biturbo19
Registered User
- Jul 13, 2010
- 26,275
- 11,376
There are 30 other teams who might offer something. I don't expect either of these guys to ever end up on waivers - they'll make the big team or get traded.
Barron's play at the end of the season showed he'd learned a few things in the AHL after being sent down.
Yeah. There's zero real pressure on the Habs to move a guy. Worst case, they just carry 8D until someone wants to make a deal. But much more likely, you can easily just find a taker for someone like Kovacevic for a pick or prospect.
Guys like Hutson, Mailloux, Reinbacher don't need to be...and really should not be anywhere near the opening night NHL roster for Montreal. There's plenty for them all to still learn in the AHL. And that 8D scenario assumes everyone is fully healthy, which with the Habs...rarely seems to be the case.
Canadiens real probably with their logjam is that they've got a lot of very "mediocre" upside guys who are just very tenuously NHL established. All of Harris, Struble, Xhekaj, Barron are sort of...at the fringes. Shown that they can play NHL minutes on a bad team, desperate with injuries. So they're not just "pure projection" in how they'll translate. But they also all have some limitations that are fairly evident to their real "upside". Which lands them in that awkward "no man's land" in terms of "trade value". The sort of young emerging players who are typically worth a lot more to the team that currently has them. Not the sort of thing teams go wild trading big value to acquire. It's just awkward because the Habs have so many of them all at once. And they've also got plenty of clutter up front as well - which makes a "change of scenery" or "organizational depth" swap less appealing.
There's a big challenge in trying to "consolidate" all these middling on the cusp sort of assets into a few more high upside or "quality" assets.
My hope is to see someone like Harris packaged with the Winnipeg first and get a Newhook-style player, ie, a guy who finished his ELC and his team is in a cap crunch and doesn't see him as part of the future core.
Which is where something like this makes a lot of sense as a potential strategy to get to where Montreal want to go with this "surplus" of defencemen. They're all cheap and NHL-ready, which is useful to plenty of teams. But if you want some higher upside back...they're probably gonna have to be the "add on" to something like a 1st round pick mystery box (and/or deadline trade chip) like that.