The Montreal Canadiens may have been a young team ahead of schedule, but that doesn’t mean they intend to rest on their laurels following an Eastern Conference Finals defeat.
Speaking at the team’s end-of-season availability on Monday, Montreal general manager Kent Hughes and president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton spoke positively about their group, but made it clear that this shouldn’t be the final product.
“In all facets of that series, they were better than us. I think that’s what we learned, we have to be better in a lot of areas if we want to get to that next level,” Gorton said Monday. “They showed us that, after that first game, they were very impressive and we weren’t quite up to it. I think going forward, though, leaving that with our players, leaving that with our coaches, leaving that with us all summer, I think will help us go forward.”
It was a tough ending for the Habs, who had battled through seven-game series against the Tampa Bay Lightning and Buffalo Sabres in the first two rounds.
The Canadiens ultimately lost in five games in the East Final and were unable to match the Hurricanes’ offensive production, routinely losing the shots-on-goal battle by a wide margin.
As they did in the regular season, the Canadiens’ top line carried the load in the post-season, with Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky leading the way in point totals among forwards through the Habs’ 19 playoff games. Although some of the depth players stepped up, the huge gap in chances between Montreal and Carolina in the third round, as the Habs brass sees it, partly falls on the team’s depth because of how much the top guys had to deal with in the first place.
“We probably asked a lot of them (Canadiens’ top players),” Gorton said. “In the playoffs, we got some secondary scoring quite a bit, really impactful guys down the bottom of the lines. But we’re asking a lot of our top guys.”
Added Hughes: “If we look around at the three series we had, the three teams we played against, it wasn’t necessarily their top scorers that were their top scorers (in the playoffs). … We just gotta get better. Period.”
And though the Canadiens’ top line took a step back against Carolina in particular, Hughes warned against overreacting to a single playoff run, harkening to a lesson learned by their inter-provincial rival, the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“Being here in Canada, I think it’s gonna be a bit of the narrative going into the Cup Final that there was that belief that certain players in Toronto underperformed in the playoffs. And one playoff season doesn’t necessarily reflect another,” Hughes said. “I think Mitch Marner’s sitting atop the playoff scoring race, and it’s not just what he’s doing offensively, it’s what he’s contributing to his team, being where they are.”
That being said, Hughes and Gorton intend to head into the summer looking to add to their young core, but don’t intend to make rash decisions that might mortgage the future. And while they made it clear they don’t know yet who will be available, they intend to put themselves in a position to take that next step forward.
“Every summer has opportunities. It’s hard to say, unless we know the opportunity,” Gorton said. “Last summer, we went in hoping to add to our core group, find somebody at the right age to fit in there. We did that, we thought with Noah (Dobson), with Zach (Bolduc). I think this summer we’ll go in with the same approach.
“We’re gonna try to keep going. But we don’t know what’s next until it comes along. It’s early on. We just got eliminated, so it’s hard to say what might be available to us. But certainly, you can’t deny that since we’ve been here, we’ve been pretty aggressive trying to go forward. So I don’t see how that would change anything.”