BROSSARD, Que. — As the Montreal Canadiens exploded for seven goals in their win over the New York Islanders Saturday, as Cole Caufield buried the last of his three on the night to get within two of NHL leader Nathan MacKinnon, as Juraj Slafkovsky potted four points to break the 60-point barrier for the first time in his young career and as Nick Suzuki registered four assists to put himself on pace to finish with 101 points this season, I thought of Charlie Flicker.
I ran into Flicker, an old friend, three days earlier in the Montreal airport. I was returning from the NHL GM meetings, he was coming back from a business trip, and as we stood waiting for luggage we shouldn’t have checked, he asked me to identify the member of the Canadiens core I felt had the most promise.
“I think within five years, Ivan Demidov has the ability to establish himself as a top-10 player in the world,” I said.
“You could say that about Lane Hutson, too,” Flicker responded.
Considering the sophomore defenceman had surpassed the 66 points he put up in 82 games of his Calder Trophy-winning rookie season by Game 65 this season, there was no debating it.
We also concurred there was an argument to be made that Suzuki’s already there, he moved up the top 10 list Saturday, that Caufield might be the best goal scorer in hockey, that the soon-to-be 22-year-old Slafkovsky was on his way to becoming the league’s best power forward and that we were likely on the precipice of the most exciting Canadiens era of our lifetime.
It was my 43rd birthday Wednesday, and maybe the conversation with Flicker resonated a bit more with me than ones I have with other Canadiens fans because we’re of the same vintage. He was born in 1979, in the last year of the last Canadiens dynasty, making both of us too young to really appreciate the 1986 Stanley Cup run.
We were old enough in 1989 to know the team that returned to the final didn’t hold a candle to the Islanders and Edmonton Oilers of the decade, let alone the Cup-winning Calgary Flames that year. And we both have fond memories of 1993, which felt like a fever dream compared to everything else we saw from the Canadiens before and after that.
The team we watched through the back half of the ‘90s and through more than the first half of the first decade of the new millennium could’ve been the poster child for the Dead Puck Era and the one I covered from 2007 through last season wasn’t much more exciting, even if it produced much better results in some of those years.
I didn’t need to ask Flicker if he felt a bit detached from them. I could feel it as he talked about how excited he was to watch every game this current team plays.
“They’re just getting started,” I said.
Then we went our separate ways.
Three nights later, as the wave at the Bell Centre hit its crescendo, as hats began littering the ice and as the Canadiens were putting the finishing touches on a 7-3 win that kept them ahead in a playoff race they’ve been well positioned in — but still anything but secure in — since the start of the season, I thought of the end of that conversation with Flicker.
He’s not the only one who’s excited about this young core, which has propelled the Canadiens to being the third-most offensively prolific team in the league in 2025-26 — after it was the third-least offensively-prolific team from 2015-2025.
“I’m excited,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis on Monday. “I’m a fan. They’re fun to watch. They’re workers. I’m not surprised. They’re good people, they’re workers, and they love coming to the rink. And I think we have an environment to help them progress, and they’ve all done that. And they’re a big part of our success, no doubt. It’s exciting.”
After becoming the first Canadien to score 40 goals since Vincent Damphousse did it in 1994, Caufield could be the first to score 50 since Stephane Richer had 51 in 1990. He’s also got a chance to be the first Canadien to win the Rocket Richard Trophy, and the first one to lead the league in goals since Guy Lafleur did it in 1978.
Slafkovsky, who was taken first overall in 2022, recently became the first under-22-year-old in the franchise’s 116-year history to notch three consecutive seasons of at least 50 points. The big Slovak, who was named to the Olympic all-star team in February, is on pace for 32 goals and 40 assists through mid-April, running numbers he’d be expected to hit three years from now — as a fully developed player.
Hutson, 22, ranks 29th in scoring, though he’s tied for the 17th-most points in the league, and only Evan Bouchard, Zach Werenski and Cale Makar stand as defencemen who have produced more than his 69 points to date.
Meanwhile, Suzuki, who had a career-high 89 points in 82 games last season, ranks eighth in the league with 85 points in 69 games this season.
And, yeah, the captain has a sense for how long fans like Flicker have waited for all of this.
“Someone said that Carey (Price) had only one 80-point guy his whole career,” Suzuki said.
He was referring to Alex Kovalev, who scored 84 points for the 2007-08 Canadiens, which was the last edition of the team to finish in the top three in the league in goals for.
That was Price’s second season in the NHL.
Imagine if he had Demidov for the ones that followed?
“Demi’s so dynamic,” said core-defenceman Kaiden Guhle, “and what is he, 20?”
The Russian star, taken fifth overall in 2024, has been 20 for all of three months. He had led the rookie scoring race for most the season, though, with 52 points, he currently ranks second to Anaheim’s Beckett Sennecke’s 54 in one more game than Demidov’s played. So I’ll stand by my prediction that he could be the best among all the core members of the team, on his way to potentially becoming a top-10 player in the world within five years.
Guhle’s right, Demdov is so dynamic. He also possesses the same type of talent Kovalev had, though he already applies it more consistently than Kovalev did for every season with the Canadiens but that one that saw him score 84 points. He also plays on the inside, with intensity on the forecheck and backcheck, and with the right intentions — like the rest of the core Canadiens.
“I feel like we try to play the game the way it should be played,” said St. Louis. “And I know people maybe think of me as, ‘Oh, he’s an offensive guy, he’s going to be an offensive coach.’ Yeah, I teach a lot of offensive principles and offensive concepts, but I think what excites me the most is these offensive guys are actually buying in and playing defensively, too, and we teach that, too.
“You can’t just play offence. You’ve got to play the whole game, but we have a group that plays offence as soon as we win the puck in our zone, and I feel like they’re bought in and playing defence as soon as we lose the puck in the other team’s zone. So, that excites me — when you have guys that with that much talent, young, that are buying into playing the whole game. But I know we look very entertaining when we get going offensively, and it’s fun to watch.”
Fans like Flicker tell me every day, and those conversations stay with me.
