The Montreal rebuild did not arrive on schedule. It arrived early, and it arrived young, and the clearest way to see both the promise and the peril is to watch who runs the blue line. Lane Hutson, 20 years old and in his second season, put up 78 points and drove a 60 percent on-ice share while Montreal was a 43 percent team without him on the ice. A seventeen-point swing from a sophomore defenceman is the kind of number that wins Norris trophies in a few years. It is also the kind of number that should make the Canadiens slightly nervous about how much they are asking of him.
| Player | Points | On-ice xGF% | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Suzuki | 101 | 61% | Career year and still entering his prime |
| Cole Caufield | 88 | 63% | 51 goals |
| Lane Hutson | 78 | 60% | Sophomore defenceman |
| Ivan Demidov | 62 | 59% | Rookie |
The kids are the whole team
Start with the good, because there is a mountain of it. Nick Suzuki posted a 101-point career year and remains, somehow, only now entering his prime. Cole Caufield scored 51 goals. Juraj Slafkovsky, the former first overall pick who took time to arrive, put up 73 and drove play at a 60 percent clip. Ivan Demidov, a rookie, added 62 points and looked the part immediately. And Hutson quarterbacks all of it from the back end. Four of Montreal's five best players are young, cost-controlled and already elite drivers of play. Teams spend a decade trying to assemble that. The Canadiens have it now, well ahead of the timeline everyone drew for them.
The blue line begins and ends with a sophomore
Here is the worry, and it is specific. Behind Hutson, Montreal's defence is thin and, in places, underwater. Noah Dobson, brought in to be a co-anchor, managed only a 48 percent share. Mike Matheson (42 percent) and Alexandre Carrier (39) were both well underwater relative to the team without them. That means the Canadiens are leaning on a 20-year-old, generously listed at five-foot-nine, to be the engine of an entire blue line, in every situation, against the other team's best. It is thrilling to watch and genuinely precarious as a plan. Young offensive defencemen who carry that much load tend to have volatile, physically punishing seasons, and Montreal has no obvious fallback if his does not go smoothly.
The number under the record
There is one more piece of honesty the Canadiens should keep in view. Their leap last season leaned partly on finishing and goaltending that outran their underlying play, the same regression trap I wrote about at the time. The talent is unambiguously real. The results were a touch inflated. Both things can be true, and reconciling them is the front office's actual job: keep the young core together, and use the cap space to build a defence that does not require Hutson to do everything.
What it means
Montreal is one of the most exciting young teams in the sport, and Hutson is the most exciting thing about it. That is not in dispute. The question is structural, not about talent. A contender needs a blue line that can survive a bad night from its best defenceman, and right now the Canadiens do not have one. The kids are going to be very good for a very long time. Whether they are good enough this season depends on whether the team can stop asking a 20-year-old to be its entire back end.