Joined: Jul. 2021
Posts: 387
Likes: 125
Monahan is a good 3C and helped a lot the young core of MTL. However, don’t fall in love with players like Bergevin did, espicially during a rebuild.
Monahan is good at the moment on the PP1 but next year the team will clearly want to put Dacher on this PP1 instead of him. He would lose quality time on the poweplay. Next year, Hughes will want to showcase Dvorak and Armia to sell at their highest value comes TDL2025. If you have Monahan in the lineup, he will steal a lot of quality minutes from them.
The 1st pick they will acquire (if they don’t flip it come draft day) might not pan out but it is the principle of a rebuild. If you have more lottery tickets, youhave more chance to win the jackpot. A late 1st can become Pastrnak, Tage Thompson, Debrincat, Aho, role players or non-NHL players. You mentionned that the 1st pick would not be as good as Monahan in three years. Why that window? MTL have 4-5 years still of bad contracts and Suz-Caufield still have 7 years on their contracts. HuGo probably planified that in 4 or 5 years from now the group that they put together will be ready and will be contenders.
Maybe Bergevin regets that he didn’t sign Danault but i think that he regrets a lot more that he didn’t trade Gallagher, Armia, Petry and Price when they were at their max value. Instead, they signed those players to reward contracts like you want to do with Monahan. It is absolutely not a disrespect to those players. Simply, you build a group of players with the same age. When they reach 28-30 years old, if your group is constantly contending you can still push for a year or two but you prepare yourself to return in a rebuild sooner rather than later.
You mentionned that Crosby and Malkin were still good at 32-34 yo. PIT is a good example. PIT won the cup early in their rebuild and carried the core until they were 28-30 and won two other cups. After that the best would have been to start a rebuild and trade the core for future assets. Instead (certainly in part because of the ownership), since the last cup, they are a middle of the pack team and one of the worst prospect pool in the league.
In summary, in the next years, you’ll see Monahan, Matheson, Savard get traded and it is what’s best for the team and the future. Their visit to Montreal will be greatly appreciated and useful. The transmission of their leadership to the core group of players may be one of the reasons why MTL will win a Stanley Cup. However, we need to be able to trade them when the time comes.