Interesting section in a recent article from Duhatschek at The Athletic. I'll post this seeing as how Montreal is a possible trade destination for a guy like Leddy.
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Bergy’s dilemma
Montreal Canadiens’ general manager Marc Bergevin was going to be the central figure of the 2020 NHL Draft, primarily for two reasons. For starters, Montreal was hosting the draft – and has a long-standing tradition of throwing the greatest parties ever – and secondly, he’d managed through astute wheeling-and-dealing to accumulate 14 choices in the upcoming draft. According to CapFriendly, the Canadiens have one first-rounder, three seconds, two thirds, three fourths, two fifths, one sixth and two sevenths. As crazy as it may sound, 14 picks is too many – and the expectation was Bergevin would use some of those picks to trade for warm NHL bodies on the draft floor. If the league goes ahead with a June draft without cancelling the season, rosters will still be frozen and so, he probably won’t be able to do that. But the fix is actually pretty easy. He can swap some of those extra picks in 2020 for choices in next year’s draft. Or he can package multiple draft choices for the opportunity to move higher in the pecking order. Several teams have extra first-rounders and might be willing to trade out of the first round if they can get additional picks in the later rounds.
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It'll be interesting to see what goes down, because Montreal, Ottawa, and Detroit each have 11 or more picks (maybe NJD and LAK too) and they're coming off of at least one summer (in most cases 2) in which they already selected 10+ players.
Montreal right now has 4(!) CHL centers they drafted in 2018 who need to be given an ELC or can re-enter the draft.
This is pertinent, because as much fun as it is for fans to see their fave team adding tons of assets, a point comes when you just can't sign everybody you want to. You just can't invest in everyone. And that means you've gotta start trading or watching those assets float away for nothing.
This BTW is one of the reasons why a number of kids heading to college or coming from Europe may be taken in the middle and later rounds of each and every draft rather than otherwise deserving or comparable CHLers. With the CHLers, you only have their rights for 2 summers before they need to be inked to an ELC.
We are actually facing that scenario right now with Blade Jenkins.
Dunno how that'll be handled this summer?
But the article above seems to answer a question I had recently. If those rosters are frozen, that will preclude basically any option Lou and co. had of adding more draft picks to a draft next month.
