The Montreal Canadiens came within six wins of a Stanley Cup last season, and it seems like there’s nearly half-a-dozen directions in which you can run with that fact.
The best place to start, perhaps, is to note that Montreal’s six-game loss in the Eastern Conference final to the New York Rangers represents the best season the club has had since winning the Cup more than two decades ago in 1993.
Further, last spring marked just the second time in a 20-season span that the Habs have advanced past the playoffs’ second round. That means those darling Kansas City Royals we’ve been hearing so much about this October—you know, the team which didn’t see a post-season baseball game for 29 years—don’t really have that much on the Habs in the misery department.
Long-suffering Montreal Canadiens fans? Believe it or not, the description fits.
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It also sheds some light on why success-starved Habs backers are creating a collective hum of optimism on the precipice of puck-drop this season. Montreal’s playoff ride last year was largely driven by the young or in-their-prime players who, after some off-season upheaval, are now fully at the wheel for this franchise. Goalie Carey Price, defenceman P.K. Subban and left winger Max Pacioretty now undeniably form the spine of a club that’s trying to elevate itself to the status of legitimate Cup contender.
And to be clear, they’re not there yet. Even if Price wasn’t felled by a knee injury in the first game of the East final and the Habs found a way to get a couple more wins against the Rangers, it’s an immense longshot that they would have accumulated four more victories against the fearsome Los Angeles Kings. (Or the Chicago Blackhawks, had they won that wild West final, or the St. Louis Blues had they gone on a run, or the Anaheim Ducks if…you get the point.)
The Canadiens—despite some nice additions in the off-season that made the team a bit bigger and better—just aren’t in the heavyweight class yet. Repeating last year’s showing is an enormous task and, realistically, there’s a still a better chance they miss the post-season altogether than win a championship.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t moving in the right direction. And even if it’s a bit misguided to talk 2015 parade routes, for the first time in many years, the Canadiens are on the kind of upward trajectory that could legitimately take them somewhere special in the not-so-distant future. That’s indicated not just by what you’ll find at the top of the roster, but with the training camp battles waged for spots at the bottom of the lineup.
Marc Bergevin, now entering his third season as the team’s GM, has done a great job developing the talent he inherited in the organization, while acquiring new faces that are already pushing for jobs. Bergevin stated from Day 1 on the job that his vision was a bottom-up build through the draft. He’s been true to his word and the result is an increasingly deep franchise that had tough choices to make this year when it came to cuts.
In the next couple seasons, draftees like 2013 second-rounder Jacob de la Rose and 2014 first-rounder Nikita Scherbak are going to make their presence felt. This year, we’ll see what defenceman Nathan Beaulieu and left winger Jiri Sekac can do as full-time NHLers in their early 20s.
For all that’s happening in Montreal, if you were to distill the hopeful vibes down to a single symbol, it would be the first guy Bergevin ever drafted for the team, Alex Galchenyuk.
No player on the Canadiens—and few in the league—has the potential to leap forward this year the way the 20-year-old left winger does. With more responsibility coming in this third NHL season, the third overall pick from 2012 has a real chance to blossom into that consistent game-changing forward Montreal—a bottom third team in terms of possession last year—could desperately use.
If Galchenyuk does make a big stride this season, the Habs’ list of needs will shrink by one major item. And with a couple more capable kids poised to make significant contributions in coming years, the Canadiens are closer and closer to whittling down those six big wins that still stand between the team and the end of a long championship drought.