Canadians GM Kent Hughes continue to explore ways to “create hood flexibility”

DETRAIT – settls the minutia, because we do not need to waste too much oxygen on CAP compliance with the new NHL season on the horizon.

The subject is a yawn, but we had no other choice than to have him approach with Kent Hughes as part of a 20 -minute conversation that we held with the Director General of the Montreal Canadians on Tuesday, before the annual NHL GM / Coach meetings.

We were much more forced to hear about the prospects of Hughes in the 2025-26 season – the things he learned about his team last season this summer, his point of view on the leadership of Nick Suzuki, his excitement for the beginnings of Noah Dobson, and his expectations for Patrik Laine, Ivan Demidov, Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach. A million dollars over $. The Cap ceiling and the name of Carey Price still beat commercial rumors when we started talking.

And so, with the price entering his third year to be too much injured to continue his player career, and with the last of the money that was due to the signing of a bonus finally paid on Monday, we asked Hughes if we should expect the ceiling of $ 10.5 million to be flexible for future movements for Canadians.

“I would never expect something to happen, because things don’t always happen when you want,” said Hughes. “But we will continue to explore ways to create a hood flexibility.”

“We are well, we don’t have to exchange prices Carey,” he added. “If we can find a job to move your contract which makes sense for us and makes sense for another team, we will continue it. But we will not have to do so.”

Yes, there is this thing called long -term injury reserve, and Canadians use it for the price during most of the last three seasons, and they will use it again if they should.

We always think that it is more likely that prices move before the start of the season, the Canadians spending an asset to face a team closer to the floor of the salary ceiling, and we were going in a lot of trouble to explain why this would be a preferable result to place it again on Ltir if we were not so concerned about your entertainment.

But the washers fly to Brossard, qué. – They were all summer long, with several main Canadians occupying the director of development Adam Nicholas every hour of watch – and the excitement in Montreal inflates on a young team that turned a lot of heads last season, so it’s time to stop talking about the ceiling.

Let’s talk about good vibrations because Hughes feels them.

“I think our players really like to be together,” he said. “I think they are committed to having the best players they can be individually, but I also think they have engaged in what I have spoken in the past – that if we will grow thanks to a reconstruction as we are committed to doing, we want our young players to take ownership of the group, the team, and not only hyper -focal for their own career at the younger age.

“According to my own experience as an agent, players evolve in a way of this phase where their concentration is really on their own career and the transition to the establishment of the team. So that we succeed as a young team, we needed these guys to do it earlier than their peers, and we see signs. ”

Hughes said that they had started to become apparent shortly after a championship start for the 2024-25 season, and victories on the four previous champions of the Stanley Cup were won over the team’s road trip trip.

“This group has grown up a lot,” said Hughes. “They grew up a lot in the second half of last year. For me, you go to Florida, you play a large expanse of games where, all of a sudden, they started to watch you and say:” Hey, we just beat Florida, Tampa, Vegas and Colorado in four of the five games during a road trip, and we played very well. “And then something changed because, for the first time, they were waiting for internal expectations that they were going to do something and not only playing a particular game while trying to catch people by surprise, but trying to compete for a place of qualifying series.

“I have witnessed many players who hold individuals and the responsible group and expected me more to each other, and I expect it to continue at the beginning of this year.”

Because the head coach Martin St. Louis and his staff helped promote this type of culture and, as Hughes noted, because Suzuki helped make him move forward.

The captain put the Canadians on his back last season, marking a career summit of 89 points in the process. He entered the office of Hughes to tell him to keep the group together before the deadline for exchange, then he intensified on the ice and delivered the fourth points of the league during the last quarter of the season to help the team win an improbable berth.

It was a statement that resonated far beyond the Canadian Front Office.

Jon Cooper, the winning coach of the Stanley Cup of the Tampa Bay Lightning and the head coach of Team Canada, heard him.

He was impressed by Suzuki in 2021.

“To be honest, I saw immense growth of him,” said Cooper on Tuesday.

And after welcoming Suzuki as one of the 42 players of the Olympic orientation camp of Team Canada in Calgary last week, he told us something else.

“The only thing I didn’t know about him was his personality,” said Cooper. “I made a duty to spend time with him in Calgary, and I learned that he is a phenomenal child. It is fairly calm, reads the room, but very engaging when you sit with him head-on. I had a good time with him, so it’s just another box checked in the cosmic trajectory of Nick Suzuki. ”

The 26 -year -old also jumped forward in his role as Captain of Canadians, according to Hughes.

“I think there has been real growth in terms of nick’s more active leadership,” he said. “He has always been a leader, but I think he is more comfortable in this role, which is only natural to age a little more.

A player who does not seem to need a boost in this direction is Demidov.

The fifth overall choice of the NHL recovery in 2024 broke out on the stage at the end of last season after being unexpectedly released from his KHL contract, and he apparently did not leave the ice since.

Demidov did two a day sessions in Brossard five days a week all summer.

The simple mention of his name illuminated Hughes’ face on Tuesday.

“An incredible work ethics,” said the managing director. “Start, which is great, and he is a big child. He always smiles, he likes the game, and he is obsessed with improvement. We will see what he can do. I think he will be a very, very good hockey player for Montreal Canadians for a long time, but we do not put him all this hope in October 202. ”

Yes, yes, the burden must be shared.

A player that Hughes would like to see more is wool, who produced 15 potential goals last season, but was largely ineffective for five against five.

Admittedly, the Big Finn, which once exceeded 44 goals in this league, recovered from shoulder surgery out of season and patinated three times before last year’s training camp, and he was barely starting to gain pace when he suffered a knee injury that prevented him from the first 24 games of the season.

Hughes has already said that without all woolen game objectives, Canadians would likely have missed the playoffs.

But he said on Tuesday that he knew that wool was more capable and that the player, who was a lot on the ice this summer, can make the necessary adjustments to deliver it.

“Patrik is an incredibly qualified and talented hockey player. We have all seen that of him,” said Hughes. “In the conversations I had with him during outing meetings, and there again – I don’t remember if it was at the end of May or early June – I said to him:” Hey, let’s think about the areas of your game that you have to improve so that you play more regularly. “”

“I think that in the case of Patrik, the answers are so obvious. I firmly believe that if he is able to bring these changes to his game, he will have a much better season. And I think it is 100% on board.

“One thing in hockey is that the game is so instinctive. I think that due to the speed of hockey and systems within it, it becomes a lot instinctive, which makes it more difficult to make changes. That, and bring him to give you the rehearsal to do so good to make these adjustments stick so that you would get more aware when you hurt it. »»

We will see if all the work of wool with Nicholas this summer reports dividends.

Two other Hughes players hope that the Rebunver is Alex Newhook and Kirby Dach, who will fight to fill the vacancy in the middle of the second line.

“Where there are holes in the programming of a team, the players should savor the opportunity instead of fear of failure, and they should be excited by the prospect of success, even if it is not guaranteed,” said Hughes. “I think that is what really separates some of the great athletes: they are not afraid of failure, they continue success and understand that they may not get it all the time. So our hope is that they intervene.”

He did not have to say that he will continue to look for more than one thing for this position. It is a fact he will.

As for the defense, Hughes helped Canadians take a step forward this summer by acquiring Dobson of the New York Icelanders and giving an eight -year -old contract of $ 76 million.

“We are delighted to see what he brings to our team, and I think that one of the elements that Noah brings, that we knew that Logan Mailoux had, was a shot on the blue line,” said Hughes. “We lost Logan in the trade of Zack Bolduc, and Justin Barron could shoot and we exchanged him in Nashville, so we exchanged two Druht-Dright D which could pull the washer. I would say having shots from the point was a little weakness for our group.

We asked if there was something he would like to say about the negotiation of the contract with the winner of the Calder trophy, Lane Hutson, who is one year from the limited free agency.

“I would prefer to say nothing,” added Hughes. “We have always said nothing in terms of comments on contracts, so we will work on things. I always believed that when people make comments, things are misinterpreted, expectations are created and false stories. As we did with all the other players, when the contract is concluded, then we will announce it.”

Whenever this happens, we will have another conversation on the salary ceiling. Yeah!