Last season was statistically the worst of Alexander Semin’s 10 in the National Hockey League.
He scored six goals and 13 assists in 57 games with the Carolina Hurricanes. He averaged the lowest time on ice (15:55) since his rookie season in 2003-04, and he sat as a healthy scratch on several occasions.
Semin says it was an anomaly.
“I try going back to how I can play,” he told reporters on a conference call Friday after the Montreal Canadiens announced that they had signed the forward to a one-year deal with the club worth $1.1 million.
The Hurricanes were obviously concerned this wasn’t a one-off. As hard as it must have been for a small-market team like Carolina to buyout the remaining $21-million Semin was set to earn over the next three seasons, their July 1 decision to move on spoke volumes about just how far from grace he’d fallen in 2014-15.
Previous to last season’s meltdown, Semin was an elite scorer. His 494 points (232 goals) in 578 games were a product of his breakaway speed, his deadly shot and his offensive creativity. He’s a seven-time 20-goal scorer who’s topped out at 40. He had recorded seasons of 38 and 34 goals, and is a career 12.8 per cent shooter. He’s also scored 181 power play points (65 goals), and has 34 points in 51 Stanley Cup Playoff games.
Surely all that talent hasn’t disappeared. But Semin’s talent has never been his issue. It’s his commitment to the game that’s been questioned at different times throughout his career.
“Last season [Semin] did not have the compete level we expect,” Hurricanes general manager Ron Francis told the News and Observer on June 30.
Francis also conceded that a few minor injuries the six-foot-two right winger suffered had perhaps contributed to his lack of success.
That’s not much of a gamble for Bergevin and the Canadiens. Considering they’re paying the 31-year-old $75,000 more than plucky winger Dale Weise, who spent stretches of last season filling a top-six scoring role he wasn’t suited for, it’s about as low-risk as it gets.
Montreal had the 20th-ranked offence and the 23rd-ranked power play in 2014-15. Adding a player of Semin’s offensive ability isn’t likely to make them worse in both categories.
Semin may not have been Bergevin’s first option, but he proved to be the cheapest one.
“His signing represents a great opportunity for the organization and for Alex’s career,” said Bergevin.
Earlier this summer, Bergevin reportedly showed interest in signing 34-year-old Justin Williams, who ended up signing with the Washington Capitals for an annual salary of $3.25 million over the next two seasons. He was also rumoured to have kicked the tires on trading for Patrick Sharp and the $5.9 million annual cap hit he carries for the next two seasons.
There’s reason to believe the opportunity will work out well for Montreal. When Semin left Washington for Carolina in 2012, he signed a one-year deal to prove he was worth a long-term commitment. He scored 13 goals and added 31 assists in 44 games that season.
There’s reason to believe he’s highly motivated to prove himself once again in the NHL after ignoring the possibility of signing a potentially more lucrative deal with any given KHL suitor that would have surely welcomed him back to Russia. His agent Todd Diamond confirmed as much, telling Sportsnet in June that he expects Semin to have a “great season.”
But if Semin can’t take advantage of the opportunity he’s sure to start with, it’s another million and change eating up valuable cap space on a team that has a near-full roster and an estimated $6.3 million remaining (according to generalfanager.com) to get forward Alex Galchenyuk signed.
Should Semin follow on the same path he set out on last season, the potential for him to become an unwelcome distraction is a real one. Distractions have a way of becoming considerably magnified in hotbed hockey-media markets such as Montreal.
Either way, consensus on this deal is that the potential upside far outweighs the possible pitfall, and that’s good news for Bergevin, who’s taken his share of criticism this summer for not doing much in free agency to this point to address his team’s lack of firepower.
