By Jon Still of TSN 690
Can Ducharme change how players are developed at the NHL level?
It is one of the most tired clichés in all of hockey. It may have been true twenty years ago, but it isn’t today.
The NHL is not a development league.
In the wake of the Montreal Canadiens deciding to not match the offer sheet tendered to forward Jesperi Kotkaniemi by the Carolina Hurricanes, a myriad of questions have been asked. Was he rushed into the NHL? Did the Habs skip stages of his development? Should he even have been drafted third overall in 2018?
These are the wrong questions. Mainly because the answers are so glaringly obvious.
The answer to those questions is baked into the commitment to an organizational reset by Habs general manager Marc Bergevin back in 2018, just before the Canadiens drafted Kotkaniemi. The plan, according to the GM, was not to jettison expensive veterans Shea Weber and Carey Price for draft picks after finishing as the second worst team in the Eastern Conference. Instead, the idea was to keep Price and Weber and surround them with cheap, impact youngsters who could hopefully still keep the Canadiens in the hunt for the playoffs.
The ill-fated plan reminds me of a quote by George Harrison when describing how the Beatles went from teenagers playing in Hamburg and Liverpool to worldwide icons:
“We were force grown, like rhubarb when you grow it under hothouse conditions. You make it grow quicker than it would naturally.”
The Habs wanted to have their cake and eat it too. But player development in pro sports isn’t linear. Nor is it quick.
Victor Mete was the first sacrificial lamb in this strategy. The diminutive defenseman skipped the AHL and went straight to the big club, playing 49 games with the team in 2017-18 after being drafted in the fourth round the year before. Next was Kotkaniemi, playing in the league as barely an 18-year old and holding his own, putting up 34 points in 79 games as the youngest player in the NHL.
What happened next was where the Canadiens went wrong. And it is something that new head coach Dominique Ducharme will have to ensure is corrected at the NHL level these next few seasons if he hopes to enjoy the fruits of Bergevin’s reset.
Through a combination of healthy scratches, slashed ice-time and diminished roles on the team, head coach Claude Julien and the organization shattered the confidence of those two young players. In Kotkaniemi’s case, he finished all three of his seasons with the Canadiens out of the team. Most teams try to ensure that a third overall pick, the future first line center of an organization, would be given every opportunity to succeed and fail in the present for long-term success down the road. Instead, the Habs threw the young Finn to the wolves.
It’s clear that Bergevin learned from those mistakes and he deserves credit for putting the brakes on the hype around Nick Suzuki, Ryan Poehling and Cole Caufield. All three were given time to flex their muscles in the OHL, AHL and NCAA respectively. But now it is up to Ducharme and his staff to make sure those young players develop properly at the NHL level.
What is development in the big leagues? Especially for the millennial athlete, it is clearly communicating expectations and goals to them. What are your responsibilities on the team? What is your role on special teams? How much ice time will you receive? Where are you having success? Where are you struggling? And then putting those players in positions to succeed even after they fail repeatedly.
Development has to happen in the NHL. If it didn’t then players would simply emerge from junior and college and play top line minutes for their respective teams. But that is unrealistic. There has to be progressive improvement and it is achieved through open lines of communication and by continuing to give young players opportunities in spite of whatever mistakes they make on the ice.
For Suzuki and Caufield, as with Price and Brendan Gallagher, their identities as players was clear long before they even got to the Canadiens. They are naturals, players that know exactly who they are and who they expect to be as pros. But they are outliers. The Habs have shown over the past decade that they fail in helping the others, those youngsters who may be physically ready but are perhaps not yet confident enough in their own games to handle the turbulence of the NHL.
The Canadiens are at a crossroads where they have to make sure they hit on these draft picks. The children of the reset are coming. They are needed now more than ever because Bergevin’s spending spree over the last two summers has pressed the Canadiens right up against the cap. With hefty raises expected for Suzuki and Caufield over the coming years, the GM will be forced to make some tough decisions on who stays and who goes. Kids will have to take those spots vacated by veterans. And you don’t set them up for success by benching them throughout the playoffs for Erik Gustafsson (see Romanov, Alexander).
Do the Habs want the likes of Norlinder, Ylonen, Harris, Struble, Tuch, Farrell and Guhle to be prominent pieces of their team in the not too distant future? Do they want Suzuki, Caufield, Romanov and Poehling to be pillars of this organization going forward? Then they need to rethink how they develop players at the pro level. If not, then the reset will have all been for nothing.
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Article by TSN 690’s Jon Still
