Kent Hughes eager to guide Canadiens from relevance to prominence

MANALAPAN, Fla. — It’s Sunday, the Montreal Canadiens are resting after their best game of the season, and Kent Hughes is in a good mood.

Despite having his travel delayed by a couple of hours to Palm Beach for these general manager meetings, he has arrived and is in a car headed to the Eau Resort and Spa, where he will make it just in time to kick his feet up and watch the Edmonton Oilers cap off a regulation win over the New York Rangers.

The result keeps the Rangers one point ahead of Hughes’s Canadiens — in the second wild-card position in the Eastern Conference — but also leaves the Canadiens with two games in hand on the Rangers.

It’s a better spot than the Canadiens were in to start the night, and it’s where Hughes hopes they’ll remain after the Columbus Blue Jackets play the New Jersey Devils Monday. A regulation loss for the Blue Jackets would keep them one point behind the Canadiens through 67 games and make Montreal’s 67th game — on Tuesday against the Ottawa Senators — that much more enticing.

No matter what happens leading up to it, it’s a game that gives the Canadiens a chance to bolster their playoff hopes, and Hughes is greatly looking forward to it.

When we ask him to look back nearly 24 hours, to when fans shook the Bell Centre while the Canadiens were locking down a 3-1 lead over the reigning Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, his voice perks up.

“A friend of mine was in from college, and I had other friends who were in from out of town, and I was just thinking about what an unbelievable experience it must be for these people to be in this atmosphere,” Hughes says. “For us to be in it feels like the road to relevancy in a rebuild is exciting but not nearly as exciting as when you get to the point that you’re actually playing a game in that building that has playoff implications this deep into the season.”

It’s been three straight Marchs of watching insignificant games at the Bell Centre and coming to these meetings to continue counting down the days to the off-season, to when Hughes could guide the Canadiens a little further down the road to relevancy.

But now, in his fourth March as GM, Hughes is spending this time thinking about how he can help them take their first step down the road to prominence.

Hughes is armed to do it this summer, with cap space to weaponize, draft artillery spilling over and, most importantly, incentive.

“Being able to see a group of players that can handle the moment is as significant as anything, and I don’t mean just specifically Saturday’s game,” he says. “I mean this stretch run.”

It’s done more than just revive the Canadiens’ playoff hopes; it has reinforced Hughes’s desire to push the Canadiens towards their next phase.

They built up the NHL’s best record (7-1-2) since the break for the 4 Nations Face-Off, with captain Nick Suzuki posting a league-leading 17 points through Saturday’s games. Core members Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Lane Hutson and Samuel Montembeault have played a huge hand in driving those results and other young players Alex Newhook, Jayden Struble, Arber Xhekaj and Jakub Dobes have taken critical steps in establishing their value to the Canadiens.

To see it happen without 23-year-old core defenceman Kaiden Guhle, who suffered a torn quadricep muscle he’s not guaranteed to return from before the end of the regular season, has been so reassuring.

“That’s when you start to know you have guys you’re going to be able to rely on going into the future,” says Hughes.

Now the idea is to get more of them.

It’s something Hughes and executive vice-president Jeff Gorton were hoping to do ahead of the March 7 trade deadline, “but we did not see a path then to accomplish that objective,” he said.

“If there had been somebody for us to get that could play up the lineup and help, somebody who could’ve played with Newhook and Patrik Laine, that was where we were testing the waters for,” Hughes added. “But to bring in somebody down the lineup when (Canadiens coach) Marty (St. Louis) really liked the composition of his lines and wasn’t going to change them, we’d have just been bringing in injury depth, and the cost for injury depth was really significant.”

The cost for top-six players could be prohibitive this coming off-season, but Hughes and Gorton won’t be deterred from paying it.

Not that they’ll completely throw caution to the wind.

“We’re not going to go into free agency like a bunch of drunken sailors and get stuck with eight-year deals that we wish we could get out of the minute we get into them,” Hughes said, “but I think we’re probably closer to overpaying in terms of what we give up in assets to acquire a player.”

With the Canadiens maturing as they are, with the way their salary cap has been managed, with a game-changer like Ivan Demidov playing out the string of his final season in Russia, and with Suzuki entering his prime, it’s what the moment calls for.

“We’d be remiss if we missed the window while we have an elite two-way centreman like Nick Suzuki driving our team,” said Hughes, and there’s no debating it.

It’s a window the Canadiens can crack wide open with the 25-year-old Suzuki making under $8 million for each of the next four seasons after this one.

Caufield is 24 and making a fraction less than Suzuki over each of the next five, and 20-year-old Slafkovsky will make marginally less than both over each of the next eight as the salary cap increases exponentially year over year.

What the 2022 No. 1 overall pick is doing right now is as incentivizing to Hughes as anything else the Canadiens are doing.

“I thought (Saturday) night, even though he only had one assist, might have been the best game Slaf has played,” Hughes said. “What we’re seeing of him now, I feel he’s finally, for the first time, really understanding how he needs to play to be the most effective version of himself. I expect that when those elements of his game become so consistent and so natural, there will be another level of development for him. When he can check the box that it’s natural and he doesn’t think about it, we can still add to his game from there.”

Development opportunities will be ripe for 2023 fifth-overall pick David Reinbacher, too, now that he’s rehabbed from the knee surgery that sidelined him for close to five months and is back to playing games.

“To David’s credit, he didn’t come here and sulk because he was injured,” Hughes said. “He came here, did all his rehab, and he was really focused on learning how we play and how others play and how he can become a better hockey player. And, for somebody who was out for a long time, I saw him play two or three times live and a couple more on stream and have seen a pretty successful return to play. I’m looking forward to him having the opportunity to finish this season and hopefully get a deep playoff run in with Laval.”

Logan Mailloux has been rounding out his defensive game in the AHL, Owen Beck has been bolstering his offensive one for most of the season there, and Hughes is happy both players will have the same opportunity as Reinbacher from here to the end.

Oliver Kapanen could get it once his impressive season in Sweden ends, but Hughes wasn’t prepared to say whether Jacob Fowler or Michael Hage will once their college seasons end.

There are sky-high hopes for Fowler, who’s finishing his sophomore year at Boston College as the NCAA’s best goaltender. The future looks particularly bright for Hage, too.

“We’re very happy with Michael’s progression,” Hughes said of the Michigan Wolverine the Canadiens chose 21st overall in 2024. “We know there was ups and downs to his season, which is very typical for a college freshman, but over the normal course of things an extra year of getting more mature, bigger and stronger never hurts.

“He’s an incredibly talented hockey player who can make offensive plays, and he’s a dynamic skater. The potential is for him to be a top-six player in the National Hockey League.”

If Hage realizes it, that’ll be one less thing for Hughes to look for down the line.

But his commitment to finding some help in that department — and a couple of others — as soon as this season ends is firm. And considering how many promising prospects the Canadiens have, and the 27 picks they hold in the next three drafts, the opportunity is ripe.

“I think there’s a lot of ways to go about continuing to improve our team,” Hughes said. “If we’re successful this summer, the player or players that come are here for now to help open our window and extend it well into the future. And I guess there’s other scenarios where there’s certain players that could come now while we’re waiting for other players to develop.”

No matter what kind of players the Canadiens pursue, Hughes likes his chances of convincing them to come.

“The organization itself is the most storied franchise in NHL history, and most of the best hockey players in the world, or a lot of them, came through Montreal over the 4 Nations and got to experience that type of atmosphere that’s hard to equal,” he said. “Montreal’s also a great city to live in. It’s cold, and we get that, but I don’t think weather is going to deter a player from playing in the best environment …

“I think we’re getting there in terms of showing the hockey world we have a great environment, that this is a good, young team on the rise, and we need to be able to articulate where our next moves are when we’re able to speak to the agents of players we may target or ideally directly to the players.”

To be in that position now is a source of happiness for the GM.

The Canadiens have come a long way under his watch, and their best chance to get to where they want to go lies ahead.

More from Sportsnet

NHL Playoff Push: Round 1 matchups we want to see

Canadiens’ smothering of Panthers puts improbable playoff chase in perspective