good second half last y[ear.... Julien likes him and he and petry are going nowhere...... tanking doesnt exist as you have to be competitve for,your fans and the lottery means there are no guarentees.....so stay near the playoffs and then trade patches and byron for picks and then you will have 2 ist and 2 2nd next year and draft 11 players again and then in the following season you will have a ton of young players to get excited about and your team will get slowly better.... I would be open to trading Weber at the deadline too but you got to get good picks for him or else keep him.

Oh I wasn't saying he's a bad player, I agree with everything you said. It was more so to go against trading assets to just get rid of him in a time where salary isn't an issue for us at all. Eventually, we may need to relieve his cap hit but for now we kinda need him. Also, I felt like we tried to play him more than what he's cable of. We just need to play him to his strengths and abilities

Sorry, the rant seemed to be aimed at you. It wasn't. It was at the whole premise of trading Alzner from a position of weakness. Juulsen, Mete, Brook, Fleury, Romanov and Lernout are all good prospects. Habs need to give them time to develop and Alzner gives them that -- and a capable mentor when needed.